Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to a superstar player in professional sports is having them be the standard by which we judge all other stars that follow. This standard of stardom is measured by this player's folklore, legacy, accomplishments, and more. Players want to be champions. They want to be MVPs. They want to be the legacy that we revere as we pore over the record books of their league’s history. The competitive hunger never quite gets satiated.
The truly great ones want to be considered the standard for which every other star that comes along is juxtaposed against. But it’s not just what the player did and how they did it; we care about when they did it just as much as the accomplishments they had. It’s why Michael Jordan’s legacy is considered greater than that of someone like Bill Russell's or even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. There is a value in recency and performing in an era that is relatable to the current form along with the future of the sport.
Almost instantly in his career, Jordan was recognized as one of the most incredible aesthetics we'd ever seen on the court. His individual talent was at a level we didn't quite understand. We'd seen scorers in this league. George Gervin used to dazzle fans. Julius Erving and Larry Bird were legendary stars. We even had a high-flying, scoring highlight reel in Dominique Wilkins at the same time, but Jordan's talents were just different.
That was why he was so captivating. He seemed capable of whatever you needed from him on the court, fueled by an unquenchable competitive mentality that either drove you to greatness alongside him or weeded you out of an enduringly tight inner circle. His icon status was backed up by individual and team success, a perennial ceremony of validation for him in the NBA playoffs.
Being an icon begets a target on your back, not just for the players that want to challenge you and take you down as they prove their standing amongst the elite, but also in the comparison to historical figures, both past and future. Jordan was the first true NBA icon. He wasn't the first star and he wasn't the first universally beloved figure. That's always happened throughout sports culture on a relative scale, but never had it gone global and transcended sports until Michael came around.
That's where the next generations of players started using Jordan as a goal. That's when he created the true standard for greatness -- an impossible set of goals both physically and mentally that were going to have to battle myth, confirmation bias, and a selective memory of how things unfolded. Not every great young player was ever going to challenge this standard. In fact, the standard itself requires a brazen level of confidence that welcomes the pressure and audacity it takes to believe you could ever measure up to it.
That's why the career of Kobe Bryant is so impressive. Right or wrong, sane or completely removed from reality, Bryant believed he belonged stalking that standard. One day he was going to unseat that standard. With such an iconic style of play and that aesthetic nobody had ever dreamed up on a basketball court, Jordan made us want to imitate him. His reality drove imagination and daydreaming on blacktops, hardwood floors, and in driveways that we were not only recreating his moments but manufacturing our own future accomplishments.
Kobe dreamt up those same images, only his goal wasn't to dream them; he was going to live them. He was going to best them. He was going to slay the king and assume the crown and all of the riches that came with the throne.
Somewhere along the way, Bryant fell short. We're not sure how far away he ever was from becoming the standard. It wasn't about the number of titles or the number of points. How much hardware he took home became irrelevant in the conversation at one point because he hadn't lived up to that impossible standard.
There are some people -- detractors of someone with such haughty goals as copying, evolving, and trying to defeat the greatness always being held over one's head -- that view Kobe's inability to become the new standard, to unseat Jordan as the perceived greatest of all time as a failure on Kobe's part. I'm not sure he was ever going to be allowed to succeed because we didn't want him to succeed. We didn't want Jordan unseated, meaning Kobe's historically overwhelming career was never going to be good enough.
This was the case because 1) Jordan was better and more iconic than Kobe in most ways imaginable and 2) the subjective nature of such a discussion doesn't leave us with answers anyway. Jordan currently has, and will likely finish with more championships than Kobe when Bryant finally retires. But Bryant will have more points than his predecessor, which matters more than we maybe want to let on. It doesn't allow Kobe to become the new standard for basketball greatness, but it does definitively put Bryant above Jordan in an official capacity.
He'll have more points than his idol, which is something we'll never be able to take away from him. Does this mean anything? Yes and no. Kobe's longevity of both physical and mental prominence in the game of basketball does matter. He outlasted Jordan, and while Jordan did more in fewer games, Kobe was able to endure the game longer, something Jordan either couldn't do or chose not to do. It's a win for Kobe, even if that win wasn't the ultimate goal.
In the end, that will be enough for his fans. It will be something to be proud of and it will be something to celebrate. If Kobe is able to endure even longer and attack the top two slots on the all-time scoring list, it will be something no other player is able to say they've done, until the next person comes along and attacks those accomplishments in their own way. And maybe that's the ultimate win for Kobe.
He could never be Jordan and he could never top Jordan. But if he creates the standard below what we've held so high for so long, then he wins the battle of recency and sets the standard that LeBron James, Kevin Durant, and the stars of the future will have to surpass before they're allowed to approach challenging what Jordan meant to the game of basketball.
Kobe Bryant doesn't become greatest of all time but he becomes the gatekeeper to that standard. Could we have asked anything more of him in this quest and isn't that the best standard we would have ever allowed him to set for the game of basketball?
