NBA: 30 best careers from players who skipped college

30 best careers from players who skipped college – 2. Kobe Bryant

It’s a reasonable debate between Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett for who should have ranked second on this list. Both had impressive careers, including a single MVP for each. Bryant was the superior offensive player, including two scoring championships; Garnet was the elite defender.

Bryant won five titles to Garnett’s one, but he also broke up a title team while Garnett brought one together and forged it in sweat and profanities.
In the end, Bryant wins out, both for his cultural impact (no player was more popular during his career) and for his role in breaking the floodgates of the prep-to-pro generation wide open. Kevin Garnett entered the league a year earlier, but he did so largely because of questionable academic eligibility – true from Garnett’s own mouth, but also in the mouths of those arguing against drafting high school players.

The reality of that can be seen in Bryant’s own draft day slide. No high school player was more dominant than Bryant his senior season, a year when he would go to Philadelphia 76ers practices and hold his own in scrimmages. Yet teams again and again were afraid to stake their careers on a high school student, and combined with some maneuvering by Bryant’s agent, saw him slide to the 13th pick of the 1996 NBA Draft where the Charlotte Hornets took him and immediately traded him to the Los Angeles Lakers.

From there, Bryant played 20 seasons, becoming an All-Star by his second and never looking back. Garnett was a one-off; Bryant was the test case, and he passed with flying colors. In his fourth season, he and Shaquille O’Neal won the first of three titles together. He would win two more later in his career alongside Pau Gasol. He became the face of the NBA, the heir to Michael Jordan: except while Jordan came into the league after three years in college, Bryant made his mark straight out of high school.