If I were to compare a current player to Kobe it’d be Jamal Murray. Is he the best player on his team? No, but it’s hard to imagine the Nuggets winning the chip without him. At least for the threepeat run, that’s what Kobe was. After a lot of … drama lets say, he then went on to win an MVP, lead team USA to gold in '08, three more finals runs, and won 2 FMVPs.

Overall his career arc itself is classic Hero’s Journey, but between the feud with Shaq, the court case, and his general reputation around the league as a hard ass, the pop culture idea of Kobe kinda took on a life of it’s own.

As far a pure basketball goes, Phil Jackson goes into depth about it in his book 11 Rings, but tl;dr he didn’t have the size, strength, vertical leap, or especially hand size of Jordan. Those are all pretty important. But what Kobe did have was a work ethic and ability to develop new skills that inspired millions of people around the world. He could score from anywhere on the court, defend the opponents best perimeter players, and fit perfectly with Phil Jackson’s triangle offense (when he bought in).

It’s also worth noting that in the early half of Kobe’s career, the ruleset favored defense a lot more than it does now. Both hand-checking and zone defense were legal during a decent chunk of Kobe’s playing time, so defenses were more complex than they were in the past and more physical than they are now. There were also way fewer good shooters back then so spacing was atrocious. There were other great offensive players at the time that deserve credit as well, but Kobe’s scoring feats during this period are often graded on a curve because of how hard it was to score. Whether or not that’s fair is up to you.