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Kobe Bryant is easily one of the top 5 most polarizing NBA players of all time. There are people who will die on the hill that he's at least the 3rd greatest player of all time, but there are also a sizeable number of people in the faction that he is only a borderline top 20 player who is overrated because of his volume scoring
Among the numerous slights leveled at Kobe Bryant's NBA career, two of the most common are that:
(a) He was never the best player in the league for the entire duration of a season plus the playoffs;
(b) He didn't deserve to win the 2007-08 MVP award but got it because voters wished to give him a 'lifetime achievement' award for once
I'm going to give the idea of refuting notion (a) a hard pass, for nearly everyone saying this is either too young to have seen Kobe in action during his prime years (2000-2009). But notion (b) is both untrue and slanderous to one of the greatest individual seasons of this century, and yet there's a sizeable NBA following which believes in that line of reasoning.
Thus, I'm going to debunk this notion based on the following 5 arguments:
#1 The Lakers were gunning for top seed even before the Pau trade
Before the start of the 2007-08 season, the Los Angeles Lakers' biggest acquisition during the offseason was landing Derek Fisher: their former draft pick and starting point guard during their 3-peat. Other than that, they did not get any talent, instead re-signing Chris Mihm and Luke Walton - rotation players at best.
In the preseason GM survey, the Spurs, Suns and Mavs were heavily favored to win the Western Conference, while the Rockets were picked by one of the participants over the Lakers, who had no talent to pair Kobe with.
And yet, the Lakers had a 35-20 record without Pau Gasol on their roster, and were well and truly hanging with the aforementioned quartet of teams. Kobe had essentially used the addition of a non-bench point guard and a 3rd-year improvement from Bynum to vault the Lakers from first-round fodder into legit contention.
Bynum's knee injury forced the Lakers to find a replacement, which is how the trade for Pau happened. With a fit Bynum, there's a pretty even chance that the Lakers would still have made it to the Finals without Pau.
#2 It was arguably Kobe's best all-round season
There is a lot of revisionist history, and pre-injury, pre-trade Chris Paul being the darling of the league alongside LeBron has changed much of the narrative surrounding Kobe's 2007-08 season. Advanced stat gizmos who barely watched a minute of action from those Laker games have tried to poke holes into what has become one of the most criticized MVP campaigns in recent times.
Those who did watch the action through the year were, however, left in no doubt about Kobe's value to the Lakers being above and beyond every player's in the league. Truth be told, if we go strictly by the meaning of the words 'Most Valuable Player', then Kobe was hands down the MVP of the league from 2004 to 2010 - but sportswriters love to look out for narratives and reward players who provided new things to talk about.
Even so, Kobe's 82 first place votes are about 3 times as many as Chris Paul's 28, and over 5 times Kevin Garnett's 15. Revisionist history can't change the fact that Kobe was better defensively than he'd been at that end for a while.
It can't change the fact that Kobe kept coming up with scoring avalanches to lead the Lakers past tough opposition. It can't change the fact that he was the single most clutch player that season, or that he was shouldering a greater burden than every other player in the league and he came through magnificently.
#3 The other candidates had better supporting casts overall
A quick glance at the Hornets' roster for the 2007-08 season tells you that Chris Paul had an excellent supporting cast that complemented his skillset pretty well and accentuated his skillset to all-time high levels of play. The Hornets' starting five of Paul, Morris Peterson, Peja Stojakovic, David West and Tyson Chandler was able to hang with most matchups in the league by itself - 4 All-Star caliber players and a specialist on the same roster.
Garnett, who finished 3rd in voting, had Ray Allen, Paul Pierce and Rajon Rondo on his team, other than some notable role players like Kendrick Perkins, Eddie House and Sam Cassell.
LeBron James was the only other MVP contender who had a sub-par supporting cast - but when you compare and contrast his teammates and their role through the regular season, it is difficult to arrive at the conclusion whether he was worse off than Kobe. Even if we give him the benefit of having a worse supporting cast, however, his team underperformed as a whole despite him winning the scoring title, regressing to a 45-37 record from 50-32 in 2006-07.
#4 He was the best player on the planet
A look through the NBA GMs' preseason survey revealed that Kobe was, by almost unanimous opinion, the best shooting guard in the league. The margin was wide enough between him and James that a few GMs voted for the likes of Pierce and Melo as the best small forward, even though they were wrong. What this goes to show is that people around the league knew and acknowledged the Mamba's status as the league's best player.
He bore this out during the season as well. Continuing on the same kind of scoring barrages as he had unleashed from the 2004-05 season upon opposing defenses as the focal point of the Lakers' offense, Kobe was a do-it-all guard who would regularly put the clamps on the opposition's best perimeter players when asked to defend them.
On a talent level, he has never been as blessed as MJ, but his will to win and unreal clutch gene elevated the Lakers to a level beyond they looked capable of. He'd been denied a couple of MVP trophies by Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash because of narratives, but the narrative was squarely on his side this season as well.
#5 His postseason campaign reinforced the award's legitimacy
The moment tip-off took place during the 2008 playoffs, there were few doubts about which two teams would make the Finals from each Conference. This is despite the fact that the Western Conference playoff qualification for that season was by a sizeable margin the toughest of all time.
To put in perspective how tough it was, the 2017-18 OKC Thunder with Paul George, Russell Westbrook and 48 wins would have finished 9th in the 2007-08 season because the #8 seeded Denver Nuggets in 2007-08 had 50 wins with Melo, AI, Marcus Camby and Kenyon Martin. That's how deep the Western Conference has been for the entirety of Kobe's prime and the reason why he only has 7 Finals appearances.
Kobe and Pau took down the Nuggets, the Jazz and the Spurs in adroit fashion as Kobe averaged 30 points, 5 rebounds and 5 assists through the playoff run. His utter dominance of Tim Duncan's Spurs team, who were the defending champions at the time, just goes to show what the Mamba could do in the playoffs with a little smattering of talent on his team.
