For twenty years, Kobe Bryant's 81 points against Toronto was the biggest scoring night in NBA history that wasn't Wilt Chamberlain's. On 10 March 2026 Bam Adebayo scored 83 against Washington and it dropped to third.1 The missed-shots record went the same way: LeBron James passed Bryant's 14,481 in October 2024, ending a decade of Bryant owning it.2
Los Angeles marks Kobe Bryant Day on 24 August, the date built from the two numbers he wore. This year it arrives with his records thinning out and Kevin Durant still climbing toward his career scoring total.
Kobe Bryant's records are leaving one at a time. The categories that claim him keep multiplying.
Kobe Bryant vs Michael Jordan: the comparison that never closed
Every all-time NBA list starts the same fight, and Bryant is always somewhere inside it.
His case is twenty seasons at one club, five championships, 18 All-Star selections and two scoring titles.3 The Naismith Hall of Fame elected him in 2020.
Jordan's case is the one Bryant spent a career answering: six Finals, six wins, six Finals MVPs. Bryant won a single regular-season MVP, in 2008, against Jordan's five.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is on this list too, so is Bill Russell with eleven rings, and so is LeBron James, who now holds both the scoring record and the missed-shots record. Bryant belongs in the conversation without ever being the safe answer to it.
Shooting guards: Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade and one long shadow
Narrow the question to a position and the field drops to about fifteen names.
Bryant played shooting guard for twenty seasons and scored more points there than anyone except Jordan. This is where the single-club career does its heaviest work, because nobody else at the position lasted that long at that volume.
Dwyane Wade is the closest modern rival, with three championships and the 2006 Finals MVP. His career ran six seasons shorter than Bryant's.
Behind them sit Clyde Drexler, Ray Allen, Reggie Miller, James Harden and Allen Iverson, who was drafted the same year as Bryant. It is a crowded position with one immovable name above it, and that name is why Bryant has to be argued for here rather than assumed.
33,643 points, and Kevin Durant still climbing
Scoring is the one Bryant measure that needs no opinion, only a date stamp.
He finished on 33,643 points, fourth in league history behind LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone.3 He led the league in scoring twice, in 2005-06 and 2006-07.
Durant passed Michael Jordan for fifth in March 2026 and is still scoring in Houston. Fourth place has a clock on it.
The order here is arithmetic. What people dispute is what the arithmetic is worth.
81 points in 2006, third on the list since March 2026
On 22 January 2006 Bryant scored 81 against the Toronto Raptors on 28-of-46 shooting, with 55 of them after halftime. Los Angeles trailed by 18 points midway through the third before winning 122–104.
Only Wilt Chamberlain's 100 in 1962 stood above it, and that held for twenty years. Then Bam Adebayo scored 83 for Miami against Washington on 10 March 2026, making 36 free throws, and Bryant's night became the third-biggest.1
What the demotion does not touch is the shape of the performance. Chamberlain played in an era of 130-point games; Adebayo lived at the foul line; Bryant took 46 shots in a normal modern game and made 28 of them.
Seventeen performances are on this list, including David Thompson's 73 in 1978, Donovan Mitchell's 71 in 2023 and two separate Michael Jordan nights. Bryant is on it twice over in a sense, since the 60 he scored in his final game is the other number people quote.
Magic Johnson vs Kobe Bryant: the best Laker ever
Franchise lists are where a one-club career finally counts for everything, and few franchises carry more history than this one.
Bryant arrived in 1996 and left in 2016 without playing anywhere else. In December 2017 the Lakers retired both his numbers, 8 and 24, making him the first player in NBA history to have two retired by one team.4
Magic Johnson has the same five championships, three MVPs, and the Showtime era attached to his name, which is a style of basketball people still describe by the decade it happened in.
George Mikan, Jerry West and Elgin Baylor represent the earlier eras here; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O'Neal and LeBron James the later ones. Fifteen names and about six plausible answers is roughly what seventeen championships produce.
Beijing 2008: the Redeem Team's closer
The United States lost the 2004 Olympic final and spent four years assembling a squad that would not lose the next one.
Bryant was on it, won gold in Beijing in 2008 and a second in London in 2012.12 In the Beijing final against Spain he took the closing minutes, a job the roster had no other obvious candidate for.
LeBron James was on the same team and has since collected three Olympic medals, across 2008, 2012 and 2024.
The list reaches back to the 1992 Dream Team and forward to Stephen Curry.
The 1996 draft: twelve names went first, including Todd Fuller
Twelve players were picked before Bryant in June 1996. Todd Fuller went 11th to Golden State and Vitaly Potapenko went 12th to Cleveland.5
Charlotte made the 13th pick and never meant to keep him. The Lakers had agreed to send Vlade Divac the other way, which cleared the cap space to sign Shaquille O'Neal in the same summer.6 Bryant was 17 and had come straight from Lower Merion High School in Pennsylvania.
Allen Iverson went first overall and won the 2001 MVP, which is the strongest counter-case anyone can make on this list. Steve Nash, taken 15th, won two of them.
Four Hall of Famers came out of that class. Thirty years later it is still the draft other drafts get measured against, and the thirteenth pick is the reason.
Clutch is not a basketball word: Bryant and Serena Williams
This ranking leaves basketball and asks who you would want taking the last shot, swing or putt in any sport at all.
Bryant's version of the reputation is volume. He took more late-game attempts than anyone of his generation and kept taking them through every miss, which is a temperament rather than a statistic.
Serena Williams saved match points on the way to 23 major singles titles, the tennis translation of the same trait and arguably the harder one, because there is nobody to pass to.
Tom Brady, Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Joe Montana and Wayne Gretzky fill out the sixteen. Cross-sport lists are where Bryant stops being a basketball answer and becomes a general one.
The overrated case: 44.7 percent, and 50 shots in the last game
Bryant belongs on this list, and the reason is the same volume that puts him on the flattering ones.
He shot 44.7 percent from the field across twenty seasons, and he held the record for most missed field goals in NBA history from 2014 until LeBron James passed his 14,481 in October 2024.2 A player has to be trusted with the ball for two decades to miss that many, which is the defence and the charge at once.
His farewell game is the cleanest exhibit either way. On 13 April 2016 he scored 60 against Utah on a career-high 50 attempts and the Lakers won 101–96.7
Carmelo Anthony, Russell Westbrook, Dwight Howard and Vince Carter are on this list for related reasons, and Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain are on it for the opposite one, which tells you how loosely the word gets used.
Cleveland, 1997: an 18-year-old wins the dunk contest
Bryant entered the Slam Dunk Contest at the 1997 All-Star weekend in Cleveland as a rookie and won it, the youngest champion the event has had.8
That one night is his entire claim on a 1990s dunking list. He played three and a half seasons in the decade, and the player most people picture, the 24 jersey and the fadeaway, belongs to the 2000s.
Shawn Kemp is the opposite case. The Reign Man's whole dunking legend is 1990s Seattle and none of it needed a contest to exist.
Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dominique Wilkins and Clyde Drexler fill the top of the list. Bryant is on it as a teenager who showed up once, which is a strange way to make a ranking and the most interesting way to appear in this one.
Kobe Bryant vs Dennis Rodman: tailoring against chaos
The fashion list is the one where basketball itself never comes up, and Bryant is on it for the tailoring.
His look was Italian-influenced and deliberately conventional, sharp suits with no statement beyond the fit. He spent part of his childhood in Italy while his father played professionally there, and it stuck.
Dennis Rodman is the counter-position inside the same thirteen names: wedding dresses, rainbow hair, painted nails, a 1990s campaign against every norm the league had.
Allen Iverson is the third real answer, the player whose cornrows and chains pushed the NBA into writing a dress code in 2005. Against those two, Bryant's case rests on restraint, a quiet thing to put up against a wedding dress.
Nike Kobe vs Air Jordan: the low-top that changed the shelf
Here the option is not a player but a product line, and Bryant's outlived its athlete.
The Nike Kobe series pushed low-cut, football-inspired silhouettes onto NBA courts at a time when high-tops were the assumption. Enough players switched that the low-top stopped being a risk.
The deal actually lapsed after his death, in April 2021, before Vanessa Bryant and Nike agreed a new long-term partnership in March 2022 that put the shoes back into production.9
Air Jordan is the line every other line is measured against, and it is a billion-dollar brand rather than a shoe. Nike LeBron, Under Armour Curry, Reebok Question and Puma Clyde are here too, eighteen in all.
The Black Mamba vs The Great One
Here the option is not Kobe Bryant at all. It is a two-word phrase he gave himself.
He picked "Black Mamba" in the early 2000s, borrowing it from a Quentin Tarantino film, as a name for the version of himself that played basketball. Self-assigned nicknames almost never survive contact with the public. This one is on murals across Los Angeles.
"The Great One" shows how the process normally runs. Wayne Gretzky was given his, and it outgrew hockey to the point where the surname became optional.
Iron Mike, His Airness, The Sultan of Swat and The Round Mound of Rebound fill out the thirteen, each doing the work of a whole career in three or four words. Bryant is the only entry who wrote his own.
Dear Basketball: the only NBA player with an Academy Award
The last list has nothing to do with sport, and it is the one that makes the whole exercise worth doing.
Bryant announced his retirement on 29 November 2015 with a poem rather than a press conference. The Players' Tribune published it, written from the point of view of the six-year-old who first fell for the game.10
Two years later it became a five-minute film. Glen Keane, the Disney animator behind Ariel and the Beast, drew it in pencil; John Williams wrote the score; Bryant narrated his own words.
"Dear Basketball" won Best Animated Short Film at the 90th Academy Awards in March 2018, two years before the Hall of Fame elected him.11 Bryant said afterwards that the statue meant more to him than the championships, which is the sort of thing athletes say and rarely mean.
Everything else on the list came out of Pixar or Aardman. "The Wrong Trousers", "Geri's Game", "Piper", "Bao", "Hair Love", twenty winners across seven decades of the category. A retired shooting guard's pencil sketch sits among them, and no other ranking in this article is as unlikely.
Fourteen lists, and no agreement on what he was
Twenty years in one uniform, and Bryant still ends up filed as a scorer, a shooting guard, a draft steal, a dresser, a sneaker, a nickname and an Academy Award winner. The records that made him famous are being handed on one by one. The categories are not.
All fourteen resolve the same way: compare two options, pick one, repeat. Hand the same list to two people and they finish somewhere different.
There is almost certainly a Kobe Bryant list nobody has built yet. Build it.
More rankings, more angles
- LeBron James vs Michael Jordan: Who Wins Which List? — the two names Bryant is always measured against
- Magic Johnson vs Larry Bird: 47 Years of the Same Argument — the Lakers rivalry that came before him
- How Rankings Are Scored: The 1000-Point System — what happens to a vote after you cast it
Sources
- ESPN — Bam Adebayo's 83 points against Washington, 10 March 2026, and where it sits in NBA single-game scoring history: espn.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- CBS Sports — LeBron James passes Kobe Bryant's career record for missed field goals, October 2024: cbssports.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- Wikipedia — list of career achievements by Kobe Bryant: five championships, 18 All-Star selections, two scoring titles, 33,643 career points and fourth on the all-time list: wikipedia.org (checked 2026-08-07)
- ESPN — the Lakers retire both No. 8 and No. 24, 18 December 2017: espn.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- Sports Illustrated — the twelve players drafted ahead of Kobe Bryant in 1996: si.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- CBS Sports — the 1996 draft-day trade that sent Vlade Divac to Charlotte for the rights to Bryant: cbssports.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- ESPN — game recap, Lakers 101–96 Jazz, 13 April 2016: 60 points on a career-high 50 attempts: espn.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- Cleveland 19 News — Bryant wins the 1997 Slam Dunk Contest at the All-Star weekend in Cleveland: cleveland19.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- ESPN — the Bryant estate and Nike agree a new long-term deal, March 2022, after the previous one expired in April 2021: espn.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- The Players' Tribune — "Dear Basketball" by Kobe Bryant, 29 November 2015: theplayerstribune.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- Sports Illustrated — "Dear Basketball" wins Best Animated Short Film at the 90th Academy Awards: si.com (checked 2026-08-07)
- Olympedia — Kobe Bryant's Olympic record: gold in the men's basketball tournament at Beijing 2008 and London 2012: olympedia.org (checked 2026-08-07)