Details Have Emerged from the Lakers' Flight Home When They Learned Kobe Bryant Died

‘It was just off the top off my head, just off the cuff,’ James told ESPN’s Dave McMenamin of the moment he learned about Bryant’s death on a cross-country flight back to LA. ‘I think it was needed for us to come together and just give thanks to the man above.

‘Even though at times we question him and question why he do some of the things that he do, know that he’s never made a mistake. And just hope that he has his hands on top of [Bryant’s wife] Vanessa and the kids at that time, and hope that he continues to watch over all of us. So, I don’t know, it wasn’t something I thought about. It was something that just kind of came to me, and I said my piece’.

ANTHONY DAVIS WAS another restless passenger.

“I can’t sleep on planes, and I’m watching my iPad,” Davis says.

Out of the corner of his eye, the Lakers’ star big man saw a phone screen flash in one of the rows surrounding him — a sign of activity amid the slumbering basketball squad, but nothing noteworthy enough to call his attention away from “Avengers: Endgame.”

Only the activity grew.

When Davis next glanced away from his screen, his eyes focused on Dwight Howard and DeMarcus Cousins, waving their hands in his direction, their urgency muted by Davis’ noise-canceling headphones.

“So I remove one of my headphones, and I look,” Davis says. “And Dwight tells me, ‘Man, Kobe died.’ And me thinking as invincible as Kobe Bryant is, I’m like, ‘Kobe who?’ Because I’m like, that’s not — it’s not Kobe Bryant.

“And he was like, ‘Kobe.’ And I was like, ‘OK. Kobe who? I’m not sure who you’re talking about.’ And he was like, ‘Kobe Bryant.’ And at this time, Bron is still asleep. So I was like, ‘Wait, what? How? Like, I need details, like, tell me.’ And he was like, ‘Man, helicopter crash.'”

Davis jostled the resting James.

“And I just like, start shaking Bron, like, ‘Wake up! Wake up!'”

The players section, quiet moments ago, began to stir, members of the team scrambling to log on to the in-flight Wi-Fi.

“By this time, all the players have woken up,” Davis says. “Everybody’s trying to get to the internet to get on their phone and see what’s going on. ‘Is it true?’ Or, ‘What’s going on?'”

“It didn’t hit me. So I turned my Wi-Fi on just to see,” Lakers guard Quinn Cook said on the Inside the Green Room podcast, hosted by fellow L.A. guard Danny Green. “I got 200 messages. Twitter is just going crazy.”