Kobe’s Hateful Eight
Kobe Bryant vs. Michael Jordan GOAT discourse online has reached apex monotony. You run into it more than a Tarantino “trunk shot”. Instead, I wanted to write about the many thorns that pricked Kobe Bryant’s side in his 20 year career, making him look like a somewhat mortal basketball lunatic. I took the aforementioned Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” as inspiration for categorizing the many beefs and mini-bosses that Kobe arduously battled against.
Honorable Mentions: LeBron James, Allen Iverson, Vince Carter
LeBron James is the biggest omission I can see readers taking issue with. My reasoning is simple: They never met in an NBA Finals. They sort of both existed congruently while throwing playful jabs at each other, never quite delivering the knockout blow. The transition from the old guard to the “new” guard came and went without much bloodshed on court, instead leaving decades worth of slop fan debate. There was a smidge of competitive spirit between the two, but it wasn’t Kobe foaming at the mouth and leaving claw-marks in Jordan’s skin determination that fueled LeBron and his legacy.. In an alternate timeline, they battle it out for multiple rings and LeBron would be on this list. Reality said otherwise.
Allen Iverson was tough to leave off. The connections between the two are graphene strong. AI represented Philadelphia as a 76ers legend, while Kobe made Philly proud as a native. They duked it out over scoring titles. Unlike LeBron, they met in the NBA finals (on a “Tyronn Lue Hateful Eight” list, Iverson is number one.)
And they were both instrumental in ushering in the 2000s with new era of aesthetic and attitude, the Stone Cold and The Rock of their time, shaping the next 25 years of what it meant to be a baller. Competitive? Absolutely. But the respect seemed mutual, and they left it on the floor more as competitors than any sort of actualized threat against each other.
Vince Carter. Vince was the shiny, new toy of the 1998 NBA Draft. He played the same position as Kobe, was hailed as an upcoming superstar in the East, and represented the antithesis of Kobe Bryant’s brash game and L.A. lifestyle—a low-key and smooth repertoire, quiet personality, thunderous, above-the-rim dunks…
On paper, this looks like the start of something exciting, but even Air Canada could not get this rivalry off off the ground.
(Matt Barnes, Kevin Garnett, Dirk Nowitzki, Karl Malone, and Metta Sandiford-Artest were a few other notable omissions.)
Here are Kobe’s “Hateful Eight”, and how he fared in battle against them.
Each of these players must relate to a character’s nickname in “The Hateful Eight” movie in some form or fashion, thus, Ruben Patterson has been donned “The Prisoner”. We needed a bit of a hapless figure in the Kobe Bryant story arc, and Ruben fits the bill perfectly. Kobe actually called him on the phone pleading him to stop his shenanigans in promoting himself as the “Kobe Stopper”, even going as far as saying he would help Ruben get a bag in free agency with some glowing feedback. I guess Ruben refused, and thus, Kobe swore that he’d basically have to kill Ruben every time he saw him on the court from there on out.
That being said, the anecdote of Ruben competing hard against Kobe in practice every day and learning his moves has to count as some sort of feather in his cap. Kobe taking note of your hard work might be one of the biggest NBA honors outside of winning a ring.
Patterson actually holds a higher win percentage against Kobe in their regular season meetings, but the playoffs are a whole different animal. Luckily for Ruben, he was only on one of those great late 90s-early 00s Trail Blazers teams that lost in the first round four times in six years against the Lakers, or else it would’ve looked a lot uglier on paper.
The Prisoner, after all, is a self-fulfilling title. Your own image and likeness is immediately erased the minute you take another man’s name as your nickname.
Verdict: Kobe.
Raja Bell is an interesting study in NBA role player-superstar beef and how to effectively glean a “winner” and a “loser” out of it. Their history is rather contemptuous—filled with bruises, buckets, clotheslines, and high stakes playoff drama. Watching clips of reporters ask Kobe about Raja Bell is always entertaining, where he could go from acknowledging him as a pesky competitor, to acting like he doesn’t exist and referring to him as “kid”.
These two have carbon copy records against each other. The counting stats are always going to lean Kobe in most of these matchups today, especially versus role players, but dive deeper into these numbers and you will notice Kobe Bryant shot 40% or less in almost half of those games against Raja Bell. The Bounty Hunter did his job—force Kobe into difficult shots and make him freeze out his teammates. I give this to Kobe with a question mark since he still has the jewelry to back up any smack talk against Western Conference foes, but it’s extremely wobbly ground to stand on.
In Raja Bell’s re-telling of this story, Kobe ultimately tried to recruit Raja Bell, which at the end of the day, is a hell of stamp of approval from the Mamba.
Verdict: Kobe (?)*. Question mark. Asterisk.
Tracy McGrady was somebody I almost left off of this list just from a cursory look of their stats against each other, but the more I read into it, there was much more than meets the statistical eye. T-Mac was an actualized Vince Carter—a scoring champ that had his own shoe deal, and an undeniable aura with a certain juj to his “cool” style. Their biggest beef actually seems to come from a 1-on-1 where both of them claimed to have gotten the best of the other. I sort of love how it’s a stupid, uber-competitive nothing-burger of a beef based on he said, he said.
This is one of those comparisons where the stats don’t do much justice for the overall battle. T-Mac started coming into his own a few years after Kobe Bryant found minutes and footing in the league, and his prime was shorter than Kobe’s, so this is pretty much complete domination from a “my team” versus “your team” perspective and statistical matchup. The Cow Puncher spent the Texas era of his career wrangling Shawn Bradley as cattle, which sounded more enjoyable than wrestling venomous snakes.
Verdict: Kobe.
Look, Ray Allen drew the short straw when it came to assigning nicknames here. The only loose tie I could even make would be the fact that he could re-brand as Jesús Shuttlesworth if he ever wanted to appeal to the Latin American crowd. Where do even I begin with Ray Allen and Kobe Bryant? This might be the most Szechuan spicy beef of them all, and most basketball fans don’t even know about it.
Secret Base made a great video highlighting the Allen-Bryant beef better than I can ever dive into, but the gist of it is: same draft, same dunk contest, same role for “He Got Game”, trash talk from Ray stating that after Shaq left, Kobe would become super selfish and need two and a half other stars on his team to ever accomplish anything. (The first part may have been prophetic from Ray, but the second part was undoubtedly hypocritical.)
In the end, Ray Allen actually treads water against Kobe when it comes to stats and playoff success. Ray Allen managed to take a ring away from Kobe in 2008, but Kobe got him back two years later in the 2010 NBA Finals. Still, considering some of the comments that Ray made about Kobe needing stars to have success, and the fact that Ray Allen would go on to play with Pierce, KG, Rondo, Wade, LeBron and Bosh, all to the tune of two rings, he might want to re-think some of his past quips.
Verdict: Kobe.
You knew Michael Jordan was coming. Only MJ could be The Sheriff. In a way, this comparison isn’t entirely fair. Jordan is THE prototype and inspiration for Kobe’s greatness. And this is where I record scratch on previous statements and actually agree with the tiresome GOAT debates being a better way to measure these two greats against each other, because their on-court matchups paint a mostly incomplete picture.
It’s pretty barren. Jordan actually ekes out points, but everything else is basically mirrored. And considering they’ve never quite played against each other during their respective peaks, it makes the discussions about who is better that much more impossible to ever come to a conclusion on. It’s a shame, because the ratings and hype would’ve rivaled Bird-Magic levels when these two went head-to-head.
Verdict: Tie. Incomplete.
Shaquille O’Neal is the by far the most apt figure to be The Little Man. We know what a behemoth Shaq is, which makes it such ridiculous nickname for him, but it’s mostly in reference to some downright awful hazing rituals in his day, and penchant for being a manchild when it came to holding grudges for no reason at all. (Ahem, Dwight Howard.)
Not to mention, his highly publicized beef with Kobe Bryant takes the cake as the most intense and far-reaching tussle on this list. There was real animosity between these two that eventually drove them to split, even after winning so much with each other. It’s not a surprise that two people who didn’t like each other could be great on-court teammates that compliment each other’s skills and cover for each other’s weaknesses, it’s that they won in spite of all of that, and the winning did nothing to add to any desire to continue doing that any longer.
Goddamn. You could hear flames sizzling through Kobe’s veins when it came to pouring it on against any Shaq-led team post dynasty. Shaq was on a couple of better teams immediately after the Miami trade, but besides the advantage in head-to-head wins, Kobe Bryant was trying to bury Shaq alive when it came to pure statistical output.
Verdict: Kobe.
Paul Pierce is The Confederate. It’s another title with a bit of a stretch, but it works somehow in my head. The Lakers and the Celtics make sure the NBA world turns into a Civil War whenever they bang heads, and can be split into the Union and the Confederacy of sports rivalries. And while neither team would ever be classified as the Confederacy geographically (especially Massachusetts!), Paul Pierce still represented the leader of a faction that the entirety of L.A. hated with a passion, the Boston Celtics.
I couldn’t find many stories or articles of animosity between the two players—but there wasn’t much personal friendship invested between the two of them either. Kobe and Pierce actually seemed to honor the code of not fraternizing with the enemy. Even so, Kobe spoke about how he would watch Paul Pierce as competitive motivation, and even steal some of his moves to make his arsenal that much more lethal.
Reading the results of their head-to-head battles surprised me quite a bit. I thought that it was going to be a bit more lopsided than what popped off of the screen. Their regular season and playoff battles are basically even when you add them up, and even their stats across the board aren’t too different either. Kobe Bryant does average more points, but the role he functioned in for the Lakers offense was very different to what Paul Pierce had to do for the Celtics. Too close for me to call.
Verdict: Tie.
The San Antonio Spurs as an entity are The Hangmen. They were the ultimate thorn in the side of Kobe Bryant during his entire career, and we don’t know how many rings he would’ve ended up with if not for the existence of Gregg Popovich, Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, etc. My favorite chapter of the saga that is Kobe Bryant’s career is how he would approach every new season trying to solve the Rubik’s Cube that was San Antonio, and how it drove him to perfect his game to crystalline levels.
I used Tim Duncan as the representative on the Spurs, since him and Kobe played against each other the most. I didn’t realize how much of a gap there was in the playoffs for Kobe and the Lakers, but I also figured that the regular season would go pretty handily to the Spurs.
Once again, the stats represent the function of who they were as players, and they lived up to their roles in this chess match. As much as I could edge this either way, and I know some people would say the Spurs got the best of Kobe because they also grinded their way towards 5 rings in Kobe’s prime, but the fact that Kobe’s Lakers got past them in two different eras of Spursdom is no small feat. To be the immovable object that the San Antonio Spurs franchise have cemented themselves as, there had to be an unstoppable force in the first place.
Verdict: Tie.
