One of the things that made Michael Jordan so great is he had a burning desire to be great. It was almost like an obsession. His competitive nature was legendary and something that not many could live up to.

Kobe Bryant shares this type of obsession, he wants Dwight Howard to have it as well, but Dwight isn’t wired that way. He’s wired in a more clownish way.

With that being said, Kobe had some words for his ailing teammate.

“Dwight worries too much about what people think,” Bryant told MacMullan. “I told him, ‘You can’t worry about that. It’s holding you back.’ He says, ‘OK, OK, OK,’ but it’s always hovering around him.

“He just wants people to like him. He doesn’t want to let anyone down, and that gets him away from what he should be doing.”

“(Howard) has never been in a position where someone is driving him as hard as I am, as hard as this organization is,” Bryant told MacMullan. “It’s win a championship or everything is a complete failure. That’s just how (the Lakers) do it. And that’s foreign to him.

“We don’t have time for (Howard’s shoulder) to heal,” Bryant said Wednesday in an exclusive interview with ESPNBoston.com’s Jackie MacMullan. “We need some urgency.”

All of that is true and Dwight would be wise to listen to Kobe.  Unless someone tells him his career is in jeopardy by playing, he needs to be out on the court helping his teammates.