Joe Bryant, a former NBA player and father of the late Kobe Bryant, has died at the age of 69. Bryant, nicknamed “Jellybean,” starred at La Salle University for two years before an eight-year NBA career with his hometown Philadelphia 76ers, the San Diego Clippers and the Houston Rockets.
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Mike Sielski first reported Bryant’s death. La Salle coach Fran Dunphy told the Inquirer on Tuesday that Bryant recently suffered a stroke.
The 76ers selected Bryant with the No. 14 pick in the 1975 NBA Draft. After four seasons, Philadelphia traded him to San Diego for what turned out to be the No. 1 pick in the 1986 draft. In Bryant’s first game with the Clippers — and Magic Johnson’s first NBA game — he dunked on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Bryant played three seasons for the Clippers, who traded him to the Rockets before the 1982-83 season, his last in the league. Bryant averaged 8.7 points, 4.0 rebounds, 1.7 assists and 0.9 steals in 606 games over eight NBA seasons. After that, he played overseas for a decade: nine years in Italy, where Kobe was raised, and one year in France.
After his playing career ended, Bryant turned to coaching. He was the junior varsity coach at Lower Merion High School in Philadelphia, where Kobe played, and the coach of the girls’ team at Akiba Hebrew Academy, before serving an assistant coach from 1993 to 1996 at La Salle, his alma mater. Bryant stepped away from coaching when Kobe entered the NBA in 1996, but went back to it in the 2000s.
Bryant coached just about everywhere except the NBA: The Las Vegas Rattlers and Boston Frenzy of the ABA, three teams in Japan, two teams in Thailand. “Basketball is basketball, all over the world,” Bryant told Sports Illustrated in Bangkok in 2012. He even coached SlamBall.
In 2005, Bryant joined the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks as an assistant coach, then replaced Henry Bibby as head coach during the season. He coached the Sparks again the following season, but was fired before the 2007 season. Bryant returned to the Sparks in 2011; again, he was initially an assistant but replaced the head coach, Jennifer Gillom, midseason.
In that 2012 Sports Illustrated story, Paul Westhead, who coached Bryant at La Salle, described his smile as “miraculous.” His happy-go-lucky spirit was not, however, always appreciated by his coaches.
“Back then they wanted people to play with a scowl and be all about the fundamentals,” Westhead said. “That wasn’t Joe.”
Bryant “had a lot of moves,” Westhead told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “He’d cut you up any which way.” He was a point forward before the term existed, and he played with flair, which made him a playground legend in Philadelphia.
Eight years before Kobe died in a 2020 helicopter crash, the Los Angeles Lakers star told Sports Illustrated that his ability to see the game on multiple levels came directly from his father, as did his love of the game.
“My father has this great understanding and compassion,” Kobe said. “That’s how I understand how to communicate with guys and lead a group.”
