From the moment LeBron James signed with the Los Angeles Lakers, the constant debate between himself and Kobe Bryant grew to another level.
The fans of both future Hall of Famers are some of the most passionate and despite Bryant pleading with his fans to accept James, the new Laker took a ton of criticism during the 2018-19 NBA season.
The debate on the NBA’s greatest player between James, Bryant, and Michael Jordan continues to be one of the biggest arguments among fans and each group has their reasons as to why they think their player is the best. It is because of those differences that James believes the comparisons are unfair.
James recently spoke with Jim Hill about the comparisons, saying each of them took different roads in their careers, via CBS Los Angeles:
“I think that’s unfair. That’s gonna be the only thing that’s gonna be unfair in this conversation that we have today because I think at the end of the day, we are all different. Michael fans, Michael Jordan himself, Kobe fans, Kobe himself, LeBron fans and LeBron himself… we’re all different. And the simple fact that we all take different challenges, we’ve all had challenges, we all had different courses, but the one thing that’s the same is that we would do anything to play this game of basketball every single day. We would do anything to win and we’ll do anything to put our life on the line to win basketball games.”
James would continue with his thoughts and how it relates to basketball fans:
“We’re just champions, we were born champions, we work hard, and we wanna be the greatest that we can be, but I think we’ve all had our own paths. Mike had his path, Mike was the greatest. Kobe had his path, Kobe was the greatest. I have my own path, hopefully, someday someone will say I’m the greatest. And at the end of the day, I hope we all make our fans proud and make each other’s fans proud as well no matter if you love us, hate us, or whatever the case may be.”
James isn’t wrong in that each player had their own paths to greatness and their fans are proud of them regardless. However, these debates are one of the many things that makes the NBA great. Fans go back and forth constantly over any number of things.
The league’s greatest player is always bound to bring out the most passion and James joining the franchise that Bryant is synonymous with only makes the arguments that much more crazy and passionate.