Since Kobe Bryant’s untimely passing, questions have been raised about his abilities as a basketball player. Was he perhaps overrated and people claimed they loved him back in the day because they wanted to hop on the hype train? It seems a little unlikely, especially to Josh Powell won two NBA championships alongside Bryant.
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Powell played seven years in the NBA, two of which came as a member of the Lakers during their 2009 and 2010 championship runs. He wasn’t a superstar by any means, but stepped up whenever head coach Phil Jackson called his number.
The 6-foot-9 big man always held Kobe with high regard, but it somehow get elevated once he played with him. Regardless of the other superb players Powell shared the court with, Bryant was simply different.
“Being able to play alongside people like Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, Derek Fisher, Kobe Bryant, Stephen Jackson, there’s a long list of players that I’ve had the opportunity to play with,” Powell said on the Talk Les Show. “But [Kobe Bryant] is one of the best to ever do it.”
Powell’s opinion of Bryant has never shifted throughout the years, but he has seen that development within a lot of people. That has become something that doesn’t sit right with him.
“It’s been a little bit of disrespect going. There’s really a lot of disrespect going on in regards to him, his name, his legacy, all these things. Anything below the top three in anybody’s list I’m not in favor of,” Powell said.
Unlike the majority of legendary players in NBA history, Bryant’s career has a unique checkpoint. Ahead of the 2006-07 season, Bryant changed his jersey number from 8 to 24. Powell illustrates the key difference between these two versions of Bryant, which only adds to the five-time NBA champion’s legacy.
“Early on, it’s like number 8 is an a-hole and he’s not talking to anybody. He was growing and learning, too. I had the chance to play with number 24. I didn’t have a chance to play with number 8,” Powell said.
By the time Powell arrived on the Lakers, Bryant had become a maestro of the game and didn’t carry any childish traits he once did. His mind became fixated on winning and doing whatever it took to achieve those goals. It turned out to go pretty well as he led the Lakers to two more championships, years after winning three in a row in the early 2000s.
Powell is just one of many former teammates and peers to rave about Bryant as a player and as a person. These accounts are only testaments of the type of legacy Bryant left, which will never fade away.
