The Los Angeles Lakers unveiled a Kobe Bryant statue to great fanfare earlier this year. It turns out that statue has multiple typos engraved in it.
International NBA journalist Andre Voigt first noticed the misspellings. There are three big mistakes on the statue in the box score of Bryant’s 81-point game against the Toronto Raptors from 2006: Jose Calderon’s name is spelled as Jose CalderSon, Von Wafer’s name is spelled as ‘Vom’ Wafer, and “coaching decision” is spelled as “Decicion.”
How does this happen? Here are the photos for proof.
Hm … Kobes Statue mit drei Fehlern? CalderSon, VoM Wafer, DeciCion? What? pic.twitter.com/5ea6zWuXJ7
— André „Dré“ Voigt (@drevoigt) March 10, 2024
It turns out that everything is spelled correctly on the official box score from the game. This is just an error by whoever put together the mocks for the statue.
The good news for the Lakers is that they are planning to unveil two more Bryant statues at some point. Maybe they can avoid misspellings on the next two.