Kobe was closest thing to M.J. ‘you ever will see again,’ says 5-time NBA champ who played with both of them

Former NBA guard Ron Harper was fortunate enough to play with two of the best players at the shooting guard position in the history of the sport over his 15-year career.

He was teammates with none other than Michael Jordan on the Chicago Bulls for the team’s second three-peat in the 1990s and then spent the final two seasons of his career playing alongside a young Kobe Bryant on the Los Angeles Lakers, where Harper won two more rings.

While Jordan is perceived to have been the better player of the two legends, Harper argued in a recent post on X that Bryant was the closest thing to Jordan that folks will ever witness.

In some ways, Bryant’s and Jordan’s resumes are similar. For one, they won nearly the same number of NBA championships during their careers. Jordan won six over the course of his time in the league while Bryant captured five.

The two most recent teams in NBA history to three-peat also just so happen to be squads that were led by Bryant and Jordan. Not long after the Bulls strung together their second three-peat with Jordan in the fold, the Lakers won three straight championships in the early 2000s, and Bryant was a top-two player for Los Angeles in that stretch. No NBA team has three-peated since.

The two players’ NBA careers didn’t overlap for all that long, unfortunately, but Bryant was in the league to see Jordan win his fifth and sixth championships with the Bulls. Perhaps Bryant saw the Bulls complete their second three-peat and became motivated to help the Lakers do something similar.

While it’s unfortunate that folks never got to see Bryant and Jordan duke it out on a grand stage like the NBA Finals, it’s safe to claim that they are the cream of the crop at their position in the history of the league. It’s also clear why Harper sees similarities between Bryant and Jordan.