Why I Consider Kobe Outside of the Top 31 All-Time NBA Players

Kobe Bryant is the most overrated player of sports in my lifetime.  As a lifelong Laker fan it pains me to make this point but from a keen sense of justice I have always been bothered by the enormity of Bryant’s legend.  To be certain he is a terrific player and one of the best to ever join the Association but not top 10.  No way. 

Kobe has been one of the best.  First, his endurance has been exceptional.  Until the last few of these 20 seasons in the league Kobe was incredibly healthy, which can be attributed to his superior physical fitness and perhaps also to genetic good fortune.  Second, he may have possessed the greatest pull-up jumper in the history of the game.  Kobe’s versatility is also among the all-time greats.

Kobe’s drawbacks begin with his ego.  When he entered the league he was groomed by many of the game’s greats to be prolific, even the best ever.  He had that kind of talent.  And that shot was so smooth from day one.  We, (I’ll speak for all Laker fans here,) all dreamed it, imagined it, and pronounced it as if his destiny was manifest by the purple and gold “Lakers,” emblazoned across his chest.  Never mind the missed three-point shots at the end of the Kobe’s rookie Lakers’ season-ending loss in the Western Conference Finals to Malone and Stockton. Kobe averaged 7 points a game and was not an integral part of the offense or the rotation.  He was the future and in many ways he lived up to the potential.  Once the Lakers brought in Shaq and surrounded the two of them with efficient workmen like Derek Fisher and Rick Fox and Robert Horry, the threepeat was born. 

In the modern NBA every team has a scorer.  The Lakers in those years had Shaq who could literally sink 40 points and gobble up 20 rebounds every night if necessary.  Bryant, however, was the team’s classic scorer.  He averaged 22, 28 and 25 points a game in those three glorious seasons.  Kobe’s points may have been easier to come by than some other scorers around the league based on the attention Shaq drew to the key.  Then again, maybe it was harder to find those points given the lion’s share Shaq achieved by owning the paint and putting back everything.  In any case he was more than proficient in his role.  I can’t help but wonder what a garden variety NBA scorer like Alex English might have achieved if paired with someone of Shaq’s caliber and stature.  Or Allen Iverson.  Iverson was not the defensive player Kobe was and he certainly brought a shitload of baggage to his team but as a scorer, he was more creative and better than Kobe and he honed his skills on a bunch of otherwise bad teams.  Carmelo Anthony may have had equal success to Kobe with Bryant’s supporting cast.  Dwayne Wade achieved at a similar level with less.  Today, around the league there are several players who will never be considered in Kobe’s class, who carry a greater burden than Kobe had to on his winning teams, and who achieved more than Kobe did when his teams were equally inefficient. 

Scorers get the recognition in the NBA.  Sometimes players like Dennis Rodman or Joakim Noah are lauded for their yeoman’s role but generally, it is the Derek Rose’s and the Isiah Thomas’s who are given the credit for wins.  This makes sense in as much as scoring is the single hardest thing there is to do in a basketball game.  At the same time they are not just plentiful in the game at any level, every team has one or two.  Kobe led the league in scoring in two of his 19 years.  Both of those years the Lakers departed the playoffs with first round losses.  For those two years, ’05-’06 and ’06-’07, Kobe was one of those scorers around the league he gets so much credit for being vastly better than.  To me he was virtually Carmelo Anthony in those years, except with good defense. 

Kobe also gets a lot of credit for somehow being a smart or heady player.  In fact he was never smart enough to focus in on his best skill and capitalize on it.  He became known as the best bad shot maker in the game, which is a truth and a manifestation of the fact that he got good at something that was unadvisable in the first place.  More, to say he was good at is a relative estimation.  It is not as if that bad shot selection yielded better results than other players or than himself when he got better shots.  Had Kobe been a truly smart player he would have made a living off of taking 1-3 hard steps and dribbles in either direction then pulling up for the mid-range jumper.  That being the shot he did better than everyone else.  Only Jordan was close and may have exceeded Bryant based on his ability to consistently get more lift on his jumper making it an easier shot for him. 

In 2008 the Lakers beat the Nuggets in the Western Conference Finals and in that series, but scarcely at any other sustained time in Kobe’s career, Kobe did focus in on his strength.  He also played unselfishly and with great defense.  In a word, in that particular series, Kobe’s play was devastating.  Personally, I was overjoyed.  For me Kobe had finally become the best player in basketball and all that Laker fans had hoped for.  It was the season of his first title sans Shaq.  He had been joined by what was at that time the best big man in the game whose name was not Tim Duncan, Pau Gasol.  As we know with Lamar Odom and Ron Artest the Lakers won two more championships, which was what fueled Kobe to play as he did in that Denver series.  Getting that other title as Shaq had in Miami was a big deal to him and finally he set his ego aside and played team ball, even in his role as the scorer.  Kobe also played well in the Finals that year, and had a spectacular game one, but Trevor Ariza and Derek Fisher made the necessary clutch shots in the crucial games four and five.  (That is the reality that can be seen throughout Kobe's career in spite of his reputation as somehow being a clutch performer.  He is not and never was.)  In the following year, even though the Lakers won Kobe’s 5^th championship, he digressed.  His ego got the best of him and he reverted to slashing to the hoop to try to get crowd pleasing dunks and bombing three balls like Pistol Pete Maravich on Dopamine.  My friends and I used to feign tears when he would hit two or three three’s because we knew the end result would be him jacking up a bunch more.  He is a lifetime 33% three-point shooter and he achieved all of 35% in that remarkable ’08-’09 season.

 

One more piece of evidence on  Kobe’s ego and a bit of conspiracy.  First, Kobe gave himself the moniker The Black Mamba.  He said he adopted it as a means of coping with the turmoil he endured being accused of rape.  He got it from a Quentin Tarantino movie.  Who nicknames themselves?  That is narcissistic as hell, right?  On the conspiracy front I question Kobe’s ability to speak Italian fluently.  It’s been out there forever that he is fluent having spent a number of years growing up in Italy while his father played in the Italian professional basketball league but I have never heard it.  We have all heard him say a few words to somebody but if that is the measure of fluency then I am fluent in Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese and Armenian.  I just don’t trust him.  He seems like the type of person to lie about such a thing.  He wants so bad to be the best ever and thus far the public has cooperated.  Also, almost everything he ever says publicly, every quote, every interview, he reveals the true megalomaniac within.

I don’t know Kobe.  It’s possible I am all wrong about him.  I have always swam upstream on this one but outside of a playoff run that led to his 4^th title, the counterintuitive Kobe is the only one I have ever seen.  He won the NBA Finals MVP award when the Lakers won that 5^th championship and I was beyond incredulous.  Go back and watch that series.  Kobe gets his 20+ points per game but his turnovers were not only abundant, they occurred at the most crucial and inopportune times.  I recall thinking during some of those crucial turnovers, ‘well, if they win at least Kobe won’t get the series’ MVP.’  Wrong.  If it had been to me I would have nicknamed Kobe 'The Emperor," for obvious reasons.

As for why or how Kobe’s reputation grew to such heroic proportions, I have fragments of ideas collected and stored over the years.  Yes, we all wanted him to be great, so we were prone to believe he was achieving it before our eyes over the years.  The Lakers had great success and Kobe was a part of it if not the overwhelming catalyst he was credited as being.  Kobe always talked the talk.  From day one he was always intent on creating that legend.  He would say he did not socialize with other NBA players because he was dedicated to honing his game and working out but it may just be that he was an asshole and no one was interested in being friends with him.  Whenever he did seem like he had become friends with someone in the league the relationship was always characterized as, “Kobe has become something of a big brother figure to Carmelo.”  I used to imagine the days when years after their careers were over some of these players would come out and tell the truth about Kobe.  I still  wonder if Dwayne Wade or Carmelo Anthony will emerge one day to say they always felt superior to Kobe and despised him for the cast he had around him and the success.  I also wonder about Pau.  He has always seemed like a heady sort of guy, in stark contrast to Kobe, and as such I thought he might one day back off all the lip service praise he has bestowed upon Kobe over the years as his teammate.  When I think about Kobe complaining to the cops the night he was arrested for rape, about how Shaq would have had his indiscretion swept under the rug by the authorities, it just seems appropriate from a karmic standpoint some of these guys would come out and cut Kobe back down to size a bit.  That they have not reveals their bigger nature.

I am a Laker lover.  When I was about 6-years-old I remember the Lakers were a great team and they had this guy who shot left-handed and always seemed to hit big shots in crunch time.  I was aware of this behemoth of a man, (unbeknownst to me in the twilight of his career,) Wilt Chamberlain.  I also knew Jerry West.  He was the team’s catalyst.  But Gail Goodrich was the guy I identified with.  Other teams could not leave West or Chamberlain alone and so Goodrich got plenty of good looks at the basket and he was in his own right a great scorer, (ironically by way of the mid-range jumper.)  A few years later it was Lucius Allen and Cazzie Russell on mediocre Laker teams.  Then Kareem came over and Magic was had in the draft and the glory years began in earnest.  Five championships in the ‘80s were salad days for Laker fans.  Kareem became and remains my favorite player of all time.  Magic was great.  His exuberance in action is unparalleled in sports.  James Worthy is vastly underrated due to the mixed fortune of playing with Buck and Cap.  I also loved Rambis and Michael Cooper and most every Laker.  I even liked Nick Van Exel. When glory returned in the new millennium, I quickly became a Shaq fan, even though I had not cared for him when he was in Orlando.  I also embraced Kobe.  In the first 6-7 years of his career I too sang the faithful refrain.  It was when the debate began about whose team the Lakers were, Shaq’s or Kobe’s, that I first became dismayed.  I remember thinking geez, I bet Chris Webber and Mike Bibby would be thankful to have Shaq on their squad and they would not act as if they were somehow on his level.  Kobe was never near Shaq in terms of real impact on basketball games.  Shaq was a pulsating force in the middle of the key who affected everything that happened at both ends of the court.  By comparison Kobe was merely a good player. 

As a Laker fan I loved Robert Horry and I embraced Ron Harper and Brian Shaw.  Along with Ron Artest later these players hit crucial important shots.  Derek Fisher also hit some big shots.  By contrast Kobe had a million chances to hit big shots and hit very few.  According to an article several years ago in Slam Magazine Kobe was statistically among the worst clutch shot makers in the league.  The cable network Prime Ticket created a show out of Kobe’s 10 greatest clutch shots.  Most of them occurred in the early season.  One or two were in the same last game of a season and another one was in the 2006 playoffs against Phoenix.  In 19 years and all those playoff games, given that Kobe has shot the basketball more than anyone to ever play the game, (the all-time leading misser of shots but well behind Kareem on the all-time scoring list,) isn’t it shocking he doesn’t have some real big clutch makes to show for all those attempts?  Fisher has “.4.”  Metta Worldpeace made hay of Kobe’s airball and made the layup as time expired in the Finals.  (Ron Harper from the baseline against Portland…Horry top of the key vs. Sacramento…so many big shots come to mind.  Only that one against Phoenix comes to mind for Kobe and the Lakers lost that first round series and the Lakers were a bad team, Kobe’s bad team.  Yes, that team was truly his.) 


Kobe is and was better than Robert Horry or Derek Fisher.  Fisher was a smarter player who used his brain and moxie to perform at a level higher than what might be expected of him physically.  Horry landed on several excellent teams that needed another really good, versatile player in their push for championships.  He was exceedingly skilled and as cool under fire as could be.


Kobe's legend was fueled by victory and Hollywood, self aggrandizement and folklore.  It was built over time by fans who wanted to believe.  It is groupthink and it is mostly harmless. 

There is not much I like about Kobe.  Even on a bad team when he calls a team meeting to tell the young guys they need to stop complaining and just go find ways to win, he could not be more tone deaf.  He is shooting 33% from the field, hoisting up way too many three-point shots and spending disproportionately more time on the court than these young guys while producing less. As it is Kobe’s legacy is larger than life and for me, larger than it should be.  I am interested to see if age changes his attitudes and if somehow he finds humility in his gray years.  It could swing my attitude about him.  I mean look, he was involved in a lot of Laker achievement.  I have no intention of changing my tune but I could see him popping up on an NBA broadcast and waxing humble for a period of time convincing me of some late-arriving maturity but then who knows how my opinion might evolve.  Still, no doubt as of today his reputation is completely overblown and unjustified. 

The odd videos one can find on the internet.  So I don't know that these are the top 10 but it is not surprising to me the only two Kobe makes are with a 5-point lead on an ill-advised two-point shot with Grant Hill all over him and one jump shot with plenty of time left in game 7 against the Celtics.  In that game it is pretty clear Ron Artest was the clutch shooter and in fact he should have been awarded the series MVP.