Kevin Durant is from an era that grew up idolizing and admiring Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady. He look back at one of their great oncourt moments.
Advertisement
Kobe and T-Mac were the two Adidas athletes who threatened to change the sneaker industry in the early 00s. The T-Macs are still viewed as some of the best basketball shoes of all time.
But while Kobe later switched to Nike and the Swoosh, he also had a radically different career path. Whereas T-Mac played his best years on a Magic team with a perennially injured Grant Hill, Kobe made yearly runs to the Finals with Shaq.
This obviously gives Kobe the edge 1v1 when the duo dueled each other. T-Mac didn’t have the luxury of throwing it to Shaq in the post and getting a guaranteed bucket every possession.
This didn’t obviously mean that the duo didn’t have their moments as the two best wing players of the NBA. Kobe and T-Mac vied for superiority all through the noughties till the latter succumbed to injuries at Houston.
Kevin Durant shares legendary 1v1 clip between Kobe Bryant and Tracy McGrady
T-Mac took 2 scoring titles in the early 2000s over the likes of Kobe, Shaq and Allen Iverson. This is a clear indicator of his varied scoring arsenal and his myriad ways of getting a bucket.
Kobe was no slouch obviously, and he ended up giving as good as he got whenever he went up against Tracy McGrady or Iverson. Kevin Durant shared a vintage clip from Ballislife that documents this rivalry.
As you can see, it was quite the vintage sequence of plays. A T-Mac turnaround fadeaway that left Kobe on the floor, followed by Kobe blowing by McGrady for a dunk.
