Los Angeles Lakers owner Jeanie Buss revealed she expected Gianna “Gigi” Bryant to dominate the WNBA prior to her tragic death alongside her father when their helicopter crashed whilst trying to fly through foggy conditions in California.
All of the passengers were killed in the Calabasas region, pushing the sport of basketball into a period of mourning for the loss of Kobe and his personality and Mamba Mentality policy towards life.
Kobe Bryant statue unveiled by the Los Angeles Lakers
But the loss of Gigi at the young age of 13 could go down as one of the biggest “what ifs” in sports history after basketball lost someone so promising on the court that even her father thought she would be better than he was.
That’s a fearsome prospect, to surpass a five-time NBA champion with 33,643 career points, but it means it’s no shock that colleges were trying to sign the prodigy from the age of 11 and Jeanie Buss confirmed the talks were real.
“The first people to embrace the WNBA were the NBA players,” Buss told the Above the Rim podcast. They love it; they know the girls can play.
“And we were talking about Gigi. She was going to go and win four National Championships in college, then she was going to kill it in the WNBA, and she was going to be like, ‘What’s the next challenge?'”
How did Kobe and Gigi Bryant die?
Bryant and his daughter, as well as seven other passengers, boarded a helicopter on January 26 that was due to leave John Wayne Airport (SNA) in Orange County, California to fly to Newbury Park to watch a match at the Mamba Sports Academy.
The Sikorsky S-76B flight took off at 09:06 PT but disaster would strike the aircraft just 39 minutes later when it crashed and burst into flames close to the intersection of Las Virgenes Road and Willow Glen Street.
Investigators concluded that foggy conditions caused the pilot to lose his sense of special orientation and rapidly descend into terrain, although some eye witnesses suggested the engine might have failed. All nine passengers were killed on impact and the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner ruled they died from blunt trauma.
