http://dberri.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/t-mac-and-kobe/ The article is a little long and has several links to tables that frankly I don't feel like recreating manually, so I'm just going to summarize. I strongly encourage anyone who wants to comment to read through the article first. The author, David Berri did some statistical analysis of T-Mac and Kobe's careers, and found that while Kobe has been a slightly superior scorer, T-Mac has been overall the more productive player in terms of wins produced. He also finds that Kobe has had far better teammates than T-Mac, and that if the two were to hypothetically switch teammates, T-Mac would have been even better than Kobe and won more. Plenty of fodder for discussion.
interesting read. I for one dont think we should trade tmac, but the "will to win" sometimes makes me wonder about his desire.
I think that Kobe isn't MUCH better than McGrady. One big thing that seperates the two of them are injuries. Kobe has longer durability, is better shooter but one thing you notice he's a winner partly because he had great team mates. But It's only stats, I don't look at the stats, Zach Randolph might have better statistics than Tim Duncan but Tim is always a better play no matter if he averages 18 pg or 25. Interesting topic, but be real, this story ended long, long time ago.
In a battle of skills I give a slight edge to Tmac. In the battle of heart, I give a massive edge to Kobe. DD
Hmm while offensivelly they may be close Kobe is by far the better defender and has shown the ability to "Take over" a game. Tracy has the talent but lacks the passion and win at all cost attitude of Kobe.
i wouldn't say mac has the edge i think that both have amazing skills.........if mac didnt have all those injuries i think i would both rate them equally.....and of course kobe does have better teammates over his career.......and i think mac would have won 3 maybe 4 championships with shaq imo.
I don't think Tmac is the same anymore, though. Kobe's better now. Over the seasons, maybe it was different.
Let's just say if T-Mac had Kobe's heart and work ethic he would be right under Jordan as the Greatest Players of all time There is no one else in the NBA who is more freakishly athletic and naturally gifted as he is. Vince Carter is the only one who comes close.
In saying that Kobe has had teammates that produced better than McGrady has had, the author does no analysis on whether or not there is a corellation between each player and the performance of their teammates. In other words, do Kobe's teammates have better production because they are better, or because Kobe helped to make them better? One way I'm thinking he could do that analysis is to track the "WP48" of each individual teammate throughout each teammate's career, and see whether each individual's WP48 increases or decreases during the time they played with the superstar in question (Kobe or T-Mac). That might give some indication of whether playing with the superstar made the teammate's production better or worse relative to when they played on other teams. But then again that's just assuming that all other things are equal (maybe the teammate just got better on his own? maybe the teammate was injured during his time with the superstar?). Yeah there's wayyyy too many variables there to be able to pin increased or decreased production on just one thing (playing with the superstar). Brain exploding in 4...3...2....1...
I'm a huge Rockets fan and an occasional Kobe hater.. with that said, comparing Kobe to Tmac is pretty damn idiotic. The two players are on different levels.
Kobe has a lot more heart and a slight edge in skills, not too much. I would take the 32ppg Tmac with a good supporting cast over anyone.
*Sigh* This, along with about 85% of the other posts in this thread, is exactly the reason why I CLEARLY requested that everyone should actually READ the article before commenting. There are only about 3 posts so far that have actually made any attempt to discuss what the article about -- everyone else just sees the thread title and spouts of whatever random recycled garbage argument that first comes to mind.
