Everyone tried to be like Mike; only Bryant came close to pulling it off

Kobe’s curse: Forever stuck in Jordan’s shadow

This is the curse of being Kobe Bryant: Win or lose another championship, he will never escape Michael Jordan’s shadow. Neither will anyone else.

It’s worth remembering that when these playoffs began, some very smart people wondered out loud whether Bryant could climb out of Kevin Durant’s.

The 31-year-old Bryant was coming off a string of nagging injuries and poor shooting performances at the end of the regular season. The 21-year-old Durant was the youngest scoring champion in league history and the game’s fastest-rising star. Bryant quickly quieted that talk by putting Durant and the Thunder in his rearview mirror, then the Jazz and Suns. By the time the finals rolled around, he was once again being compared to opponents he can’t ever beat.

We’re not talking about the Celtics, but the notion that Bryant’s body of work is somehow still incomplete, that he must keep winning titles to secure his spot among the handful of greatest players ever. Please. It’s way past time to give the man his due.

Bryant won his first three NBA championships as Shaquille O’Neal’s sidekick, or at least that’s the way the story was framed. A fourth title last year with a supporting cast that included exactly one reliable sidekick, Pau Gasol, should have removed any doubts.

But Bryant could win a fifth title and still not be considered the greatest Laker ever as Magic Johnson finished his stay in LA with the same number. Bryant could win a sixth title, as many as Jordan won, and still suffer in comparison. Bryant will walk away from the game in a few years with numbers that make his argument persuasively, but he’ll never gain the top spot.

Jordan put that out of reach by taking his Bulls to their first NBA championship in 1991 and never losing another playoff series. Of course, that assumes you don’t count the beating Shaq and the Orlando Magic doled out in 1995 Eastern Conference semis, when Jordan was still getting his legs back after spending most of the season trying to play baseball.

Either way, it left the perception that when push came to shove, Jordan was unbeatable. What Bryant’s detractors have missed over the last decade is that he’s become the next best thing; namely, the guy you have to beat.

The list of players who have done just that includes a few of the big names of Bryant’s generation — Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett, Manu Ginobili, Chauncey Billups and plenty of lesser ones. Bryant has won the lion’s share of those collisions and piled up just about every other significant accomplishment along the way — MVP awards in the finals, regular season and All-Star Game; scoring titles and a string of all-NBA and all-defensive team selections.

He just didn’t win them all.

To some people, falling just short of that impossible standard seems like a fitting punishment. Bryant came into the NBA as a prodigy, polite and saying all the right things. But he so wanted to be like Mike that eventually the selfishness that is in the DNA of every great player began defining his behavior away from the court even more.

He undermined coach Phil Jackson the first time they were together and nudged Shaq into exile with an eye on taking over a team so lacking in options that he could call his own number every trip up the floor. And then, when Bryant figured out he could wind up wasting his absolute prime on a team so bad that even his best wasn’t good enough to put it over the top, he threatened to walk out of Los Angeles, too.

All of those things made Bryant tough to root for, and an accusation of rape a few years ago made him more guarded than ever. But he’s come back stronger than ever season after season, leaving a succession of would-be next Jordans in his wake.

He’ll never be as lovable as Magic, though he likely will be every bit as accomplished when he steps away. He won’t be as feared as Jordan was either, but he’s the closest thing most of us will ever see to either. As legacies go, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org