Kobe Bryant: Kobe Is Not the NBA's Top Player, but He Is the Most Talented

By the hip-hop industry's standards, 42-year-old rapper Jay-Z (or Sean Carter) would be considered ancient when compared to the young stars who currently dominate the art form's landscape.

Rappers like Lil' Wayne, Drake, Wiz Khalifa and Carter's own protege J. Cole have taken over the same limelight that Jay was accustomed to regularly basking in.

Most young people today cannot appreciate the influence that Carter has had on hip-hop culture, and to illustrate my point, I recently asked my 16-year-old son to name who he thought were the best rappers in the game today.

His first response was Cole, and he also went on to name a few other rappers such as Wale, Rick Ross and of course Lil' Wayne.

I pointed out the irony of his selection of Cole, since the young artist from North Carolina not only credits Carter as his inspiration, but he is also currently employed by Carter's Roc-Nation record label.

My son giggled and said the fact that I hang on to old rappers like Jay-Z and Nas only proves that I was getting older, and he gently informed me that no one was really listening to those guys anymore.

But all of that changed when Jay and Kanye West released Watch the Throne, which was my oldest son's first formal introduction to Jay's music in the present tense, and the beginning of his appreciation for an era that is quickly fading away.

Jay-Z's lyrical dexterity over West's smooth beats captured my son's imagination, but Jay's most recent song Glory, which details the birth of his daughter Blue Ivy, simply blew my son away.

It is an amazing and heart-felt song, and coupled with Watch the Throne, it serves as a reminder that even though Jay may not be considered the rap industry's top artist, he is arguably still the genre's most talented.

Outside of the Los Angeles Lakers fanbase, there are few people who would consider star guard Kobe Bryant to be the NBA's top player, but Kobe is making it very hard to argue that he is not the league's most talented.

After 11 games, Bryant is averaging 29.5 points, 5.7 rebounds, 5.8 assists and shooting 46 percent from the field, and he's destroying any notion that age has affected his game.

Or injuries. Or a new coach.

This season was supposed to be one of transition for the Lakers with the retirement of legendary coach Phil Jackson and the ascension of his successor Mike Brown.

Add in the uncertainty of Kobe's revolutionary knee surgery in the offseason, his subsequent wrist injury, the extended NBA lockout and the surprise trade of forward Lamar Odom, and you have the perfect recipe for disaster.

Unless, of course, you have Kobe Bryant.

Bryant took the hiring of Brown without his consult in stride, reluctantly shrugged off the Odom trade and put the pain of his wrist injury at the back of his mind.

And the immediate results have been impressive, as Kobe has shown that he is still spry enough to remain among the league's top players, but his 48-point outburst against the Phoenix Suns was something entirely different.

The fact that Kobe scored 48 is not really impressive, since it was his 108th time accomplishing the feat, but the manner in which he scored those points was amazing.

Kobe put on an 18-31 shooting performance for the ages, and while other players like LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Dwyane Wade have certainly had their moments, they are trailing Kobe in style points.

LeBron and Wade are more athletic than Kobe, and Durant may be just as smooth, but none of them can capture the beauty of the game the way that Kobe does and do so in a text-book, fundamental way.

I sat and watched Kobe hit jumper after impossible jumper, and when the defensively-challenged Suns decided to play Bryant tight on the perimeter, he shot over them or simply drove around them.

The points never stopped coming, and after witnessing the league's highest-scoring individual performance to this point in the season, I think the premonitions of his demise were greatly exaggerated.

Players like Wade and LeBron may be better than Kobe, but in my opinion you can compare their games to basic sentence structure.

Both Wade and James are dominant on the court, and they certainly get the job done and look good doing it.

Kobe's game can be explained by the same analogy using sentence structure, but in order to completely understand the difference you have to add in a few adjectives and adverbs as well.