Gilbert Arenas Explains Why He Doesn't Think Media Gave Kobe Bryant Due Credit

During a recent podcast episode, Gilbert Arenas laid out why he doesn't think the media gave Kobe Bryant enough credit during his career. 

Once Michael Jordan came into the league and established himself as a superstar, every great young player who came afterwards was naturally compared to him. 

Very few of those players could actually live up to the standards set by Jordan, but two have come awfully close, LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. 

Arenas played with both Bryant and James, but was more of a contemporary of Kobe. According to Agent Zero, the media buried Kobe as a favor to Jordan: 

"Those people that were NBA Jordan lovers — the NBC, all of them — they were not listening to no Kobe-is-the-next-Michael-Jordan while Michael Jordan was playing basketball. They didn’t want to hear none of that shit. And that's who started the campaign of 'Kobe Sidekick.' This is Shaq’s team. That’s who separated. They did it in real time because Michael Jordan was there."

There are surely reasons why the media may have preferred Jordan to Bryant. The first is that no player has ever really matched Jordan's accomplishments. Some have more championships, but Jordan did it as the leading player in an expansion era. 

That's not to say that Bryant didn't have some impressive accolades of his own. He played in that same expansion era and had to compete against numerous loaded teams. When the historians look to make up a list of the greatest of all-time, Jordan is number one, but Bryant isn't far behind.