Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant have been ceaselessly compared over the years. Kobe famously modeled his game after MJ in many ways, right down to copying his iconic jump shot, but he also had a huge part of his brand tied to something Jordan had first. Yes, Kobe had the “Mamba mentality.” Everybody knows about that. But, when it comes to improving not just himself, but his teammates too, Kobe took that job seriously.
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Craig Hodges, who played with Jordan for about 3.5 seasons with the Bulls and coached Kobe as an assistant under Phil Jackson with the Los Angeles Lakers, appeared on the most recent episode of the Up in Smoke podcast with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, and he spoke about some of the differences between these two NBA greats.
Hodges won two rings with both men, but he said that MJ and Kobe had very different approaches to inspiring greatness in their teammates. Kobe, he said, recognized that for the team to be great, everybody had to reach their own individual potential.
“He told me, he said, ‘Hodges check this out. If I can get everybody to play at their greatest, not Kobe great, but their own, ain’t nobody gonna beat us.'”
According to Hodges, Kobe built his teammates up, while MJ beat his down by being too demanding. Some players responded well to that kind of treatment; others didn’t.
“I didn’t feel that with MJ. I was around him,” Hodges said. “And I seen how many players went the other direction because of how he demoralized them with his bravado.”
Phil Jackson, the only man to coach both players, once said in his book Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success, that Jordan was a much better leader early in his career, but that Kobe grew into the role over time.
Jordan and Kobe couldn’t have won if they didn’t lead
Jordan’s hard-driving ways helped his Bulls to two separate three-peats, so he must have been doing something right, even if he wasn’t necessarily making friends along the way. Kobe won three rings with Shaq but clashed so badly that the Hall-of-Fame big man was eventually traded away to the Miami Heat.
It wasn’t until Shaq was gone that Kobe embraced being a true leader in the way that Hodges described. That’s why he won two more titles before his career was done, including one in which he famously trusted Ron Artest to take a critical Game 7 shot, much in the way Jordan once did with John Paxson and Steve Kerr.
“Kobe’s become the floor leader of a basketball team that was kind of looking for that nature of a player, who could not only be a scorer, but also be a playmaker or consistently make big plays at critical times,” Phil Jackson said during the 2001 playoffs. As the man who coached both icons, he may know best.
“And I think it’s the best that I’ve ever seen a player of mine play with an overall court game. I’m asking him to do so much, and he’s accomplishing it,” Jackson added.
Jordan and Kobe are similar in so many ways that it’s a good thing that their leadership styles were so different so as to set them apart from each other. Both were tremendously effective, which is part of why each man had such great respect for the other, with Jordan even adopting Kobe as a sort of little brother.
