Why Kobe Bryant is not a top-five NBA player of the 21st century

Last week, a 2021 comment from Boston Celtics superstar Jayson Tatum made the rounds on social media again: “Anybody that don’t have Mike [Jordan], Bron [LeBron James] and Kobe [Bryant] in their top five [all-time players], I really have a hard time listening to them.” 

This isn’t a surprising comment from Tatum, and it’s not an especially controversial one, either. Everyone with a pulse would agree with him on Jordan and LeBron in some order, and there are plenty of people who put Bryant right alongside those two. 

I’m just not one of them. In fact, I would go so far as to say that not only is Kobe not a top-five player of all-time, he’s not even a top-five player of the 21st century. My colleagues agreed when we ranked, by way of cumulative vote, the top 25 players of the last 25 years earlier this offseason.

Cue the eye rolls. I get it. These are all great players and splitting hairs between them becomes, to some degree, subjective. But there’s also some pretty objective data in support of the following five players as being better, or perhaps more impactful is a better way to put it, than Kobe. 

In no particular order, here are the arguments for each. 

LeBron James

As much as the cult of Kobe will try to make this a legit debate, it’s not. The best thing Kobe Bryant did on a basketball court was score, and LeBron, from both a raw number and especially an efficiency standpoint, is a better scorer than Kobe. 

CAREER PPG	REGULAR SEASON	POSTSEASON
LeBron James	27.0	28.4
Kobe Bryant	25.0	25.6

Now add to this the fact that Kobe was a career 44% shooter in both the regular and postseason, while LeBron is at 50% in the regular season and 49% in the playoffs. Again, this isn’t an argument even if you whittle it down to just scoring, where Kobe is at least a fellow all-time great. 

After that, it’s not even close. LeBron is bigger. Stronger. Faster. He’s a better rebounder, passer and defender (even if you want to make the on-ball argument on behalf of prime Kobe the difference would be slight, with the versatility and interior strength factors easily swinging the needle to LeBron’s side of the ledger). 

It is not an exaggeration to say there isn’t one single thing Bryant did on a basketball court better than LeBron, who, just as an aside, has also been a far superior performer in the biggest moment. That’s right. Just because Kobe felt inclined to align himself with one of the deadliest snakes on earth doesn’t mean he was actually some sort of clutch killer. Quite the contrary, in fact. 

For his career, Kobe made 34.5% of his shots to either tie or take the lead in the final two minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime, including both the regular and postseason — not even close to LeBron’s 44.8%. 

Want to take it to the final minute of playoff games? 

• LeBron James: 46%
• Kobe Bryant: 27%

How about the final 30 seconds? 

• LeBron James: 40%
• Kobe Bryant: 26%

Nine times in his career LeBron has made a shot to give his team the lead inside the final 24 seconds of the fourth quarter or overtime of a playoff game, and he has done so at a 41% clip. Kobe, by contrast, hit five of these shots over the course of his career … at a 29% clip. 

Get this: From the beginning of the 2003-04 season through the start of the 2009-10 season, a five-plus year sample taken smack dab from the middle of his prime, Kobe jacked up a league-high 56 potential game-winning shots (defined by 82games.com as inside of 24 seconds with a chance to give the Lakers the lead). He made 14 of them. That’s a 25% clip. Well below league average (29%), and even farther below LeBron’s 34% clip. 

The fact is, Kobe’s so called clutch prowess was, and is, based much more in reputation than reality, as is the idea that he’s in the conversation for greatest player ever, which some people insist he is. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t great. Perhaps one of the 10 greatest ever, depending on your taste. But he’s nowhere near LeBron’s class. Save your breath for the actual reasonable arguments. 

Stephen Curry

Our panel unanimously voted Curry as the second-best player of the century. Again, this one shouldn’t be a real debate. The offensive impact isn’t close, but you can bet there are a lot of irate Kobe stumpers screaming “last I checked defense matters!” at the top of their lungs right now. 

Those people, mind you, are right. Defense does matter. And this element notwithstanding, prime Curry was — and frankly current Curry might still be — a more impactful player than Kobe ever was. 

Consider the following:

• Curry’s career Win Shares average — calculated as the sum of a player’s offensive and defensive value — is higher than Kobe’s in both the regular and postseason. 

• Five times Curry has posted at least a 7.0 total box plus-minus (another sum of offensive and defensive impact) over a single postseason. Kobe did it three times. 

• Curry’s career playoff point differential, to this point, is plus-975. Kobe’s was plus-557, and in damn near half of his playoff games (91 out of 200) he finished with a negative plus-minus. That has only happened to Curry in a third of his playoff games. 

This postseason distinction is important, because the perception of Kobe is that he was some sort of big-stage god while Curry has, in the distorted eyes of some, shrunk from some of these moments. None of this is true in the slightest. 

CAREER PLAYOFF AVERAGES	PPG	TS%
Stephen Curry	26.8	60.8
Kobe Bryant	25.6	54.1

As you can see, Curry has been a better raw playoff scorer, on far greater efficiency mind you, than Kobe, and the same can be said of their respective stat lines on the biggest stage. Check the tale of the Finals tape (Kobe played in seven Finals to Curry’s six, so it’s a similar sample):

CAREER FINALS AVERAGES	PPG	APG	RPG	TS%	+/-
Stephen Curry	27.3	6.0	5.8	59.5	+138
Kobe Bryant	25.3	5.1	5.7	50.7	+36

If you want to take it to the regular-season averages, it’s still a dead heat (25.0 PPG for Kobe vs. 24.7 PPG for Curry) in raw numbers with the efficiency, again, registering as a Curry blowout. 

Consider than the highest number of shots per game that Curry has attempted for any single season in his career is 21.7, which was Kobe’s average over his 13 highest-volume campaigns. Three times Curry has put up at least 20 shots per game in his career; Kobe did it 13 times. Do not confuse shooting more with being a better scorer. 

Hell, for the duration of their respective careers Curry has been a better playoff rebounder than Kobe from both a per game and percentage standpoint (for those of you who were about to argue the pace case). Curry has also accounted for more playoff assists per game. All of which is why Curry’s career postseason PER and Game Score are both higher than Kobe’s. 

If we go to their respective peaks, Kobe never put together a season like the one Curry did in 2015-16 when he led the league at 30.1 PPG on 50/45/91 shooting splits. The guy made an NBA record 402 3-pointers at a 45% clip en route to the only unanimous MVP award in history and Curry’s second straight. 

Kobe, by contrast, won one MVP. They both won two scoring titles, but when Curry scored 30.1 PPG in 2015-16 he did so in a little over 34 minutes and 20 shots per game. In both of Kobe’s scoring-title seasons, he played 41 minutes per game and attempted a hefty 25 shots on average. You get the point. Kobe shot A LOT. And he needed to. And he was a great scorer. Just not as great as Steph has been and truly still is. 

But to me, the most overwhelming evidence in Curry’s favor as the superior player between the two is Golden State’s 2022 championship. That was not a championship roster (Andrew Wiggins was the only other All-Star and arguably the second best player). 

Yes, Kobe has five total titles to Curry’s four, but he never won a title with as much responsibility as Curry had on that 2022 team. Not even close. He had Shaq for the first three and Pau Gasol — All-NBA in 2009 and 2010 — for the last two. This isn’t to knock any of Kobe’s titles. It’s incredibly difficult to win it all without a second All-NBA guy. The ones that have been able to do so this century without that luxury stand out. Curry is on that list. Kobe isn’t. It’s the final gavel on an argument that by pretty much any unbiased standard swings in Curry’s favor. 

Tim Duncan

This is where most people think things really start to get debatable, and at first glance I get it. Kobe and Duncan is a tough call. They’re all tough calls from here on out. For starters, the bullet points of the respective resumes looking strikingly similar. 

TALE OF THE TAPE	TITLES	MVP(s)	All-NBA	All-Defense
Tim Duncan	5	2	15	15
Kobe Bryant	5	1	15	12

In what could, on the surface, feel like a coin flip, it seems to me that Kobe’s charisma both on and off the court, when measured against Duncan’s relatively boring persona and game, swings this debate in Bryant’s favor. But we aren’t going to do the style-points thing. 

We also won’t be lending even an ounce of weight to this “Spurs system” nonsense. For starters, Kobe played in arguably the single-most romanticized system in history in the Triangle and he did so alongside other superstars and the winningest coach of all time, so it’s not as if he was bereft of institutional support.  

And besides that, Duncan was the Spurs’ system. Or culture. Or however you want to phrase your euphemistic insinuation that Duncan’s greatness was a product of his environment rather than the other way around. It’s no different than Curry and the Warriors or Tom Brady and the Patriots. Without these guys, there is no system.

And so, with this understanding that the Spurs’ dynasty was disproportionately due to Duncan, let us begin with the number 50 — as in no Duncan team, over the course of his 19-year career, finished with fewer than 50 wins other than the 1998-99 team that went 37-13 and won the championship in a lockout-shortened season. 

That is honestly mind blowing. Do you get how hard it is to win 50 games in an NBA season? It is no small feat. And Duncan literally never experienced anything less. Kobe’s teams, meanwhile, finished with 45 or fewer wins seven times (not counting two shortened seasons) and 35 or fewer four times. We all understand the decline of Kobe’s supporting cast over periods of his career, but if anything, it’s another feather in Duncan’s cap that he never ran his top running mate out of town. 

Either way, these are mid-career and end-of-career lows that Duncan, a top-12 MVP finisher in three of his last four seasons, never had. By contrast, as admirable as it was for Bryant to come back from the Achilles tear, he fell off considerably at the end. Over his final two seasons, Kobe shot 37% and 36% overall. By that point Kobe was just jacking up a lot of bad shots on even worse teams and getting courtesy fan-vote All-Star nods despite playing in just six games in 2013-14 and 35 games the year after that. 

I also want to address the defense. Yes, Kobe was a great defender in his prime, but he fell off appreciably and benefited from a number of reputation-based All-Defense nods over the latter half of his career. Moreover, you simply can’t have the kind of defensive impact as a 6-foot-6 wing as you can as a seven-foot rim protector. Duncan was a defensive system unto himself. It’s the same reason that Shaq was actually a more important defender than Kobe for those Lakers teams (which we’ll get into shortly).

Bottom line: While the traditional markers of career accomplishment look extremely similar between Duncan and Kobe, Duncan was a more impactful defender and a more consistent winner. He was the better player early (fifth in MVP voting as a rookie) and the better player at the end of their careers (10th in MVP voting in his penultimate season). Reasonable minds can disagree here, but the most objective signs mostly point to Duncan over Kobe. 

Shaquille O’Neal

Another razor-thin call, but for me, it’s really this simple: When Shaq and Kobe were playing on the same team, which one did opposing teams worry about more? The answer is definitively Shaq, who had teams employing lines of big men whose sole responsibility was to spend six fouls each trying, in vein, to marginally disrupt the dominance of an ultimately immovable object. 

Three times the Lakers won titles with Shaq and Kobe and Shaq was the Finals MVP all three times. The stats weren’t even close. 

2000 FINALS	PPG	RPG	TS%
Shaquille O’Neal	38.0	16.7	57.6
Kobe Bryant	15.6	4.6	41.1

2001 FINALS	PPG	RPG	TS%
Shaquille O’Neal	33.8	15.8	57.5
Kobe Bryant	24.6	7.8	50.1

2002 FINALS	PPG	RPG	TS%
Shaquille O’Neal	36.3	12.3	63.6
Kobe Bryant	26.8	58	62.3

Even in the Finals they lost to Detroit in 2004, Shaq was far better than Kobe, who was frankly abysmal, shooting 38% for the series. It wasn’t just the Finals, either. During the 3-peat. O’Neal’s postseason numbers far outclass Bryant’s. 

The evidence for Shaq as the team’s alpha runs even deeper when you get into the impact stats in the three championships seasons. 

From Thinking Basketball:

From 2000-03, [the Lakers] played 32 full-strength games without Shaq and posted a +0.4 rORtg. With him, they were an exceptional +7.3. Even his floor-raising was colossal: In 29 games without Kobe, Shaq’s 2000 and 2001 Lakers posted a +2.8 relative offense at a 54-win pace flanked by role players (and Glen Rice for half of those games). O’Neal’s game-to-game impact across his career was consistently huge and, naturally, his overall WOWY results are some of the best on record.

Check out the respective ratings for the Lakers from 2000-2005, counting both the regular and postseasons, when Shaq played without Kobe and vice versa, per PBP Stats. 

LAKERS LINEUPS (2000-04)	O-RTG	D-RTG	NET RTG
Shaq without Kobe	106.9	102.6	+4.4
Kobe without Shaq	101.6	104.7	-3.1

As you can see, the Lakers were significantly better when Shaq played without Kobe than they were when Kobe had to go it alone. And it’s important to note the defense getting better, too, when Shaq was on his own. Indeed, defensive metrics are not without their flaws and are total-lineup and opponent dependent, but the general story that Kobe being a great defender and Shaq being a lazy one was more perception that reality holds true. Bottom line, Shaq’s size meant more. Lazy or not. 

And by the way, this trend continued when O’Neal went to Miami (the defense playing better with him on the floor than off). In fact, all told, Andy Bailey noted for Bleacher Report in 2019: “From 2000-01 to the end of Shaq’s career, his teams’ net ratings were 7.7 points better when he was on the floor. Kobe’s career net-rating swing is plus-5.6.”

At the end of the day, both Kobe and Shaq proved capable of winning at the highest level without one another. But when they were together, Shaq was the clear No. 1. That puts him higher on this list, as well. 

Nikola Jokic

OK, here’s where the Kobe Stans are going to officially lose their minds. Are you kidding me? This dude with one title, who has only been an elite player for a little more than half a decade, is better than Kobe Freaking Bryant? Yes, that’s what I’m saying, and the case for Jokić is pure peak performance. 

No, at this point, Jokić, at 30 years old, has not had the career longevity to even be spoken of in the same conversation as Kobe, but by the same token, Bryant, for even one season, was never as dominant as Jokic has been over the past five years. 

There’s an argument to be made that Kobe was actually never the best player in the world. Jokic, meanwhile, is head and tails above every other player in the world and has been for some time. He should’ve won the last five MVPs if voter fatigue wasn’t a thing. The three he did win are already three times as many as Bryant won over a 20-year career. 

A lot of Kobe backers are going to want to pull defense card in the Jokić debate the same as they want to do with Curry, but the same story is true: The catch-all numbers tell the story. Even with defense factored in, the impact of Jokic simply means more than the impact of Kobe. 

Again, Jokić hasn’t played for as long as Kobe so we’re only going off peak here. For Jokić, we’re going to make that his last seven years. For Kobe, we’re going to measure his best 11-year sample (2001-2012). Take a look at the respective teams’ point differentials per 100 possessions with each player on and off the court. 

PLAYER	ON COURT	OFF COURT	DIFFERENCE
Nikola Jokić	+7.32	-5.29	+12.6
Kobe Bryant	+5.04	-1.60	+6.6

I want you to focus on the on-court rating. Understand that despite Kobe playing with Shaquille O’Neal and Pau Gasol during this sample, his teams still outscored opponents by fewer points per 100 possessions than Jokić’s teams even though Jokić has literally never played with another All-Star. 

Another metric to consider: Jokić’s average PER over the last five seasons is 31.68. Kobe’s career high was 28.0. Let me repeat that: Jokić’s average PER is higher than Kobe ever reached even in his best single season. That is also true of VORP, Win Shares and Box Plus-Minus. Jokić’s average in all these catch-all metrics is better, by far in most cases, than Kobe’s career high. 

Yes, I understand that Kobe has five championships to Jokić’s one, but much like Curry’s 2022 title, Jokić’s 2023 championship speaks higher volumes than any of the titles Kobe won with All-NBA players by his side. Again, the guys who have won titles without star sidekicks are in a pretty exclusive club. It doesn’t mean all those guys are better than Kobe. Dirk Nowitzki (2011) wasn’t. I don’t believe Giannis Antetokoumpo (2021) is. None of the 2004 Pistons have a case. Kawhi Leonard (2019) hasn’t stayed healthy long enough. But in the case of 2003 Duncan, 2022 Curry and 2023 Jokić, given the full breadth of each of their respective resumes, this kind of lone-wolf title makes a difference.

Ultimately, Jokić’s efficiency and overall impact are so much greater than Bryant’s ever were. If he keeps this up for another five years this won’t even be a debate for anyone who has the capacity to look beyond ring counts. For now, I understand if you still believe the the full weight of Bryant’s career still trumps Jokić’s. I just disagree. For me, it’s pretty simple: Jokić is a better player than Kobe ever was. If we were talking a couple seasons, that would be different. But the sample size is now big enough to measure relative value, even if the total number of accolades are obviously going to favor Bryant.