Is there some beef brewing between Kobe Bryant and ESPN? It sure seems like things have gotten a bit personal in the past two days.
After ESPN announced that they had ranked Kobe as the 40th best player in the NBA this season, Bean shot back by saying he’s known for a while that ESPN was just a bunch of idiots. Naturally, ESPN didn’t take too kindly to the insult, and Royce Webb fired back at Bryant by saying the Ranking actually overrated him, and discrediting Bryant’s current state as an NBA player.
In fact, our problem was that we overrated Kobe tremendously, out of “respect.”
But “respect” is one of the most useless concepts in the NBA when it comes to player evaluation. If we had treated Kobe like any other player, we would’ve said he was no longer a top-25 player, or even close to that.
Let’s be blunt: Kobe Bean Bryant was one of the very worst players in the NBA last season — a $30 million disaster. He was closer to the 425th-best player than the 25th-best player.
But respect is earned, and the current version of Kobe is not much of an NBA player.
Yikes.
It seems like ESPN and Webb especially are salty that Kobe would question their rankings, and this has turned into a personal attack rather than a simple assessment of Bean’s skill-level. While Bryant has struggled with injuries the past season and a half, it’s laughable that ESPN would actually say that Kobe isn’t much of an NBA player right now, especially based off of a six-game sample size from last season.
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Bryant has to say about these latest comments from Webb.