Was Kobe Bryant as great as people think? Or are fans simply clinging to the memory of a beloved sportsman? Bleacher Report probably thought this out before naming him outside the top 10 on their list of the top 100 NBA players of all time, which was published in June. Unfortunately, not everyone is particularly happy with their assessment.
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Chris Johnson dismissed it right away on Dwyane Wade’s podcast. “Clickbait …. it’s clickbait,” he asserted. Joining him was D Wright, who claimed that nobody’s qualified to make a judgment call if they haven’t seen him play.
“So how can I rank somebody in an order [if] I’ve never seen a lot of these guys … it can never be fair in my opinion … I know who was great. I know who was hard to guard, and I know who was a bad m*********** when I watched them,” Wright noted, before proceeding to agree with Johnson.
Johnson dove right back to his point about the whole ranking system being just a tool for engagement farming. In other words, excluding Bryant was just a controversial gimmick to get people riled up, so they’d go at each other in the comments. The more conversation on the piece, the better the metrics.
Johnson even suggested that a lot of people make fake or burner accounts just to comment on posts like this and start online fights.
Dwyane Wade mentnioned he’d been asked his opinion on the controversial rankings before, saying, “A lot of people reached out to me … like, ‘How do you feel about this?’ And he was talking about me being ranked 23rd.”
“I told him, I said, ‘Man, I don’t care about that stuff,'” Wade went on. “I said, ‘It literally means nothing” … I said, “Listen, I’ve gotten everything out of this game. I’m still eating out of this game,’” he recalled, essentially dismissing the whole conversation.
“I’m just like, ‘Yeah, if you want to ask us hoopers who played against Kobe, all of us gonna talk top 3. Like, we all gonna talk top 3 if you played against Mamba. But from someone’s opinion that’s never played against Kobe, has never played a game of basketball at the level that we played at, having him at 11 [is nonsense],” he added, practically scoffing.
Wade, however, also seemed to ask Kobe fans to calm down and told them not to get too wound up because Bryant himself disregarded such subjective assessments.
“I remember … they had rankings when [Kobe] played in the league, and they had him low … and Kobe addressed it like, ‘Who are these idiots? Like, why would I listen to these idiots?’ And I’m not calling a person who did this an idiot, but what I’m saying is when someone does something like that, Kobe [Bryant] was like, ‘This is idiotic to me,'” he explained.
The former NBA champion noted that it was always going to be difficult to rank all the players who have ever played the game, more so if you haven’t actually seen them play. Statistics matter, but they seldom paint the whole picture. Avid basketball fans should know better than most about that.
