Kobe Bryant shows he isn’t done being great

It’s easy to make fun of Kobe Bryant and poke fun at the holes in his game. Yes, he loves to shoot a lot and from crazy places on the court. No, he doesn’t always share the ball. Sure, he might have ’sabotaged’ some of the Lakers’ free agent recruiting efforts over the years.

But he’s also an all-time great player, probably one of the five-best to ever step onto a court. And as his 31-point, 11-rebound, 12-assist performance in the Lakers’ 129-122 Sunday night overtime win against Raptors showed, Kobe Bryant is still a star player.

Just check out below the move he put on Terrence Ross. Kobe is 36 years old and this is his 19th season in the league. He’s played 1,482 career games if you count the postseason. He should be broken by now, lumbering through his final days. Instead Bryant is playing nearly 36 minutes per game and still making defenders look foolish.

There’s still beauty to Bryant’s game. A shot chart like Sunday night’s with all those mid-range jump shots might not be appealing from an analytics standpoint, but there’s still something special about it. There might not be another player in the league who can score 31 points taking shots like these. Bryant’s footwork is still unmatched. His ability to create separation when none seems to exist remains second to none.

His shot selection is also further proof that Bryant doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. He got to where he is playing one way and has no intention of ever changing. As basketball fans, we can complain about what Bryant doesn’t do, or we can appreciate what he does. Shooting 39 percent for a 4-14 team is obviously not good, but leading the league in scoring at the age of 36, is something that we might not ever see again.

And there are the records. Bryant recorded his 6,000th career assist Sunday night, making him the first player in NBA history to have that many assists and at least 30,000 career points. As time goes on, there will be more milestones reached and hopefully more quotes like this:

This is who Kobe is today: a former superstar unwilling to acknowledge he isn’t the same player he used to be. This might not be a recipe for winning games, but it does give basketball fans the chance to watch Bryant put on a show just like he did Sunday night.

If you want to see future Hall of Famers blend themselves into the team setting, watch the Spurs. But that’s now how Kobe plans on riding off, and that’s entertaining in and of itself.

★★★