LeBron James on Kobe Bryant: ‘He knows he don’t suck’

Opening up the 2015-16 season with averages of 15.8 points per game, 32.3 percent shooting from the field, 20.6 percent shooting on 8.5 attempts per game from deep, and a minus-15.7 net rating through four games, it looks like Father Time has finally fully consumed Kobe Bryant.

The Mamba himself certainly thinks so, saying after Sunday’s 103-93 loss at home to the Dallas Mavericks, “I’m the 200th-best player in the league right now…I freaking suck.”

Despite Bryant’s grating self-evaluation, fellow superstar LeBron James apparently disagrees.

“He knows he don’t suck,” said the Cavs forward of the five-time NBA champion to Jason Lloyd of the Akron Beacon Journal on Tuesday.

“What I see is a challenge to himself,” James countered. “It has zero to do with his age. Zero. I think at one point in my career, in my 20s, I felt like I sucked. It’s all a personal challenge. I know him. He knows he don’t suck. C’mon man, it’s Kobe Bryant. But it’s a personal challenge to him. That’s all that is.”

Well on the one hand, it could be simply be early-season growing pains with Bryant trying to develop chemistry with the Lakers’ fresh young talent and trying to work his way back from devastating upper and lower-body injuries that have ended his last three NBA seasons prematurely.

Then again, Bryant has been a horribly inefficient defensive minus for years now, and at 37 years of age and with 46,866 regular season minutes already on his wheels, it’s hard to argue that he’s helping the Lakers more than he’s hurting them right now. Especially when he’s hoisting up shots that look like this:

C'mon Kobe it's getting hard to watch https://t.co/eVDqUMuv2a

— gifdsports (@gifdsports) November 4, 2015

LeBron’s respect for his fellow basketball deity is admirable, and he’s probably right that Kobe doesn’t actually think that he sucks. But at some point, you just have to face reality and admit that the Mamba Rifle has just about run out of bullets.