"He has no choice but to shoot so much"

[scm5]

I'm pretty sure nobody was giving Kobe in '06 or AI in '01 too much shit for shooting so often

They were, and that label followed Kobe around despite dropping his FGA/gm to 20-21 once he got Pau.

In comparison:

Westbrook shot 22FGA/gm this past season in much less minutes.

Lebron has always been at 18-21 FGA when not playing with the Heat who had two other legit stars/scorers.

KD has hovered right around 20 FGA his entire career.

[Derka]

If Kobe or Melo were in this exact situation, no one outside of their haters would be crucifying them for it.

But Melo and Kobe chucking on shitty teams that went nowhere is not the same thing as Lebron losing his #2 and #3 scoring options to critical injuries DURING the playoffs and being shoehorned into the role of sole offensive facilitator during the NBA f*cking Finals. And its not like he's not getting his teammates involved; fact is, his guards are shooting like weeks-old dog shit.

[Hey Yo]

LeBron shooting 39% getting carried by his dominant front court. Sound familiar? Their chickens have come home to roost.

Shaq with 3 of the top 5 performances on that list. Which shows what everyone already knew....carried, not earned.

[Nash]

lolz the day Kobe manages to average 10 assists while shooting a lot is the day that.. well it will never happen.

[Kblaze8855]

If you never heard the media explaining why Ai or Kobe shot a lot you just weren't watching basketball at the time. Did you not notice the media voting Iverson the MVP? Did you miss Kobe coverage coming before the mighty NFL after the conference championship games? Did you miss the wall to wall coverage of Kobe scoring streaks?

You going to just straight up lie and pretend most of the media wasn't going crazy over the scoring outbursts and readily explaining that he didn't have great teammates and had to carry them?

You miss the grown men getting giddy with excitement and giggling through highlights of Kobe hitting ridiculous fadeaway over the defenders during his scoring years?

Everybody knew why Iverson and Kobe shot a lot and people really got critical in retrospect. That's why when we were here in 2001 everybody was going crazy over Iverson in the playoffs and now you have 19 year olds don't remember it acting like he played poorly over shooting percentages.

At the height of their powers both of them we're getting love. Kobe more than AI obviously but both were among the most popular athletes in the world with legions of fans and media supporting that.

Melo? Not so much. But he was never as highly regarded a player as the other three.