One of the great debates in sports is this: who is the greatest basketball player of all time? To me, this is a three, maybe four-horse race. 

Michael Jordan and LeBron James are the two greatest players of the last 30 years, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scored more points than anyone in league history and was effective into his forties, and Bill Russell was the best player for a team that won 11 NBA championships. 

Yet, for some reason, one player keeps ending up in this discussion where he does not belong. That player is Kobe Bryant. 

Kobe has stoked the flames of this debate through Twitter, and his devoted online fan base is swift to put his name forward in any LeBron-Michael Jordan debate. However, Kobe doesn’t belong in this debate. He doesn’t really belong in a debate that involves other great players, like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird or Tim Duncan. 

Indeed, one of the most loathed and criticized players in today’s game has quite a strong case to land above Kobe on any list of the greatest players of all-time: Kevin Durant.

First, let’s start out with the areas in which Kobe has an undeniable advantage over Durant. Kobe did indeed win five NBA titles, more than Durant’s current two. Durant also joined one of the greatest teams of all-time in order to obtain those two rings, it’s true. 

Furthermore, there is an undeniable mystique around Bryant and his Mamba mentality, or his killer instinct, which Durant does not appear to possess. 

However, there are a couple of points here that ought not be overlooked. Bryant only really has two titles with teams where he was the best player on that team (his first three were with a fairly dominant Shaquille O’Neal.)

Durant’s titles have both come with him being the best individual player on his team. Furthermore, while Kobe will never win another title, Durant is likely to win at least one more over the course of his career. His Warriors are once again early favorites for the 2018-19 title, and whether he stays with Golden State or leaves to join forces with another superstar in 2019, he likely has three to five years of his prime left. 

LeBron James, if he is in fact a human being and not a god of some sort, is due for some level of decline in the next couple of seasons. 

All of this means these next four to six seasons are a decent window for Durant to win another NBA championship or two.

However, talk about championships is fairly simplistic. Anybody can count rings and make their evaluation of a player based on that factor alone, but it is far from an accurate measure. 

Steve Nash and Chris Paul have never won an NBA title or even appeared in an NBA Finals, but both of them will be remembered as superior to players like Kevin Love or probably even Klay Thompson. 

Statistics play a role as well, and most of them land in favor of Durant. I used Basketball Reference to compare the career numbers of Kevin Durant thus far in his career to those of Bryant’s. In order to give Kobe a leg up, and remove an obvious excuse, I removed the seasons he played after he tore his Achilles in April of 2013. The results were surprisingly definitive in favor of Durant. Durant has averaged more points, rebounds and blocks per game, per 36 minutes and per 100 possessions than Kobe did. 

He has been more efficient than Kobe as well, shooting higher percentages both from two-point and three-point shots while also taking and making more free throws than Kobe. Durant’s teams (most of them being Oklahoma City teams) have scored more points per 100 possessions while he has been on the court. He even has more win shares per 48 minutes than Kobe, a statistic that measures how many wins a player has contributed. 

And, just to make sure all the bases are covered, these numbers hold up in the playoffs as well. Kobe holds advantages in assists and steals, which is to be expected for a guard who had more on-ball responsibility. In short, Kobe was unable to consistently match the scoring totals that Kevin Durant has made routine, even as Kobe took more shots than Durant. When evaluating both players as primarily scorers, which is what they are, it’s not hard to see who has the edge. It’s Durant, even when not taking Kobe’s worst years into account.

I understand Bryant will likely remain a more famous, influential figure in basketball. His mystique and his greatness are undeniable. But those qualities shouldn’t obscure the facts. And the fact is, Durant is a better basketball player, plain and simple.