NBA fans love debating the ranking of players. On Monday, Kobe Bryant was asked to do the same. In a conference call, the Los Angeles Lakers legend was asked to name the five best players he’s competed against in his twenty year career:
Top five players Kobe says he has faced: Olajuwon, MJ, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Clyde Drexler. Adds that it’s hard to pick just five.
— Baxter Holmes (@BaxterHolmes) December 21, 2015
There are a few interesting takeaways from Bryant’s choices. Firstly, Clyde Drexler was drafted in 1983 while Kevin Durant was drafted in 2007, a 24 year range that clearly shows Kobe’s incredible accomplishment of sticking in the league for such a long amount of time.
The second takeaway is Bryant’s choices of Durant and Drexler. While both were/are fantastic players, they are generally not seen as being in the very elite category – Drexler partially due to his playing the same position as Michael Jordan in the same era, and Durant mostly due to his youth. Many will see Bryant’s exclusion of players like Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, and Dirk Nowitzki as somewhat ridiculous.
However, this is not that big of a deal. Bryant has and will be asked some form of this question over and over again, and the answer will change many times. The fact of the matter is that Bryant has played against tons of all-time great players and any combination he chooses to represent the best of that competition will always be missing some deserving candidates.
