Los Angeles Lakers: Kobe Bryant’s Genius Is His Resilience

By chriscruz on October 7, 2014

Watching some Los Angeles Lakers game highlights, I couldn’t help but think about Kobe Bryant’s place in history. He has been playing for 18 seasons already, and there is no telling how long he will continue to play with his team. Two seasons ago, at the end of the season, he suffered an injury that kept him out of play until the end of the summer. He then suffered another devastating injury at the beginning of the sixth game of the 2013-14 season that kept him on the bench for the rest of the season.

Needless to say, it looks like the reign of the “Black Mamba” is coming to a swift end.

So where is his place in history? Is he in the top 25? Is he in the top 15? Top 10? Top 5? It is hard to say, because this is so much a matter of opinion. However, I think that there are a few statistics that I might be able to throw out that will give Kobe precedence over other players.

I say that Bryant is No. 7 in NBA history. He has five championships, and while we can talk about how Shaquille O’Neal really led those championship runs, you still cannot take away Bryant’s contributions to those teams. He has 31,700 career points, which puts him at fourth on that list, with the possibility of surpassing Michael Jordan by the end of the season. He is a 12-time All-Defensive team player and a 15-time All-NBA team player. He has made the All-Star team 16 times and has won an MVP, with two Finals MVP awards.

But the biggest attribute of Bryant’s game that I find fascinating is his ability to rebound from injury. My wife consistently notes how resilient babies are, noting how they are able to fall, hit their head or bang their arms against a bedpost and still able to keep going. Sometimes they do this without even crying. Bryant is a lot like that. He has been able to bounce back from injury after injury, no matter what age.

In this decade alone, he has had a swollen knee (2009-10), avulsion fracture in his index finger (2009-10), a sprained ankle (2009-10), Tenosynovitis in his shin (2011-12), a sever ankle sprain (2012-13), a torn Achilles tendon (2012-13), Achilles surgery (2013-14) and a fractured knee (2013-14). And we are in just the first half of the decade. This small sample has not taken into account the other injuries that Bryant has had. His body has taken a pounding that, quite frankly, I don’t think that I have ever seen. Yet he continues to return with greater force.

In the 2012-13 season, he played 78 games and was scoring 27.3 points per game at the ripe old age of 34. He is 36 now, and there is no telling what he could do from this point on. But if his career ended right now, I still believe he is the seventh best player in NBA history. I will tell my grand kids that there was nobody who could deter The Black Mamba.