In a way, writing about Kobe Bryant's fantasy career feels hopelessly redundant. Here's a guy who grew up as the son of an NBA and international ballplayer, became an NBA rotation player at 18 and lasted 20 seasons at the game's highest level. He's earned five championship rings, has played in 14 All-Star games, is the NBA's third all-time leading scorer and has upwards of $300 million for his on-court efforts alone. If that's not a fantasy life, I don't know what is.
Of course for us the term 'fantasy' has a different connotation altogether. For nearly two decades, gamers have sought Bryant to anchor their teams and for good reason. Few players have been as consistently productive and before his Achilles injury a few years ago, he was also exceptionally durable. All that has changed the past couple of years, but the fact remains Bryant was one of the key fantasy basketball assets of his era.
In honor of Bryant's retirement announcement this week, the time feels right to do a little retrospective of his contributions to the alternate reality of fantasy hoops. There's been plenty of discussion of where Bryant ranks in real-world contributions, so this augments, and in many ways mirrors, that discussion.
Methodology
To keep things simple and familiar, I integrated a modified version of ESPN's Player Rater into my historical database to get a sense of Bryant's fantasy register. Player Rater has been around our fantasy pages for a long time and this season the metric shows Bryant at a career nadir.
My version of the Player Rater calculates the exact values of the version on the site in the six basic fantasy categories for counting stats: Points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks and 3-pointers. Then I veer off in two ways:
1. My version has a slightly different approach to the percentage categories, giving a little more weight to the attempts part of the equation, rather than the raw percentage.
2. I include turnovers, integrating the z-scores for them into the final Player Rating total as a negative factor. ESPN's standard formula for Player Rater does not include turnovers.
In the end, my results are very similar to the numbers you'd find in a Player Rater listing for any given season. Also, because I include turnovers, the number correlates highly (.83 raw correlation) to Wins Above Replacement (WARP).
The best and worst
By this method, Bryant has never ranked as the top fantasy asset in any given season. That's similar to the story told by WARP: He topped out at third in 2007-08, and has been top 10 six times. His fantasy story is brighter. Bryant has ranked in the top 10 by Player Rater 2.0 eight times and has finished as high as second. That second-place finish came in 2002-03.
Bryant finished 13th or better in nine of 11 seasons between 1998-99 and 2008-09. He was in the top five in each season from 2005-06 to 2008-09, and finished third in the first three seasons of that run. That peak -- running from Bryant's age-27 to age-30 seasons -- almost coincides with Shaquille O'Neal's departure from the Lakers. There was a one season between O'Neal's departure and the beginning of Bryant's peak run -- the 2004-05 campaign.
At the other end of the spectrum are Bryant's worst seasons. Those tell a familiar story. His three worst seasons have been the past three. The two worst before that were his first two. In other words, during the long stretch in which Bryant was neither too young, nor too old, he was really good. His most recent top 10 season by Player Rater 2.0 was 2012-13, when he was sixth. That was his 17th NBA season, and the one he finished by popping that damnable tendon in his foot.
Overall standing
I calculated Player Rater 2.0 for each season of the 3-point era, which is more or less the same period of time in which roto-style fantasy sports have existed. Here's the top 20 all-time in career Player Rater 2.0:
Not bad! Bryant's No. 15 ranking is dragged down by a couple of factors. First, he hung on too long. Take away his past three seasons -- which rate way in the negative -- and he'd land on this list between Kevin Garnett and Magic Johnson. But of course you can't take away those seasons. And No. 15 is awfully good when you consider there are 2,700 players on the list.
As you'd expect, Bryant's strongest category is points. Only Karl Malone has a higher cumulative z-score in that category. He's in the 96th percentile or better in every category except three.
One is field-goal percentage, where his accuracy -- adjusted for attempts -- rates in the 81st percentile. As others have noted, it's this lack of elite efficiency that, from a statistical standpoint, leaves Bryant just off that cream of the cream layer of historical superstars. Bryant also rates low in blocks, which is understandable.
Then there are turnovers: Bryant's aggregate score for turnovers is the worst of any player in the database. Again, that plays into his relative inefficiency compared to other superstars. All the elite fantasy players rate low on the turnover scale. It's an inevitable by-product of having the ball in your hands so much.
He's no Jordan
When you're parsing shades of greatness, it always comes across as nitpicky. The greats -- of which Bryant is certainly one -- are so good at so many things that their rare and usually mild flaws are all we have to talk about. But when you look at Bryant's career through a fantasy lens, one overwhelming take-away is to once again marvel at just how off-the-charts Michael Jordan was.
As the chart showed, Jordan tops the career list in Player Rater 2.0, though it's conceivable that Dirk Nowitzki catches him next year if he stays at his current level. Jordan's eliteness is simply unmatched. In every full season he played before his second retirement, Jordan finished in the top five from a fantasy standpoint. That's 11-for-11, and the No. 5 finish (1997-98) was actually an outlier. In the other 10 seasons, Jordan ranked first seven times, and second in the other three seasons.
All this goes to show that it's not just that Bryant is no Jordan. No one is, or is likely to be. But judged on his own merits, Bryant is a first-tier Hall-of-Fame fantasy asset.