Kobe Bryant Breaks Down James Harden's Game

[Jedi32]

Nothing about the "eye test" is reliable because it's completely subjective. People only see what they want to see. Kobe stans' romanticized memories of his play aren't accurate recollections of his career. That's why people look at the numbers. The numbers say one thing about Kobe, the romanticized memories say another. I wonder which is more accurate...

There is only one thing that is romanticized and that is the winning. If Kobe was averaging 50/10/10 and losing I would say he is a loser that scores a lot of points.

The only thing that makes stats relevant is whether you win the game or not. Losing is not romanticized.

Jerry West averaged 46 ppg in the finals and was awarded the only FMVP for a player on a losing team and he says he would rather have won the series than score all those points.

Winning applies context to stats.

You can't say if you do X then you will win the game because there are too many variables within a game.......

So KD is a better player in 2017 than he was in 2016?

Teams win. Not individual players. If a guy can go 6-24 in a deciding game and be seen better than a guy who averages 30+ in a losing effort in the finals, there's something wrong with your analysis.

So defense, rebounding, etc mean nothing if a guy had a bad shooting game? Maybe there's something wrong with your analysis.

[Capn'O]

i dont have espn access. did anyone actually watch this? was it interesting? since there's no talk of "omg kobe is dissing harden to make himself look good" i'm guessing no one actually watched it?

I was interested in the video and commentary as well. Paywall and... this thread... ensued

[mademan]

There is only one thing that is romanticized and that is the winning. If Kobe was averaging 50/10/10 and losing I would say he is a loser that scores a lot of points.

The only thing that makes stats relevant is whether you win the game or not. Losing is not romanticized.

Jerry West averaged 46 ppg in the finals and was awarded the only FMVP for a player on a losing team and he says he would rather have won the series than score all those points.

Winning applies context to stats.

You can't say if you do X then you will win the game because there are too many variables within a game.......

So KD is a better player in 2017 than he was in 2016?

Teams win. Not individual players. If a guy can go 6-24 in a deciding game and be seen better than a guy who averages 30+ in a losing effort in the finals, there's something wrong with your analysis.

So defense, rebounding, etc mean nothing if a guy had a bad shooting game? Maybe there's something wrong with your analysis.

They dont mean as much as scoring. They especially dont mean as much when it's a guy who's greatest value is offense (and more specific, scoring).

It's a team game. Kobe choked, insofar as that he played well below his standards in a must win situation, but his team still won. How is that any more impressive than someone balling out in a losing effort?

[thebigbird]

There is only one thing that is romanticized and that is the winning. If Kobe was averaging 50/10/10 and losing I would say he is a loser that scores a lot of points.

The only thing that makes stats relevant is whether you win the game or not. Losing is not romanticized.

Jerry West averaged 46 ppg in the finals and was awarded the only FMVP for a player on a losing team and he says he would rather have won the series than score all those points.

Winning applies context to stats.

You can't say if you do X then you will win the game because there are too many variables within a game.......

So KD is a better player in 2017 than he was in 2016?

Teams win. Not individual players. If a guy can go 6-24 in a deciding game and be seen better than a guy who averages 30+ in a losing effort in the finals, there's something wrong with your analysis.

So defense, rebounding, etc mean nothing if a guy had a bad shooting game? Maybe there's something wrong with your analysis.

Rebounding and assists don't matter for lebron when you talk about him. He's just "stuffing the stat sheet to impress analytics nerds". So why should any of that matter for Kobe?

[An Unbiased Fan]

So KD is a better player in 2017 than he was in 2016?

Teams win. Not individual players. If a guy can go 6-24 in a deciding game and be seen better than a guy who averages 30+ in a losing effort in the finals, there's something wrong with your analysis.

So defense, rebounding, etc mean nothing if a guy had a bad shooting game? Maybe there's something wrong with your analysis.

They dont mean as much as scoring. They especially dont mean as much when it's a guy who's greatest value is offense (and more specific, scoring).

It's a team game. Kobe choked, insofar as that he played well below his standards in a must win situation, but his team still won. How is that any more impressive than someone balling out in a losing effort?

How did Kobe choke? His shot was off so he went aggressive and got to the line, while grabbing boards and playing great defense. You act like he scored 6 points...he had 24 and 15 rebounds.

[1993Playoffs]

Kobe is by far the most overrated player ever.

[G35]

Nothing about the "eye test" is reliable because it's completely subjective. People only see what they want to see. Kobe stans' romanticized memories of his play aren't accurate recollections of his career. That's why people look at the numbers. The numbers say one thing about Kobe, the romanticized memories say another. I wonder which is more accurate...

There is only one thing that is romanticized and that is the winning. If Kobe was averaging 50/10/10 and losing I would say he is a loser that scores a lot of points.

The only thing that makes stats relevant is whether you win the game or not. Losing is not romanticized.

Jerry West averaged 46 ppg in the finals and was awarded the only FMVP for a player on a losing team and he says he would rather have won the series than score all those points.

Winning applies context to stats.

You can't say if you do X then you will win the game because there are too many variables within a game.......

So KD is a better player in 2017 than he was in 2016?

Teams win. Not individual players. If a guy can go 6-24 in a deciding game and be seen better than a guy who averages 30+ in a losing effort in the finals, there's something wrong with your analysis.

Did anyone read this thread "Most overrated or least impressive NBA champion"

I follow the school of thought that all championships are created equal. A team can only beat the teams it plays. If I were forced to answer the question, though, it would definitely be the '02 Lakers.

I would say that every team that wins a title is equally impressive in my book. Part of a dynasty or not, each team defeated every opponent put in front of them in order to win the championship. And of course, no championship team played the same opponents the previous or future champion did.

These are two best comments in the thread. Every team had their own individual challenges in their respective years and no one can duplicate what they had to go through.

Basically, you do what you have to do to get the job done.

Now, an example I was taught in a leadership class was humans only do what we have to do to accomplish a task.

So the example he made was when we are walking around town and you come to a crosswalk and you walk to the other side and there is a curb you have to step up to.

The curb is say eight inches high.

Is it more impressive to jump three feet in the air or to just barely clear the curb by raising your foot 8 1/4 inches.

You would say its more impressive to jump three feet in the air....look what I just did! I jumped 3ft in the air to clear an 8 inch curb.

While I say humans do whatever it takes to accomplish the task, anything more is meaningless.

If your boy Lebron goes 40/10/10 in the finals and loses is that impressive?

35/8/8 and wins in the finals?

26/10/12 and loses in the finals?

How about 18/15/17 in a tied series?

Maybe 47/26/19 in a series loss?

To me the it doesn't matter what you do in a loss, you can put historical numbers, but if you lose you did not clear the curb. You did not meet the objective.

Yes you win and lose as a team, but you also do whatever it takes to win. If the star has to produce more stats in a win, great, do it. If a star does not have to produce more in a win, great, it does not matter.

The 2007 finals is a perfect example. Tim Duncan was the best player on that court. He could have dominated that series if he chose to. But he did not. He deferred to Tony Parker and played a supporting role in the teams victory...the Spurs swept Lebron and the Cavs and kept it moving.

But HATERS will say, oh that was not impressive...Duncan did not put up historical numbers so it was more about his team. He had too much help. Lebron was the real hero, because he had no help and he had to do everything. So so so lets give Lebron more credit for getting swept in the finals.

Chasing stats do not make you a better player...you can be a better player and put up lesser stats than you have previously because you know how to play with your teammates better. But that goes completely over Lebron-stans heads because they only know how to Google Lebron's stats. Anyone else on the team is an afterthought......

[LakerLegend]

Really miss Kobe, shame these analytic warriors continue to bring down his legacy.

You seriously think Kobe is top 15? He's not even close, look at advanced stats for a second, if you're smart enough to understand them I mean.

Let me put down my classwork for my Advanced Applications in Statistics class at MIT Open Courseware for a second to teach you a little something about how mathematical models work. You probably couldn't even begin to comprehend how the models I work on in my spare time work, but I'll try anyway. It's good to pass on the knowledge, especially to those who are not well endowed in the analytical side of things.

You must be one of those Lakers fans that thinks championships are actually important, completely ignorant to the fact that any legendary player (Duncan anyone?) would take a 55 FG% than some useless jewelry ring anyday.

You don't know anything about the PER valuations and the metrics used to accentuate intricate sample sets about autonomous principles that can be extracted to show that Kobe Bryant has never actually hit a game winner in his career. All his game winners are media hype tapes to sell shoes. Kobe is very fortunate that he's marketed so well by Nike and the Lakers franchise.

ESPN and the whole 'next Jordan' narrative has you thinking Kobe is clutch but he's not, every data point that was graphed on the Cartesian plane while prime factorization was allowed to exist in a null factor showed that Kobe continued to fail theses primitive tests. I studied statistical variations in geometric localities and each and every one of their correspondent asymptotic differentiations provided me with the conclusion that your so called Kobe is the worst clutch shooter in the NBA.

Cosine functions developed at Princeton while combined with the Bell curve allows us to measure basketball production without affecting Higgs Boson-like particles that would otherwise exist in non-zero environments. And where do you think Kobe ranks on that scale? The bottom of the Bell Curve. They ran about ten thousand trials of the same repeating polymorphic routes emulating artificially generated synergy optimization and the Mamba was nowhere to be found in either planes. "Eye tests" are a layman's tool for avoiding thinking and this kind of narrow tunnel vision only exacerbates current falsifications that we can rely on such a poor method of extrapolation. I don't watch basketball but the fact of the matter is that I don't need to. It's all in the stats. The numbers don't lie.

Your "Kobe" is just an average NBA player who gets an ungodly amount of touches thanks to his marketing. Kobe was never the best player in the league, nor even a top 250 player in the league at any point in his career. I wish people understood more the numbers side of basketball and woke up and finally realized that this guy not only is overrated, but flat out isn't good at basketball in any way whatsoever.

There aren’t 15 players who can be ranked over him when you combine career accolades and peak play.

[LakerLegend]

Watching LeBron this season has been a real eye opener in terms of stat inflation and analytics. Kobe’s advanced and regular stats would be so much better if all he did was aggressively go after uncontested defensive rebs and bring up the ball repeatedly and just toss it to players cutting or curling off screens for assists. Kobe was also more of a gunner than a lot of player affecting his shooting percentage but that unpredictably is also what made him so dangerous and warped defenses.

Kobe had a higher usage rate than lebron despite being a role player his first 3 seasons and a second option his next 5.

LeBron has a higher usage rate when it comes to “other” things

[kdot99]

Not one stat paints the high rankings kobe fans have of him....while you could argue it isn't conclusive there isn't ONE metric that loves Kobe enough to rank him like kobe fans do.

What about 5 rings and 2 NBA Final MVP's?

1 is rewarded for just being on a team, the other is an award. Neither are stats.

Stats produced results. The results are 5 rings and 2 MVP's.

You can call Kobe overrated or whatever you want, but only a handful of players in the history of NBA have been able to put up the stats with the results he has. Kobe also played 36 MPG over 20 years, find me someone else with that much sustained success that was able to produce like he has. You can throw out per minute numbers, but not many players can do it at the volume with the success Kobe had

[kdot99]

Not one stat paints the high rankings kobe fans have of him....while you could argue it isn't conclusive there isn't ONE metric that loves Kobe enough to rank him like kobe fans do.

What about 5 rings and 2 NBA Final MVP's?

So wait, somebody else was the Finals MVP the other 3 times?!? Holy riding coattails Batman!

You're kidding yourself if you don't think Kobe wasn't a huge reason the Lakers won.

Watch on YouTube

Were you alive when this happened? Where's Shaq in overtime? Oh that's right he fouled out. Who won? The Lakers.

[dhsilv2]

What about 5 rings and 2 NBA Final MVP's?

1 is rewarded for just being on a team, the other is an award. Neither are stats.

Stats produced results. The results are 5 rings and 2 MVP's.

You can call Kobe overrated or whatever you want, but only a handful of players in the history of NBA have been able to put up the stats with the results he has. Kobe also played 36 MPG over 20 years, find me someone else with that much sustained success that was able to produce like he has. You can throw out per minute numbers, but not many players can do it at the volume with the success Kobe had

The stats of the TEAM produced the results. The problem is you're putting far too much of the credit on Kobe. That's why we look at individual stats separate and in context of team results. Kobe had a great career but there are certainly more than a handful of players who had better careers.

[dhsilv2]

There aren’t 15 players who can be ranked over him when you combine career accolades and peak play.

Depends how you rank accolades vs peak as Kobe's peak certainly isn't top 15.

[kdot99]

1 is rewarded for just being on a team, the other is an award. Neither are stats.

Stats produced results. The results are 5 rings and 2 MVP's.

You can call Kobe overrated or whatever you want, but only a handful of players in the history of NBA have been able to put up the stats with the results he has. Kobe also played 36 MPG over 20 years, find me someone else with that much sustained success that was able to produce like he has. You can throw out per minute numbers, but not many players can do it at the volume with the success Kobe had

The stats of the TEAM produced the results. The problem is you're putting far too much of the credit on Kobe. That's why we look at individual stats separate and in context of team results. Kobe had a great career but there are certainly more than a handful of players who had better careers.

The stats of the team that Kobe contributed to. You think the Lakers would with VC instead of Kobe? With T-Mac who could never make it out of the first round? With Ray Allen? Those were his comparables. People love talking hypotheticals but plug in your numbers and say what you want but those guys weren't built like Kobe. At the end of the day Kobe's advanced numbers might not say he's uber-elite, but his success speaks for itself and not many can compare to his produced results.

Don't twist my words, I wasn't saying there are only a handful of players that had better careers than Kobe either.

[dhsilv2]

Stats produced results. The results are 5 rings and 2 MVP's.

You can call Kobe overrated or whatever you want, but only a handful of players in the history of NBA have been able to put up the stats with the results he has. Kobe also played 36 MPG over 20 years, find me someone else with that much sustained success that was able to produce like he has. You can throw out per minute numbers, but not many players can do it at the volume with the success Kobe had

The stats of the TEAM produced the results. The problem is you're putting far too much of the credit on Kobe. That's why we look at individual stats separate and in context of team results. Kobe had a great career but there are certainly more than a handful of players who had better careers.

The stats of the team that Kobe contributed to. You think the Lakers would with VC instead of Kobe? With T-Mac who could never make it out of the first round? With Ray Allen? Those were his comparables. People love talking hypotheticals but plug in your numbers and say what you want but those guys weren't built like Kobe. At the end of the day Kobe's advanced numbers might not say he's uber-elite, but his success speaks for itself and not many can compare to his produced results.

Don't twist my words, I wasn't saying there are only a handful of players that had better careers than Kobe either.

Kobe has clearly better stats than all of those guys. Those aren't guys that anyone reasonably would claim were better than Kobe. I mean if you think anyone here is taking VC over Kobe, you're crazy. Peak Tmac over Kobe is a common comment but that's one freaky great 2003 season.

[mademan]

There is only one thing that is romanticized and that is the winning. If Kobe was averaging 50/10/10 and losing I would say he is a loser that scores a lot of points.

The only thing that makes stats relevant is whether you win the game or not. Losing is not romanticized.

Jerry West averaged 46 ppg in the finals and was awarded the only FMVP for a player on a losing team and he says he would rather have won the series than score all those points.

Winning applies context to stats.

You can't say if you do X then you will win the game because there are too many variables within a game.......

So KD is a better player in 2017 than he was in 2016?

Teams win. Not individual players. If a guy can go 6-24 in a deciding game and be seen better than a guy who averages 30+ in a losing effort in the finals, there's something wrong with your analysis.

Did anyone read this thread "Most overrated or least impressive NBA champion"

I follow the school of thought that all championships are created equal. A team can only beat the teams it plays. If I were forced to answer the question, though, it would definitely be the '02 Lakers.

I would say that every team that wins a title is equally impressive in my book. Part of a dynasty or not, each team defeated every opponent put in front of them in order to win the championship. And of course, no championship team played the same opponents the previous or future champion did.

These are two best comments in the thread. Every team had their own individual challenges in their respective years and no one can duplicate what they had to go through.

Basically, you do what you have to do to get the job done.

Now, an example I was taught in a leadership class was humans only do what we have to do to accomplish a task.

So the example he made was when we are walking around town and you come to a crosswalk and you walk to the other side and there is a curb you have to step up to.

The curb is say eight inches high.

Is it more impressive to jump three feet in the air or to just barely clear the curb by raising your foot 8 1/4 inches.

You would say its more impressive to jump three feet in the air....look what I just did! I jumped 3ft in the air to clear an 8 inch curb.

While I say humans do whatever it takes to accomplish the task, anything more is meaningless.

If your boy Lebron goes 40/10/10 in the finals and loses is that impressive?

35/8/8 and wins in the finals?

26/10/12 and loses in the finals?

How about 18/15/17 in a tied series?

Maybe 47/26/19 in a series loss?

To me the it doesn't matter what you do in a loss, you can put historical numbers, but if you lose you did not clear the curb. You did not meet the objective.

Yes you win and lose as a team, but you also do whatever it takes to win. If the star has to produce more stats in a win, great, do it. If a star does not have to produce more in a win, great, it does not matter.

The 2007 finals is a perfect example. Tim Duncan was the best player on that court. He could have dominated that series if he chose to. But he did not. He deferred to Tony Parker and played a supporting role in the teams victory...the Spurs swept Lebron and the Cavs and kept it moving.

But HATERS will say, oh that was not impressive...Duncan did not put up historical numbers so it was more about his team. He had too much help. Lebron was the real hero, because he had no help and he had to do everything. So so so lets give Lebron more credit for getting swept in the finals.

Chasing stats do not make you a better player...you can be a better player and put up lesser stats than you have previously because you know how to play with your teammates better. But that goes completely over Lebron-stans heads because they only know how to Google Lebron's stats. Anyone else on the team is an afterthought......

None of this really matters because Kobe didnt win. The Lakers won. Team success and individual play arent correlated linearly. When rating guys individually, as in this thread, how they play individually is more important than how their teams did. The heat, for example, had a legit chance of beating the Mavs even with Lebron's chit play. If they had won, it wouldnt excuse Lebron's choke in the least. Nobody should think any worse/better of how Lebron played in the 2011 series if the Heat had won. Just like i dont think any better of some of Kobe's title runs than i do of other guys losing runs.

[XxIronChainzxX]

The contrast between this topic and the Tim Duncan greatness topic is striking. 7 pages of people correctly pointing out that stats don't reflect TD's greatness, yet...with Kobe the opposite opinion.

Tim Duncan is one of the most celebrated and love universally (and rightfully so and is arguably a GOAT candidate) while FS1, Bron stans, the analytics fans all dislike Kobe to push a narrative or prop up their favourite player when they are feeling insecure.

It's all about agendas. Funny how people said KD's and Steph rings don't count cause they teamed up and ruined the league but now apparently, they surpassed Kobe or will surpass him with those same accolades that they call meaningless.

People would rather watch the box scores and punch in numbers and move goalposts than actually watch the game of basketball.

That thread on TD is partly about how the stats absolutely prove his greatness, with TD being top 10 all time in many categories, and arguments about awards that TD deserves but did not get. But threads about Kobe are not about whether he’s top 15 all time. No one is really debating that. It’s between Kobe stans who want to say he’s top 5 or better than LeBron, and everyone else. This isn’t really a debate. It’s guys stanning on one side and the befuddled masses on the other.

[kdot99]

Really miss Kobe, shame these analytic warriors continue to bring down his legacy.

You seriously think Kobe is top 15? He's not even close, look at advanced stats for a second, if you're smart enough to understand them I mean.

Let me put down my classwork for my Advanced Applications in Statistics class at MIT Open Courseware for a second to teach you a little something about how mathematical models work. You probably couldn't even begin to comprehend how the models I work on in my spare time work, but I'll try anyway. It's good to pass on the knowledge, especially to those who are not well endowed in the analytical side of things.

You must be one of those Lakers fans that thinks championships are actually important, completely ignorant to the fact that any legendary player (Duncan anyone?) would take a 55 FG% than some useless jewelry ring anyday.

You don't know anything about the PER valuations and the metrics used to accentuate intricate sample sets about autonomous principles that can be extracted to show that Kobe Bryant has never actually hit a game winner in his career. All his game winners are media hype tapes to sell shoes. Kobe is very fortunate that he's marketed so well by Nike and the Lakers franchise.

ESPN and the whole 'next Jordan' narrative has you thinking Kobe is clutch but he's not, every data point that was graphed on the Cartesian plane while prime factorization was allowed to exist in a null factor showed that Kobe continued to fail theses primitive tests. I studied statistical variations in geometric localities and each and every one of their correspondent asymptotic differentiations provided me with the conclusion that your so called Kobe is the worst clutch shooter in the NBA.

Cosine functions developed at Princeton while combined with the Bell curve allows us to measure basketball production without affecting Higgs Boson-like particles that would otherwise exist in non-zero environments. And where do you think Kobe ranks on that scale? The bottom of the Bell Curve. They ran about ten thousand trials of the same repeating polymorphic routes emulating artificially generated synergy optimization and the Mamba was nowhere to be found in either planes. "Eye tests" are a layman's tool for avoiding thinking and this kind of narrow tunnel vision only exacerbates current falsifications that we can rely on such a poor method of extrapolation. I don't watch basketball but the fact of the matter is that I don't need to. It's all in the stats. The numbers don't lie.

Your "Kobe" is just an average NBA player who gets an ungodly amount of touches thanks to his marketing. Kobe was never the best player in the league, nor even a top 250 player in the league at any point in his career. I wish people understood more the numbers side of basketball and woke up and finally realized that this guy not only is overrated, but flat out isn't good at basketball in any way whatsoever.

You sound like someone whose never played basketball in his life. Keep reading your books, go study your statistical variations in geometric localities and don't watch any games, you lame.

[dhsilv2]

You sound like someone whose never played basketball in his life. Keep reading your books, go study your statistical variations in geometric localities and don't watch any games, you lame.

can't tell if serious....

[kdot99]

The stats of the TEAM produced the results. The problem is you're putting far too much of the credit on Kobe. That's why we look at individual stats separate and in context of team results. Kobe had a great career but there are certainly more than a handful of players who had better careers.

The stats of the team that Kobe contributed to. You think the Lakers would with VC instead of Kobe? With T-Mac who could never make it out of the first round? With Ray Allen? Those were his comparables. People love talking hypotheticals but plug in your numbers and say what you want but those guys weren't built like Kobe. At the end of the day Kobe's advanced numbers might not say he's uber-elite, but his success speaks for itself and not many can compare to his produced results.

Don't twist my words, I wasn't saying there are only a handful of players that had better careers than Kobe either.

Kobe has clearly better stats than all of those guys. Those aren't guys that anyone reasonably would claim were better than Kobe. I mean if you think anyone here is taking VC over Kobe, you're crazy. Peak Tmac over Kobe is a common comment but that's one freaky great 2003 season.

Alright not sure where this thread is going, I have nothing to say to this except we can debate hypotheticals all we want but fact is Kobe's results speaks for itself. People here can say he's overrated but not many people will ever achieve the personal or team success he's had and that can't ever be taken away with arguments. No need to reply.