If Kobe gets his ring this year, how is he not the GREATEST?

Attempting to sort through this glorified mess of a rebuttal.

I give Kobe his due as one of the greatest players to ever play this game. But to suggest that should he win a title this year he deserves to be ranked the #1 best basketball player is just stupidity and there have been many replies in this thread that have presented factual evidence of this.

Best at his position? all time? Larry Bird and Dr. J would have something to say about that.

Bynum's presence allows Gasol to be so dominant, don't kid yourself. Odom's the same height as Hakeem. They have 3 giants to throw down in the middle. It means they get more rebounds.

 

Exploiting matchups has nothing to do with Kobe playing poorly in the majority of his Finals. If they want to exploit Shaq then that means post good numbers with the opportunities that you get. So exactly what does exploiting Shaq have to do with Kobes poor play? If the Finals teams were chumps then why did Kobe struggle against them? It's not like the Pacers, Sixers or Nets had stud defensive SGs.

 

Its justification enough because MJ won 6 straight (discounting his retirement) without a big man. Even if MJ had a great cast he's still the only major swingman to win a championship without a dominant center or pf.

Even if Kobe got his ring now his career playoff performance still pales in comparison to MJ, and MJ did it in the olden days when people played rougher and scoring points where much harder. Even without having won a ring, LBJ is still closer to reaching MJ as the greatest swingman of all time than Kobe will ever be.

 

He's not the greatest because MJ is the greatest and always will be.

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Seriously, goodbug & rock4ever, why do you care about what us Rocket fans think about Kobe? You can kiss Kobe's ass on a Lakers forum all you want. Take this **** elsewhere please.

 

Michael Jordan
5 MVPs
6 Finals MVPs
1 DPOtY
10 Scoring titles (7 of them being consecutive)

Kobe
1 MVP
1 Finals MVP
2 Scoring Titles

Lol.

 

Many people have posted those stats, but the idiot Rapist fans just continue to ignore em.

 

Jordan was the #1 guy on the Bulls ever since he was drafted and after he came back from retirement.

Can't say that for Kobe. Hell, if Gasol keeps up his great play for the rest of the playoffs he has a chance to win the Finals MVP instead of Kobe.

 

steddinotayto, if it's all the same to you....

....no matter how funny you think I am or my list is (and I do thank you for the compliment)...

...I think I'll keep my day job and stay away from comedy.

You've got the best point that most of us can make in these types of discussions: we all are dealing from frames of reference that have a wider or narrower scope, depending on the context any of us would use to make our cases for these types of players.

Take Shaquille O'Neal, for example. If you look at my argument, and if you place O'Neal in my list where I have Jerry West, the difference in placement is only about five spots. Those types of differences are semantics, in my opinion. Greatness, at this level, is merely in the eye of the beholder.

There are things about Jerry West the player that are naturally forgotten. I didn't get to see Jerry West play myself. But I heard enough from my uncles who did see him to believe it after the fact. It's a lot like people who have a hard time believing that Larry Bird was as good as he was. He was slow and couldn't jump over a dime laying flat on the sidewalk. But he played the game better than most of us will ever get to see in our lifetimes.

That's the way West played, steddinotayto. He was relentless, determined, efficient, smart and very, very good.

We don't, as a matter of course, assign the title of "legend" to just any player. West was a better player than he is a general manager.

Think about that for a minute. It's true.

But there is something to be said about sustained dominance, so Shaq should definitely receive his share of votes for top ten all-time player. Not very many players can put three consecutive championships on their resume. And O'Neal does have the advantage of being a lot more recent in memory for the majority of us than Jerry West.

C'est la vie.

Dr. J made the NBA cool, steddinotayto. Cooler than Walt "Clyde" Frazier did in New York, and Clyde could give icicles the shivers.

I didn't get to see Julius Erving at his best. I was 12 or 13 when he won his championship in 1983, and the good doctor was a shell of his former self even then. But even so, I knew what Dr. J meant to the NBA.

You wanted to WATCH Dr. J. You wanted to see what he would do, because nobody knew. Including Erving himself. He said so several times.

Magic Johnson used to say that Michael Jordan took the game from a horizontal plane to a vertical one. But ask Jordan, and he'll tell you that Julius Erving gave him the vision of it. Erving was in the air long before Jordan was. And looked good doing it.

Erving was almost single-handedly responsible for the ABA-NBA merger in the mid 1970s. People wanted a free-wheeling, breakneck brand of basketball....the ABA provided it, and the Doctor made house calls every game night. His game was all transition, all the time. He was a never-ending highlight when nightly highlights were non-existant. He would have been covered the way LeBron James is had there been an ESPN in his prime. Dr. J was better than good. Sometimes we think we're seeing something new with these players nowadays...when what we're really seeing is what has gone before.

Remind me to tell you a little bit about David Thompson sometime.

I love to exaggerate, steddinotayto, as if you couldn't tell. But I'm not exaggerating about Julius Erving. He was as beloved and iconic a basketball player in his day as Michael Jordan or Allen Iverson or Lebron James were and are in their own.

Sometimes, the stats players rack up don't really tell you what a player means to the game as a whole, when you're discussing legendary players....at least to me.

The reasons why players are all-time greats is that they are unforgettable. And that in ways that aren't always easy to notice, they IMPACTED the game and changed the game. For the better, too.

I like that.

Just for giggles, that top fifteen list of mine I was going to round out (in no particular order, again)....

11) Shaquille O'Neal
12) Kobe Bryant
13) Elgin Baylor
14) Bill Russell
15) Kevin Garnett (could have been a toss-up between Garnett and Karl Malone to me, but Garnett does have a ring, and Garnett's versatility at his size won't be fully appreciated until he's finished)....

 

OP is a dumbazz, so are other Kobe fans.

 

When Jordan was Kobe's age now (32), he came back from retirement and became the best player in the league again. Kobe is already no longer the best player in the league now. This shows you how good Jordan was.

 

I really don't know why the mods let these kobe-trolls come and troll the board every day...

When did the Rockets board became Lakers board?

 

So many legit NBA greats all say MJ is the best to ever play the game.
Who knows better than those who played against him.

"I'm not Michael Jordan, there will never be another Jordan, he's the greatest player of all time...and nobody can fill his shoes, period."-Kobe Bryant

 

yet the kobe trolls still argue even tho thier savior doesn't want to be compared

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Kobe

couldnt even sniff

Jordan's NUTSACK!

 

Do you guys really think in 10yrs ...


people would remember Kobe like they do Jordan

like Kobe would have an impact like Jordan ?



HELL DA F TO THE MUTHA F 'ing NO THEY WONT!


(only people that agree were born in the 90's)

 

I'm not quite exactly sure what you mean by "terms of greatness" in the first place.
If you mean, who is the best player currently playing, it's still Lebron, regardless of any defeat tonight.
If you mean, which player out of those currently playing has the greatest legacy, Kobe is a valid choice, but one could just as easily argue Shaq or Duncan.

The point is something I've argued again and again. The Lakers aren't dangerous because of Kobe, though he makes them better.

They're better because they have three very tall, very skilled players (claiming Bynum is nothing more than a foul machine shows the degree of your Kobe homerism, as he's pretty good - observe quite simply that Raptors fans, on discussing a sign and trade for Bosh, are much more interested in getting Bynum from the Lakers than all the crap we could offer them. This indicates that he is good), and ultimately they just out-big us. That's how they destroyed us in Game 7 last year. That's how they defeated Orlando. And that's why they're dangerous.

Brooksball had a thread a couple of weeks ago, discussing the fact that ultimately the combo of a great wingman plus a great big is one of the most deadly in the league. It's why Kobe-Shaq, and later Wade-Shaq as well as Kobe-Gasol won titles. It's why all Rockets fans were ecstatic when we received McGrady, as the McGrady-Yao combo should have been just as lethal.

What makes Jordan so damn incredible is that he did his stuff without an elite big man, thus violating conventional theory. Just as Hakeem was so damn good that he could win a championship without any other All-Stars, Jordan was so damn good that he could win even when his bigs were not impressive, an impressive feat given the accepted conclusion that it is the wingman-big man threat that is the most dangerous.

Add that his awards utterly blow Kobe out of the water, and anyone who genuinely claims Kobe is better than Jordan is a tool. Plain and simple.

 

but jordan never benefited from a player that was better, had a bigger impact and out produced him like shaq during kobe's early championships.