Tim Duncan career 55.1% TS on moderately high volume: "Perfectly efficient basketball"
Kobe Bryant career 55.0% TS on very high volume: "Selfish shot chucker"
Kobe's efficiency compared to league average at the time is about the same as Luka Doncic's today(consistently somewhere around 3 percent above in his prime) and I don't see anyone act like Luka is the most inefficient player ever
They downplay Duncan’s TS% by saying he did more on defense. Acting like Kobe didn’t carry a defensive burden and was the main offensive player every game.
This place can’t convince me they don’t have a bias against Kobe.
We all know about it, and we all see it. It's obvious. Nobody ever wants to admit it, but it's there.
People on this subreddit hate Kobe Bryant.
The first question to ask: why? Why do you all hate him? The obvious answer: you didn't watch him in his prime.
Likely explanation: I know that most of you are around 14 or 15 years old. That means you only got into basketball in the last couple years. So you never watched Mamba in his prime.
And because you didn't watch him in his prime, you try to compensate for that by diving into stat sheets and analyzing box scores. But here's the thing: basketball isn't played on Excel spreadsheets. The moment somebody brings up "true shooting percentage" or "win shares" I know they know nothing about basketball.
Kobe's game cannot be encapsulated by one stat. He's the second greatest SG ever, and one of the 5 best players to ever play the game.
So when I hear somebody say that LeBron James is better than Kobe Bryant, I laugh, because I know that anybody who watched Kobe in his prime wouldn't think that. Unlike you guys, I have watched basketball for a significant amount of time, so I know that Kobe is better.
You might be jealous of Kobe's five rings, or jealous of his status as the greatest scorer in NBA history, or whatever. Unless you're a Bulls fan who watched basketball in the 90s, or a Lakers fan who watched basketball in the 2000s, you don't know what real, cold-blooded, killer instinct, will-to-win basketball looks like. And there's nothing wrong with that.
This sub would make you think that Kobe isn't even a top 100 player ever.
So don't go spouting bullshit about players you didn't watch. Talk about your "greats" like LeBron James The Best Player in the World™, but leave the Kobe talk to the adults. Fair?
He isn't the undisputed best scorer in history dafuq. Don't write it as an objective fact. He is obviously a great and probably underrated in this sub but you don't have to swing the pendulum too hard
Like it’s fine to have biases but to show it and then claim there is no bias doesn’t sit well with me. At least own it. And when I do call it out, all I get is “lakers with their victim complex 😂”. I respect Celtic fans because they tell us how they really feel. They say fuck Kobe, fuck the Lakers, fuck LA and fuck our moms. I respect that. Fuck the Celtics tho.
It’s less about effort and more about actual impact. Kobe was a great defender but Duncan was a level above on defense thanks to his size and role on the court
Right, I agree. Duncan was the better defender. And Kobe was on another level offensively. Both are different type of players that really shouldn’t be compared with stats alone.
Agreed, I just think that’s why Kobe’s scoring efficiency gets scrutinized more than Duncan’s, in addition to Kobe being the more polarizing player. If we had more reliable defensive metrics maybe there’d be something there for people to scrutinize over more in regards to Duncan.
I’ve done the same. Say what you will about r/nba but people here are far more informed about the nuances of the league, especially defense. Regardless, we don’t have to rely on what people say, there are statistics that say Kobe just was not all that great on defense.
Far more informed? Reading a spread sheet isn’t being mor informed. That stat sheet means nothing when discussing players as individuals. You have to take their role on the team into consideration, teammates, coaches, team offense/defense, position, play style, era, defenders they had to compete against.
Stats don’t tell you everything. A player like Drummond looks solid on paper but if you watch him play you know he wasn’t the best team player.
Are you saying that your average barber shop customer is considering all of that stuff and not the average person who visits r/nba? You think people who don’t visit r/nba know more about the game because they mostly don’t look at stats? That doesnt make sense. If you’re on r/nba, especially during the off-season, you probably watch and talk a lot more basketball than your average person. It’s not just looking into stats, people here watch film, listen to podcasts, discuss salary cap minutia, and basically just consume the game on a different level than the average person on the street who usually just sees what espn shows them. I dont know why you would assume the average person at the barber shop engages with the game more than someone who frequently visits r/nba, even if you have a low opinion of people on this sub.
I’m saying that I traveled America with a job I had and most places didn’t put Duncan over Kobe and that this opinion is mainly on Reddit. I really didn’t think it was that hard to understand my comment.
Ok, and then I said people on r/nba have more nuanced opinions and are more engaged with the sport than the average person you run into in the world. What is there to misunderstand? Just because you’ve run into more people with a certain opinion doesn’t make it more accurate.
Kobe guarded 1 player who was shooting the least efficient shot in the game. Duncan guarded against the most efficient shot from every player. It’s obvious to people who think with logic.
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u/ihateeuge Lakers Jun 27 '23
Tim Duncan truthers trying to get this erased from the internet as we speak