Kobe Bryant averages 15.9 points per game, but he needs 17.5 shots a night to get there. He is currently shooting 31 percent from the floor. He takes 7.3 three-pointers per game, despite shooting just 22 percent from long range, and at this rate he would need to take another 560 three-pointers to equal the 119 three-pointers that Stephen Curry has already made this season.
His defense is horrible. He is holding back the development of his teammates, by their own admission, and he is no doubt the most destructive (in a bad way) force in the NBA.
But is he an All-Star?
Well, no. But he’ll probably be at the game, because since his second season in the league (and this was in a year that Bryant didn’t even start for Los Angeles) fans have voted him in as a starter. And, as fan voting for the All-Star Game began this week, it seemed appropriate for NBA commissioner Adam Silver to answer a question regarding Bryant’s ASG prospects.
From an interview on Sirius XM’s NBA channel, as transcribed by Kurt Helin at Pro Basketball Talk:
“I hope to see him there. I think he deserves to be there. He’s going to retire as one of the NBA’s greatest players.
“He’s done, even beyond his play on the floor, he’s played as great a role as anyone in international expansion of the game. Right now, I’d say in China, there’s still Kobe and everyone else. I think because he was such a hit there when he was there with the national team for the Beijing Olympics, and I know he’s made so many trips to China over the course of his career in the NBA. I think the same thing in Indiana and Africa and Latin America and of course Europe, where he grew up.
“He’s just one of those great global ambassadors of the NBA. And I hope in the same way that Dikembe Mutombo now is a global ambassador of the NBA that we find a way to keep Kobe involved. So, we’ll what the fans and the coaches decide, and then, we’ll go from there.”
For clarification, the fans vote for the ASG starters, and the NBA’s head coaches (or, more often than not, the assistants they’ll delegate the task to) choose the other reserves.
“Deserve,” as Helin pointed out, is the wrong word. It isn’t just that Kobe Bryant has been a bad player this season, playing out the string in his final campaign. No player in modern NBA history (that is to say, since we landed on the moon) has coupled playing as poorly as Kobe with the amount of minutes, shots, and overall impact (with the Lakers’ two best prospects sitting on the bench and barely playing over half the game in deference to Bryant) that Kobe has.
This isn’t hyperbole. Think of the worst active NBA player you know, plug him into Bryant’s starting shooting guard slot, and the Lakers would be better off. We have never seen anything like it – 30 percent from the field, yet he still takes a Michael Jordan (or Kobe)-sized amount of shots per minute.
Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rank as the NBA’s last two great legacy hires for the All-Star Game. Kareem didn’t deserve to make it in his final year at age 41 back in 1989, but coaches added him anyway in his farewell season after Magic Johnson bowed out of the game due to injury.
MJ, at age 40 in 2003, was a different case. In what seems unfathomable now, he wasn’t even voted into the game as a starter by the fans in favor of Vince Carter and Allen Iverson. Not because Jordan deserved their spots, mind you, but mainly because his popularity seemed to make him a shoo-in. Unlike Bryant, however, Jordan (who averaged 20 points per game on 44 percent shooting) was having an All-Star-level year, Carter later ceded his starting spot to him, and the snubbed Ray Allen (whom Jordan signed to his Jordan Brand six years earlier) probably didn’t mind the unexpected few days off.
Adam Silver, because he’s good at these sorts of things, deftly eased into Kobe’s global impact as a way of deflecting attention away from fans likely voting in the Worst All-Star Ever this winter. He may have misspoke on the whole “deserves” characterization, but his overall sentiment ain’t wrong:
Kobe Bryant belongs in this year’s All-Star Game.
He hasn’t earned a starting or even reserve slot, and his declaration that he’s the 200th-best player in the NBA is literally too clever by half (if not more). We need one last Sunday night, however, to decorate the Black Mamba. In a Toronto town that, in a very Kobe-like move that I’m sure he kind of dug, refused to acknowledge that he once dropped 81 points on in a recent tribute video.
So, maybe Andrew Wiggins or Klay Thompson has to sit an All-Star Game out this year, in Kobe’s last. They probably would have had to anyway, as Bryant was always going to be voted in by both Laker Nation and the (fantastic) international community that obsesses over this league. It’s a basic cable event pitched on a Sunday in February. It’s just fine, and it might even give Kobe a chance to make more than two-thirds of his shots for once.
This isn’t like a spot on the Olympic team, something that could cost a more deserving player a once in a lifetime chance at a gold medal. That means something, this doesn’t.
Plus, it’s going to be fun to see Kobe break a play and wrest the ball from Stephen Curry’s hands, should it come down to one final shot. While we’re at it, let’s put him in the Three-Point Contest.
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