Gilbert Arenas went into detail to explain why Kobe Bryant is not Michael Jordan: 'He never moved like him'

Sebastian Telfair made some headways six months ago when he emphatically stated that Kobe Bryant was never on Michael Jordan's during an interview on Vlad TV.

"I love Kobe, but let's stop this s**t. Kobe is not Michael Jordan," Telfair stated, explaining that Bryant didn't influence basketball as MJ did.

Gil agrees

Three months after Telfair, Gilbert Arenas did an interview on the same platform, and he agreed with Telfair's take.

"That's facts. I'm a Kobe fanatic, but he's not [Jordan]. I don't like the idea of people saying Bryant was the carbon copy of Michael. And I go back to the basics, I ask, 'What year?' Kobe never looked like the eighties Jordan," Gil said.

"He never moved like him; he didn't have the speed of Michael Jordan in the eighties or the nineties. He was athletic for a high school kid, and 38-inch vertical is still 38-inch vertical. But you're talking about 48 (Michael's vertical). That's two different styles of jumping and moving in the air, so they could never look like each other. The no. 24 Kobe looked like the second three-peat Jordan. The fade-away, tongue-out, but that's older Michael Jordan. You can't say because of one similar fragment, Kobe was the carbon copy," Arenas concluded.

It depends on the viewpoint

When you look at it deeper, Arenas' point makes sense. For the last three years in Chicago (three championship years), Michael started to rely on his midrange game and jump shot, but three years do not define the 15 years MJ played in the Association because he relied on his athleticism a lot more in his earlier years. So it's not really fair to say Bryant was Jordan's carbon copy.

However, Kobe fans will argue when we talk about the will to win, working on your craft, and giving every single percent of your effort to maximize your ability; nobody was more similar to Jordan than the "Black Mamba." 

When you look at Kobe's fade-aways and mid-range game from 2009 until the end of his career, you will not find a shooting motion more similar to MJ's.

Nobody was Jordan. There is a reason why the NBA experienced huge growth in revenue, viewership, and overall popularity during the 1990s. People all over the world wanted to see Mike play because they had never seen anything like that before.

Kobe tried to emulate him. He didn't succeed, but he was the closest one to him in terms of style. Even if your game resembles Michael's for just a year, that's still pretty amazing.