Kobe Bryant is still telling his story. Are we falling for it anymore?

Kobe Bryant’s new ESPN show Detail opens with tense music, followed by a full minute of silence as the camera pans to Bryant at the controls of a dark room, laser-focused on a projector shining light into his face. Basketball, here, is not jazz; it’s more serious, more surgical. Detail is “meant for debate, not to entertain,” the opening clip warns, like a pseudo-edgy anti-PC YouTube video.

Kobe turns the spotlight on himself in the first episode. He plays a jab-step jumper he missed over Carmelo Anthony in the 2009 Western Conference Finals, while Trevor Ariza was open for three at the wing. He chastises himself but offers a method to the madness: on that particular play, he had an opportunity to demoralize Anthony — and by proxy, the Nuggets — by going for the jugular.

An enlightening moment in a fairly enlightening show. Kobe, after all, understands the game better than almost anyone on the planet.

Regardless, it’s hard to conceive of Detail as more than a vehicle for his legacy-building project, a convenient microphone. Bryant projects too much Machiavelli to imagine him enjoying anything for its own sake. Everything must be a means to an end.

If Kobe has beef with this rendering, well, he should take it up with himself. He wrote his own story to the public, better than any politician could have. Bryant understands what our collective imaginations yearn for: our willingness to suspend disbelief and forget ugly truths to anoint a legend, so long as it’s the right legend. He lived it.

Kobe, the ruthless individualist with an all-consuming, almost murderous desire to win, wove a great tale. It allowed him to wield his five championship rings like a lone wolf, as though Shaq never won three of those Finals MVPs, and Kobe didn’t shoot 6-for-24 in Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals. It was enough to make his fans overlook the alleged events of June 30, 2003, in Eagle, Colo., when he was accused of raping a 19-year-old hotel employee in his room. In the months and years to come, Bryant embraced the negativity greeting him around the NBA and reframed himself as the anti-hero of his own story. Hell, Bryant’s short film, “Dear Basketball,” collected hardware at the #MeToo Oscars.

With LeBron James coming off a historic playoff performance that centered him alongside Michael Jordan in the greatest player of all time debate — a debate Kobe thought belonged to him — Kobe is spinning yarn again, on Twitter and in interviews. But in an age of stronger bullshit detectors, where memes can dismantle flimsy narratives, Kobe’s storytelling is finally facing blowback, making a top-10 player of all time look like an amateur grifter.

After the Finals, Bleacher Report’s Howard Beck asked a roundtable of NBA legends, including Bryant, about LeBron’s legacy. A common theme emerged: Kobe’s musings on greatness, rings, and conversations he’s had with Jordan were so different from everyone else’s that they bordered on absurdity. It was stagecraft that was too obvious to be effective.

The interviews were conducted separately and condensed together, but I like to imagine a real roundtable, with Bryant cutting in with a triage on championships and his will to win like a vegan who hasn’t told anyone they’re a vegan all day.

There are times he just looks out of touch, like when he took a joke about the Detail curse — the idea that players Kobe analyzes on the show perform poorly the next game — seriously and told basketball writer Jared Dubin to #growup.

Bryant later told Tim Bontemps of the Washington Post: “It’s just not for them. They have simple minds. The show is not for simple-minded people, the people that do that sort of stuff. They’ve got to grow up. We’re looking at this show from a deeper level.”

He’s also liked some interesting tweets.

Social media no longer allows celebrities to weave their stories alone. The only tenable response is to play along, poke fun at the whole enterprise, or ignore it. Nowadays, a sense of humor can buy a mile in exchange for an inch.

Kobe’s approach isn’t giving fans much of a chance to miss him. Bryant’s essence — the serious demeanor, motivations rooted in both insecurity and cockiness, clasping at his legacy with a death-grip, not allowing anybody else to have a say in it — remains on display. His is a self-serious style that worked better with his fingertips on a basketball, not resting on a keyboard. For a player who turned every perceived slight into an edge, levity might be impossible. Kobe can’t just laugh off the haters. Haters are his everything.

But why are there so many of them? And why the fervor? Kobe’s return to the spotlight has brought out of the woodwork people who think they have to obfuscate to prove LeBron is better than him.

The goal, in some instances, is deeper: a treatise on the value of score-first players. Is Kobe Bryant, some snickering kid will tweet today, just Vince Carter with two jersey numbers?

With spin warriors on both sides yelling into their bubbles (or not), screaming into the void (or not), making their points without ever really knowing or even getting a grasp on who is winning, it is clear that the battle over Kobe’s legacy is still hotly contested. He is a symbol, a touchstone, a moral signifier.

His value answers a question that in our changing times not only applies to basketball but to life. Do the Kobes of the world still win? And if so, is today their reckoning day?