When it comes to the comparison between Kobe and Jordan, most people think that Jordan is the first shooting guard in the NBA, Kobe is the second shooting guard in the NBA, and Jordan is in front of Kobe, which is not controversial.
When it comes to the comparison between James and Jordan, most people think that Jordan is ahead of James; But some people think that James should be ahead of Jordan.
The reason why there is such a big difference is not because James is better than Kobe, but because of the track problem.
Kobe’s choice is to catch up with Jordan head-on. His route is similar to Jordan’s, and even his playing style and style are close to Jordan’s. In this case, Jordan has six champions and six FMVPs, and Kobe has five champions and two FMVPs, so everyone thinks that Jordan won and Kobe lost.
James’ choice was to find another way. The route he took was different from Jordan’s, and even this road was not traveled by many people. In the end, James achieved some "first" achievements on his own road, but many NBA stars including Jordan didn’t, so James did what they didn’t do, so comparing from different angles, naturally James could be ahead of Jordan.
The most typical example is that James is the first player in NBA history to get FMVP from three different teams, but Jordan, Duncan, Russell, Bird, Jabbar and other stars can’t even get together with three teams. From this perspective, James is indeed the first person in history.
This is also the reason why in the first-person vote in history, Kobe got less votes and James got more votes.
Take the World Cup group match as an example. In the 2022 World Cup group match, the first in Group E is Japan, the second is Spain, the first in Group F is Morocco, and the second is Croatia.
Jordan is Morocco and Kobe is Croatia. They are very comparable. In contrast, Jordan is in the lead, so there is no suspense in the ranking. Jordan is the first and Kobe is the second.
James is Japan, and he is on his own way, and he is also the first. Durant and Harden are similar to James’ route. Obviously, they are all behind James.
When choosing the strongest team in the group stage, no one will choose Croatia because it has Morocco in front of it, but someone will choose Japan because it is also the first in the group. But can you say that Japan, which ranks first in Group E, must be better than Croatia, which ranks second in Group F?
Obviously not.
This is Kobe’s paranoia.
In fact, there was only one person in Kobe’s pursuit, that is Jordan. He just wanted to catch up with Jordan. As for the others, he didn’t care. For him, he either surpassed Jordan or didn’t surpass him. That’s all. In his cognition, there is no difference between the second place and the 100th place, so he can say that the second place is the biggest loser.
Of course, there was another one he wanted to surpass, and that was O ‘Neill …
James, on the other hand, is more rational and smarter.
Perhaps he wanted to catch up with Jordan’s path in the early days, but after realizing the difficulty, he chose another one. On this road, James was one of the pioneers, and finally he succeeded and became the leader of this road.
You can’t say that James’s other way is bad. After all, many imitators followed James’s old path, but their achievements were not as high as James’s, such as Durant.
And James is also trying to collect all kinds of "firsts" to increase his chips for the GOAT.
There are many criteria for the selection of the GOAT, among which James is the GOAT, but in fact, from a competitive point of view, Jordan is undoubtedly the GOAT, which is the fundamental reason why Jordan has a very high position in the NBA.