28,601.

That's how many points Kobe Bryant has scored in his career, putting him fifth on the all time list. That's 5 points more than his former teammate, Shaquille O'Neal. And it's fewer points than Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, Karl Malone, and the all time leader, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who scored 38,387 before his retirement.

Ian Thomsen profiled him early in his career. "Is Kobe Bryant the second coming of Magic or Michael?" he wrote. "The playoffs are the place to find out if he's truly a prodigy or merely a creature of hype."

Rafe Bartholomew told the strange story of Bryant's ever so brief turn as a pro in the Philippines. "There is no way to overstate the nation's passion for hoops. The United States introduced the sport more than 100 years ago, when the Philippine Islands were a U.S. territory," he writes. "Over the ensuing generations, basketball has crossed over from colonial import to a game most Filipinos consider essentially Pinoy.1 It's hard to imagine another country where basketball is followed and practiced as broadly as it is in the Philippines, where half the men you pass on city streets and provincial roads wear basketball jerseys."

J.R. Moehringer tries to wrap his mind around what sets Byrant apart. "Is Kobe Bryant possessed of transcendent talent? Of course. But that's not what makes him great," he writes. "For fourteen grueling seasons, the 31-year-old former prodigy has cracked, fractured, strained, torn, cut, bruised, nicked, and risked every part of his finely tuned self. And he's got the rings—and the scars—to show for it."

Elizabeth Kaye described the moment when he was charged with rape. "Bryant, bone thin, eyes cast downward, seemed paradoxically frozen and on the verge of crumbling, his humiliation completed by the need to draw on the fortitude of the young wife sitting beside him, the woman he betrayed," she writes. "Here was another exemplar: the sports hero gone awry. Terrible to witness, the occasion was made more terrible by the knowledge that Kobe Bryant had been destiny's child, a young man who had everything except, perhaps, an appreciation of how swiftly all of it could be taken away."

And Mike Sager profiled him in 2007. "Don't believe what you've read," he wrote. "The Los Angeles Laker doesn't want to be traded. He doesn't want to be a Laker, either. He just wants to be so good, so great, you have to love him."