Fortune favours the brave Mamba

Count the rings, first.

Only one lesser than Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. As many as Magic Johnson. One more than Shaq and Tim Duncan. Two more than Larry Bird. Three more than Hakeem Olajuwon, Wilt Chamberlain, and Dwyane Wade. Four more than LeBron James.

Five rings, seven Finals appearances, and countless legendary playoff battles later, Kobe Bryant ranks as one of the greatest players of our generation, and perhaps one of the 10 greatest to ever play the game. His biggest fans will even call him the greatest ever.

Some call him the luckiest ever.

The story of one superstar NBA player – Dwight Howard – finally stablised after months and years of deliberation, when the Lakers pulled off what NBA analyst Charley Rosen called ‘the trade of the century’. Howard ended up with the Lakers, who had to give up Andrew Bynum to the 76ers in a massive four-team transaction.

But it is the story of another, bigger superstar, already in LA, that turned its pages to a new, exciting chapter. No stranger to the NBA’s biggest games, Kobe Bryant’s Lakers failed to make it past the second round of the playoffs for two consecutive years. The second round itself may be a rarity for most NBA players, but for Kobe, it was nothing but a disappointment. And then, his team essentially gifted him the league’s best Center in exchange for its second best. This was just a month after he was gifted former two-time MVP Steve Nash to man the point for him. This was on the day that he didn’t lose the league’s best-passing big man and the current best big man in the Olympics – Pau Gasol – from his team. This was the day when having an unpredictable, crazy, yet sometimes useful Metta World Peace as the fifth-best option in your team didn’t hurt. This was when his team had a bench featuring Antawn Jamison and now, Jodie Meeks.

Kobe Bryant is on the NBA’s best team – on paper – once again. No star of our era has consistently played along with the type of talent that Kobe has become accustomed to in Los Angeles. And to think, he wasn’t even supposed to be in Los Angeles.

Picked 13th by the Charlotte Hornets as a teenager, the Lakers took a chance with Kobe when they traded for him in return for Vlade Divac. He went from potentially playing alongside Glen Rice, Anthony Mason, and Dell Curry in Charlotte to playing with Shaquille O’Neal, Nick Van Exel, and Eddie Jones in LA. Van Exel and Jones left but other talent came in. When he was just 21, in a team led by Shaq and the NBA’s best ever coach – Phil Jackson – Kobe won his first NBA championship as the Lakers’ second-best player. He improved the next two years, and the Lakers won two more championships. Shaq as Batman, Kobe as Robin.

But with the two stars publicly feuding against each other, the Lakers struggled to find the team chemistry to win in 2003. So they revamped and brought in Karl Malone and Gary Payton to join Shaq and Kobe. Another Finals appearance for Kobe, but this time, he had to settle for the runners-up prize.

And then Shaq left, and Kobe became the best player in an awful team. For three years, the Lakers, which only Lamar Odom to support Kobe, the team struggled to make much noise in the playoffs. And so the, amidst drama in the team and trade rumours for everyone from Kobe to a young and unproven Andrew Bynum, the Lakers made a big move, trading for Pau Gasol from the Grizzlies for short change. Over the next three years, they went to the Finals three times and came back victorious twice, once again led by a returning Phil Jacksoin. This time, it was Kobe’s team all right, and Gasol, Odom, and sometimes Bynum were his more-than-able sidekicks.

And now, two years away from championships later, Kobe has been gifted a super team again. A starting lineup of Steve Nash, Kobe, World Peace, Gasol, and Dwight Howard will strike fear in the hearts of every other opponent in the NBA, including the Heat and the Thunder.

The NBA has had many great players, but only the ones in great teams are able to climb the top of the pedestal at the end of the season. LeBron spent too many barren years with a mediocre Cleveland squad before joining Wade and Bosh in Miami for two Finals appearances and his first championship. Durant has been part of a team that has been patiently built with players they have drafted, and every year, he has been getting closer to the title dream. Kevin Garnett spent over a decade in an awful Timberwolves squad without much success – except for the Cassell/Sprewell year in 2004 – before joining Paul Pierce and Ray Allen (and Rondo) past his prime to win a championship and become a perennial title threat. Allen Iverson never won a championship because he was rarely part of a championship-level squad.

So why Kobe? Why does he get all the luck? Why was he already a multiple champion before he got to Durant’s current age? Why has he spent more time in good teams than LeBron James, when LeBron is such a great player himself? Is he that much better than Kevin Garnett or Allen Iverson?

Well, the first answer is that Kobe plays for the smartest franchise in the history of the NBA. You could call the Lakers lucky, but a team can only get lucky a few times; the Lakers are ‘lucky’ so often that the truth is: it’s not luck, it is incredible management.

“History speaks for itself, certain franchises seem to make all the right decisions,” Kobe said to reporters soon after the Dwight trade was announced.

History does speak for itself. Somehow, the Lakers are always able to nag some of the NBA’s best players of the time: From George Mikan, to Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, and Wilt Chamberlain, to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, and James Worthy, and on to Shaq and Kobe, and then to Kobe and Gasol, and now to Howard, Kobe, Nash, and Gasol. Cynics could say that Los Angeles is just a great city to live in which takes its basketball seriously and can help the ‘brand’ of players, and that’s why all the players want to go there. But are New York, Miami, or Philadephia – as cities – that far behind? Or how about the Lakers own LA neighbours, the Clippers? Why is it that these teams rarely have the ‘luck’ that the Lakers do?

The hard truth is that the Lakers have always made the brave decisions and many of these decisions result in championships. Their current general manager Mitch Kupchak continues that tradition by continuing to bring championship talent around their current centrepiece: Kobe.

So is Kobe just lucky to be a Laker? Not so fast: a player is only as lucky as what he makes of his good fortune. I think he keeps getting lucky because he rarely wastes his opportunities. When he has a good team, he usually makes the most of it, even surviving the chemistry issues and off-court drama.

Other stars of this generation – Carmelo Anthony, Dirk Nowitzki, Tracy McGrady in Houston, Allen Iverson in Denver, or Steve Nash in the Suns – have been in great teams in or near their prime. But none of them won anything except for Dirk’s 2011 ring (who was in great teams for a decade before his championship).

Meanwhile, Kobe got five, and no matter how much of a ‘bad teammate’ that he might be accused of being, other talents wish to play with him because he gives them a shot to win the title. He’s not just one of the NBA’s luckiest players, he’s also the hungriest.

The Lakers are a mix of the league’s most excellent management and it’s most determined winner. It’s a dangerous combination for everyone else in the league.

“I’ll play for 2-3 more years, and then the league is his,” Kobe said, welcoming Dwight to Los Angeles.

Now, at 33, Kobe is perhaps not the top-three player that he once was, but he has Howard in the Center to bring him back in the championship mix. With Howard, he is likely to have the type of role in the team that Paul Pierce had for the Celtics’ championship team in 2008. If we imagine that the Lakers are able to win the next two championships, Kobe will surely cement his legacy as perhaps the greatest Laker of all time. He would’ve delivered one of the NBA’s most storied franchises seven rings as one of the team’s cores.

For the record, I don’t think that the Lakers – even stacked with all their talent – are going to win a championship this season. They might reach the Finals but in a championship clash against the Heat, I’m picking Miami. LA have too many personalities and no Zen Master to handle them. There is bound to be an implosion.

But even if he does win this year, and the next (and the next?), and has more championships than Jordan and Magic and of course Shaq and Duncan, he doesn’t necessarily become that better than them. He doesn’t become the best player ever, because if rings alone counted, no one is touching Bill Russell’s 11 anytime in the near future, and Robert Horry would be better than Michael Jordan.

And then there are those who will surely doubt and underplay Kobe’s success, claiming that he has only won because his teams have helped him win.

The truth is somewhere in the middle. Kobe is at the same time one of the most talented players of our generation and one of the luckiest. He is a legend and yet an overachiever.

Fortune hovers over most players from time to time, but it sticks permanently above only a few. Why did Fortune choose Kobe to stick with over a meaty course of his 16 year career?

Perhaps the answer is this: it isn’t Fortune that chose Kobe, it is Kobe who chose Fortune.