RHODEY wrote:Kobe> SGA
So let's look at that.
First, we remove team accomplishments. Those don't have any bearing on value as scorer.
Now, we're focused.
Kobe wasn't as efficient as SGA. Wasn't as good a shooter. Worse shot selection. Similar size. Maybe a little more athletic. Played in a slower era, so it wasn't an simple to get transition buckets. Shai scores about 6 ppg in transition this year. Kobe loved to shoot crappy shots, and particularly long two-pointers. But he was a pretty good slasher, a very good isolation scorer... and in most of his top-athleticism years, was somewhat constrained by Shaq. We saw him let loose in 06, and he produced a volume-scoring season comparable to Jordan's 87 season. Never approached an MJ-type season outside of that in terms of volume+relative efficiency, but that's still pretty impressive.
So in order to author a Kobe argument, we need to look at volume more than efficiency, and steer ourselves away from appreciating certain skills.
Kobe's reputation as a scorer is built on volume, and on ignoring his Finals performances. He has some big regular seasons, and some pretty good ones overall. Never competed with the most efficient guys in-season, but most of the most-efficient perimeter scorers also didn't score on comparable volume. Guys like Ray Ray, Pierce. Vince was pretty close in 2000 and 2001, but basically never again thereafter. And Pierce folded in the playoffs pretty much perennially, so he's a hard sell. So that left Kobe competing with like Dirk, Shaq, prime TD and such, and he didn't really stack up to those guys (though Duncan's volume-scoring prime was fairly brief due to San Antonio's overall management strategy). On a different scale but in a similar vein, Kobe's popularity has a lot to do with people appreciating the aesthetic of his game, and the playground in his approach, which wasn't always great for in-game performance. And he caught a lot of the "next Jordan" angle, but didn't do a lot of what made MJ really, really dangerous, or how Jordan built his consistency.
One thing Kobe does have over Shai at the moment is longevity. That 11-year prime is pretty significant. And scoring in volume at +3% rTS over that time was a big deal. Shai's working on his third season of being involved in this kind of performance, so it isn't quite the same.
It's an interesting argument, because Kobe was legitimately one of the best players in the league for like a decade, and it was very much rooted in his scoring.
