You can’t fault his ambition. From the time he began his NBA career in 1996, then the youngest player in the history of the league, Kobe Bryant has been pretty unashamed in his pursuit of Michael Jordan.
And tonight he finally did it with a pair of free throws during the second quarter against the Minnesota Timberwolves:
While all new NBA players want to be the best, few if any have ever targeted the greatest of all time and decided to see if they can take their crown quite like Bryant did.
And on the week when he surpasses Jordan on the all-time NBA scoring charts, it would be easy to suggest that he has finally, to borrow a phrase from another sport, knocked Jordan off his perch.
However, based on any number of criteria, from cultural impact to on-court influence, Jordan remains well clear of Bryant and no matter what Bryant achieves before the end of his career, it will always remain so.
The obvious argument concerns rings, namely Jordan’s six to Bryant’s five but the superiority of Jordan goes much deeper than just championships. Kobe may have finally moved past Jordan on points, but how those points were achieved is central to understanding both players. Kobe had to play 5,000 more minutes than Jordan to surpass him and his field goal percentage is .452 to Jordan’s .497. In short, he is miles off the efficiency that Jordan maintained in his career.
Kobe is also ahead on assists (remarkably) but when it comes to the other end of the game, Jordan is still crushing him. The older Jordan has over 600 more steals and over 250 more blocks while Bryant has almost 1,000 more turnovers than Jordan, a hugely telling stat on how good Jordan really was.
There are usually one argument thrown up at this point to defend Kobe; Jordan had a better supporting cast. And, it must be said, there is merit to this argument, as Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and a whole host of other greats provided a suberb scaffold for Jordan to work on.
But having Shaq as a team-mate wasn’t too shabby for Kobe and he also played with Derek Fisher, Robert Horry and Pau Gasol during his championship wins. The Lakers team-mates Kobe has now are undoubtedly the worst of his career but when he was winning titles, the supporting cast was littered with quality, just like Jordan’s.
The Chicago teams of Jordan may have been better than the Lakers teams that Kobe won with, but not by enought to tilt the argument for me.
At this stage of his career, and looking at the roster of the Lakers, it is highly unlikely that Bryant will even match, never mind exceed, Jordan’s six titles, though five is hardly a bad return.
But it is off the court that Jordan is even more out of sight compared to Bryant. Eleven years after his retirement, Jordan remains the world’s most famous basketball player. The NBA may have grown globally many times over since Jordan hung up his Nikes but the 50-year-old is still the brightest star and one that Bryant can never eclipse.
Jordan and his ability was the primary reason why the NBA went mainstream in the late 1980s and he was a member of the 1992 Olympics Dream Team, the side that began the global growth of the NBA.
Add in his enormous role in making Nike the company it is today, the fact that 12 of the 30 best selling runners of all time have his name on them (including the No 1, Nike Air Jordan 1) and the fact he made an estimated $90m last year and you can see that the Jordan juggernaut shows no sign of shutting down.
Even if Bryant plays on and somehow overhauls the all-time top scorer (Kareem Abdul Jabaar has 38,387 so it would take Kobe at least three more injury free full seasons at his current points per game ratio) he’ll never really top Jordan.
You have to admire Bryant for trying, and he got closer than we could have ever thought possible over 18 years ago, but for the ultimate competitor this is one game he simply can’t win.
