Deron Williams could he just wasn't as great as Chris Paul.
Kobe's 10 Greatest Playoff Games
- Thread starter Controversy
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GreatestLaker
#FirePelinka
I don't see it. I never feared Deron Williams. He put up decent stats but he was a lot like Antwon Jamison to me. He always scored 20 but they weren't an impactful 20.
2004 doesn't even register to me. Kobe wasn't Kobe that year. Physically he was a shell of himself.
Kobe typically faced grind it put defensive focused teams in the Finals during an era of slow paced offensive basketball. Go back and look up some of those final scores and team fg%.
If he got to get cake walks to the Finals each year like Bron did in the East then in the Finals played high octane offensive minded teams that wanna run and score then his finals stats would've been much higher. Kyrie has better Finals stats than Kobe, is he better? Or does who you play and when you play also matter?
Like I said in my previous post. The closest team Kobe faced in a critical series that was stylistically similar to the brand of basketball we saw in the mid to late 2010s when Bron started putting up monster stats in the Finals was the 2010 WCF versus the Phoenix Suns. They were the only offensive minded high pace team he played in a conference finals or finals and unsurprisingly its the series where he had arguably his best statistical performance. If you notice I never tout it as his best series because I understood the context those numbers came in. Its also why I don't consider his 2009 Finals better than his 2010 Finals. Who you play matters when evaluating a performance far more than the statistical end product. Kobe's 2010 Finals was more impressive than his 2009 Finals for that reason. Just as his 2009 WCF was more impressive than his 2010 WCF despite the less impressive stat lines.
No. The West was just stacked back then. Put them in the East and they are facing the Celtics in the WCF.
ISO
Pass me the rock nikka
Detroit and Orlando were better and they wouldn’t beat the Cavs either.
ISO
Pass me the rock nikka
An example of a team getting dikk rode in retrospect.It doesn't make sense how that Utah squad was a first round matchup. They had five All-Stars on their roster: Williams, Okur, Boozer, Kirilenko and Millsap. They had Korver too.
Lakers chopped them down three straight seasons.
They didn’t have 5 All-Stars.
Deron Williams and Boozer were fringe All-Stars. D-Will didn’t make his first All-Star until 2010. Kirilenko and Okur made one All-Star team their entire careers. Millsap and Korver weren’t regarded as they are today.
They were a treadmill 48-53 win team in that era and their defense ranked just outside the top 10 in their run. Never a true threat to win a championship.
The Lakers and Spurs would handle them easily and D-Will was never as good as CP3.
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Devil Plisken…CMS
Veteran
murksiderock
Superstar
I didn't mention anything about LeBron...
Teams can only play whose in front of them, I'm not into penalizing anybody for things they can't control; it's like another recent thread someone mentioned penalizing Oscar for playing in the 60s. It's not like he could change the era in which he played, all that matters to me is how you perform in your era. And I'm a big believer in contextualizing a guy's work instead of blanket, generic evaluations....
To that point, Kobe did play in an era where some of his WCF opponents would be better than his Finals opponents. That really only applies to the 3peat Lakers when Kobe wasn't even his team's best player at any point if that run (expectations and pressure are different for the lead guy and we all know it); and none of that really applies to '04 or the "Comeback Kobe" run though---->the '04 Pistons were better than the '04 Wolves, the '08 and '10 Celtics were better than the '10 Suns and '08 Spurs, and the '09 Magic were better than the '09 Nuggets...
So like with most cases, those years Kobe played his toughest opponents in the final round. And look, he won two of them, so this isn't a harsh criticism, but it is an observation that against his toughest opponents, with the exception of '09, he played better in earlier rounds than he did versus the best opponent in the final round. He's not the only great player this can be said about, and also making this observation isn't saying he didnt do enough to win, but when you start breaking down the great ones, this is something you can say about Kobe and it has to hold the same merit it has with anyone else...
The fact that there are multiple Finals we can say that Kobe mean something. It ain't the total picture but it's not irrelevant, given the fact we saw him eviscerate Orlando, and we've seen other greats destroy teams repeatedly at the final stage.
Kobe's shining attribute above all is there was no quit in him. Granted, the '10 Finals shifted when Perkins got hurt G6 and that series is probably over if Perkins doesn't get hurt, but Kobe woulda went down shooting regardless. So Perkins getting hurt isn't a knock, because a TON of Finals have swung on untimely injuries, but most people who watched it knew the Lakers were in some trouble, even going back home for the last two games. I can't call '10 greater than '09 because Kobe just didn't play better in '10 than he played in '09, and if he played better overall they may not have been in an elimination position after G5 to start with...
Controversy
Superstar
Deron Williams was an all star & Olympian...best PG in the game during that time. Kept running into Kobe & the Lakers.
Controversy
Superstar
we were blowing out the Celtics in g6 with bum ass Perk
they weren't beating us again in LA
U MUST BE FORGETTING, THE DEBATE FOR BEST PG IN THE LEAGUE THEM DAYS WAS BETWEEN DERON WILLIAMS AND CP3...........DONT LET DERON'S QUICK DECLINE FOOL U. HE WAS ABSOLUTELY ELITE IN UTAH.
ISO
Pass me the rock nikka
They wouldn’t have made the ECF in any of those yearsYET STILL, ITS THE TYPA TEAM THAT WOULDA BEEN IN THE ECF BACK IN THEM DAYS
And if they was in the East y’all wouldn’t even talk about them
They basically 2010 Hawks status
