Compare And Contrast Jordan Vs Kobe Bryant

A lot of people will tell you that Michael Jordan was the best player to ever play in the NBA, and that Kobe Bryant doesn 't quite measure up to him. Kobe and Jordan are likely the most commonly compared basketball players, because their styles of playing the game are very similar. However, Kobe is underrated compared to Michael Jordan because he didn’t always have a good team around him, which resulted in less championships and less attention towards earning the MVP award, and the amount of injuries that Kobe was able to play through. With that being said, Kobe Bryant definitely deserves more credit and should be recognized as the better player when being compared to Michael Jordan.

Comparing two basketball players by their skill levels by

Winning the NBA championship is the challenge that every team wants to achieve at the end of the season. In Kobe Bryant’s 19 seasons, he won the championship title 5 times; Michael Jordan’s 15 seasons, he won the title 6 times. What makes Bryant’s 5 championships more impressive than Jordan’s 6 is that he was lacking “star power” on his team, while Jordan was surrounded by it. Michael Jordan had the benefit of playing with John Paxson, Steve Kerr, Horace Grant, Dennis Rodman, and Scottie Pippen during all of his championships, which made it easier for him to pull off his 6 NBA titles. For Michael’s first championship in the finals in 1991, his team won the series easily in a 4-1 victory against the Los Angeles Lakers. For most of Jordan’s career, his team usually consisted of at least one other Hall of Famer, and for all of his championships, he had Scottie Pippen. In the 1998 NBA Finals, Pippen was robbed of the Finals MVP award, which they instead gave to Jordan. In game 4, he put up 28 points, 9 rebounds, and 5 assists, which was crucial in that game, which they won 86-82 against the Utah Jazz. To have a teammate like Pippen, who averaged 17.5 points, 7.6 rebounds, and 5 assists per game in the playoffs, made it easier for Jordan to succeed in the finals. On the other hand, Kobe was not always accompanied by All-Stars and Hall of Famer’s. From 2000-2002, Kobe had a lot of help from his future Hall of Famer teammate, Shaquille O’Neal, to win his first three championships.

In 2001, Michael Jordan came back from retirement to finish two more seasons, which were subpar to his standards, only averaging 20 points, 6 rebounds, and 4 assists per game. Kobe Bryant, going into his 20th year in the NBA for the 2015-2016 season, is listed in the top 20 for all time games played, and will be in the top 5 for most seasons played after this season. Although he has faced many injuries throughout his career, like having achilles surgery in 2014, and tearing his rotator cuff in his shoulder in 2015, he still remains a threat in the NBA at age 37. Kobe is well known for playing through injuries, and has suffered a total of 23 of them in his whole career, while Jordan was healthy almost his entire career, only breaking his foot in 1985-86 and played 18 games that season. Playing over 35 minutes per game while being injured is not only risky, but also requires a lot of resilience to do. Keeping in mind that Bryant was experiencing at least minor injuries every season, he definitely was facing a situation that prevented him from performing at his full strength, while Jordan was rarely involved with any kind of injury. In Kobe’s 2012-2013 season, which was his latest season without being interrupted by any serious injuries, he averaged 27.3 points, 6 assists, and 5.6 rebounds per game.