Fun With Math: Kobe Is Better Than MJ Edition: Courtesy of GQ Magazine

Last Thursday night, in the second quarter of a 93-87 loss to LeBron James and his backup singers—err, his very talented teammates—Kobe Bryant stepped up to the free throw line and sunk a relatively meaningless basket. Meaningless, that is, aside from the fact that said free throw put him one-fourth of the way to 100,000 career points. Impressively, Kobe is only the 15th player to reach the 25,000-point milestone, and perhaps more impressively, he is the youngest ever to do so.




Back in 1996, when Kobe first came into the league, he was straight outta high school and probably better known for his celebrity prom date (Brandi) than his crossover dribble. Michael Jordan, still at the terrifying height of his athletic prowess, was king of the hardwood then—pulling in $30 million a year in salary and fresh off a starring role in Space Jam. And yet, even as an NBA snot-nose, Kobe was already being compared—or, more accurately, his potential was being compared—to His Airness, fairly or not. Unlike Harold Miner, J.R. Rider, and other shoulda-woulda-coulda-beens, however, Kobe has since made the case that such talk was never off the mark.

So now one must ask: With his latest achievement, has the pupil finally surpassed the master?

It's hard to say. When Jordan scored his 25,000th point, it was in the recent wake of two years spent whiffing in the White Sox farm system. Give him those two years back, and MJ would have been less than 150 days older than Kobe is now. Negligible. But there's an even better, fiscal argument to be made.




In fact, after scouring basketball-reference.com and punching some numbers through the old watch calculator, we can definitively say that Kobe Bryant is better than Michael Jordan...at making money. Kobe has never pulled in $30 million a year in salary, it's true. But considering their cumulative NBA incomes, up to the point of their respective 25,000th points, Kobe made approximately 5x as much money per point as MJ ($6,405/point vs. $1,373/point)—and he'll be a free agent after next year.



Granted, Kobe may need to win a couple more rings before he's hoisted into the same historic echelon as Michael. But the numbers speak for themselves. And, even though Kobe has yet to star in a hilarious half-animated feature film, he is clearly the greater capitalist. And therefore, one could argue, the greater American.—RAFI KOHAN