MORE ON KOBE HATING: Stephen Smith in the Inquirer picks up on the class reasons for Philly's Bryant hate:

[Kobe] also knows Philly is a blue-collar town, that his eloquence, his style - and the fact that he does not resemble, at least outwardly, the tattooed, braid-wearing, playing-with-reckless-abandon persona of Allen Iverson - contribute to the distance Philadelphia feels for him.

That Michael Lynch thing I just alluded to is pretty high on Iverson, who is pretty much Kobe's opposite in a public-perception way:

Take your hat off to Iverson, who not only kicks butt on the court, (if not in last night's NBA All Star Game) but plays well on paper, too. He's stayed true to his roots, refusing to wear suits and even appearing on NBC's Meet the Press in tattoo-revealing sweats. "People used to always tell me to wear a suit, look this way, look that way, cut my hair and stuff like that," says Iverson, who declared "I did this my way" when accepting last year's NBA Most Valuable Player award.

I prefer Iverson over Kobe in terms of their personas, but that's just me. I'm also not a Kobe fan because a.) he's a Laker and b.) he plays with Shaquille O'Neal and we'll never be able to tell how great Kobe is until he is sans Shaq. I am reminded of these Bill Simmons comments:

Wouldn't it be much more fun watching Kobe carry a team built around his offense, like Vince in Toronto, or T-Mac in Orlando? As his 56-point explosion Monday night against Memphis proved, this would be "MJ in 1988" all over again. Other than MJ, when was the last time a noncenter was a legitimate threat to drop 70 in a game?

Here's the sad thing: Shaq goes on cruise control for 90 percent of the regular-season games, mainly because he can (Shaq doesn't have that crazed desire to dominate every single game, the way Bird, MJ and even Moses did, and that's fine, I guess). And he probably saves Kobe's legs in the long run, as Kobe doesn't have to expend nearly as much energy carrying his team during the season.

But the fact remains that, at this point in his career, the Kobe Experience would be 10 times more interesting if he were forced to carry a .500 team. I watched some of the 56-point game -- coincidentally, the first game of Shaq's three-game suspension -- and Kobe was showing more flair and explosiveness than anyone since the young MJ. He was totally unstoppable, looking like a guy who finally had the chance to let loose.

This isn't another case of Magic-Kareem, or even Bird-McHale or MJ-Pippen, where there was a mutually beneficial relationship that allowed both players to reach even greater heights. In this case, Shaq makes Kobe's life easier, and vice versa ... and I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing. Hey, it might translate to 10 championships before everything's said and done, but I can't shake the feeling that neither player will reach his optimum potential with the other guy hanging around. We'll see.

Reading Simmons on the NBA has made me into a bigger NBA fan. You all should read him too.