For the past several seasons, ESPN.com’s NBA editorial crew has taken to ranking the top players in the NBA.
This season, they put Los Angeles Lakers superstar and former MVP Kobe Bryant at No. 93, 53 spots lower than he was a season ago.
Some players might take such a ranking as a slight. Bryant, writes Baxter Holmes of ESPN.com, chose to ignore it altogether:
Early in the second half of the Los Angeles Lakers’ 105-97 preseason loss to the Toronto Raptors on Thursday, a fan shouted from the stands at longtime star guard Kobe Bryant: “You ain’t no 93!”
The fan was referencing Bryant’s No. 93 ranking in ESPN’s #NBArank project, which counts down the NBA’s top players for this upcoming season.
Bryant, a five-time NBA champion and the third all-time leading scorer in NBA history, laughed when asked whether he’d heard such comments from fans defending him.
“Yeah, I heard a couple of them,” he said with a smile after scoring 16 points on 5-of-11 shooting in nearly 22 minutes. “I don’t need to defend that [ranking]. Nobody does, really.”
Pressed on what he thought of the ranking, Bryant said, “Please don’t ask me about silly stuff like that.”
After the release of last year’s rankings, in which he was No. 40, Bryant voiced his displeasure.
“I’ve known for a long time [that] they’re a bunch of idiots,” Bryant said last October, referring to the ranking as “silly” and “laughable.”
For the 2015 edition of #NBArank, 101 members of the ESPN Forecast panel (analysts, writers, researchers, editors, etc.) predicted how much each NBA player would contribute to his team’s ability to win games, factoring in both his quality of play and minutes played.
The panel, founded in 2008, has been ranking NBA players since the lockout of 2011.
In the first three editions, Bryant ranked seventh, sixth and fourth (in a special edition of #NBArank published shortly before his Achilles injury).
In the past three editions of #NBArank, Bryant, coming off a serious injury each time, has ranked 25th overall in 2013, 40th in 2014 and 93rd this year.
24 seconds of Kobe. pic.twitter.com/hDWQbVda14
— Arash Markazi (@ArashMarkazi) October 5, 2015