The NBA sidekick Hall of Fame

Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom

Do not trade horses in midstream is the maxim. Kobe Bryant always cherry-picked what advice from the past to heed and not heed. He might have molded his every move off the patented gestures and mannerisms of his betters, but he might have also mistaken his own mimicry for being better.

He didn’t trade Shaq for a thoroughbred in kind. Shaq is Shaq, after all, and the resources to make such a man only come around once a millennium or so. No, Kobe hitched his legacy to a team of horses, and they did a great deal of thankless work while Metta World Peace went about conquering the hearts and minds of the people.

Yes, the elder Gasol is a six-time All-Star, but his role on the 2009 and 2010 Los Angeles teams that took home the championship has never really garnered the attention and respect his contributions deserved. In both title seasons, Gasol, not Bryant, led the Lakers in VORP. Those title years are not referred to as the Kobe-Gasol teams in the fashion that the Laker teams earlier in the decade are referred to as the Shaq-Kobe or Kobe-Shaq squads.

One could also argue Gasol deserved the Finals MVP in 2010 for averaging 18.6 points and 10.6 rebounds per game against the Boston Celtics. In the fourth quarters of that seven-game series, Gasol shot 10-for-17 and, more importantly perhaps, his defense in that series made a strong case that he was not only the game’s best all-around big at the time, but his team’s best all-around player.

Lamar Odom’s name is often used to conjure the laws of Greek tragedy into the 21st century or to warn against dating Kardashians (and maybe there’s no real difference between the two). His basketball career was a good to great one, even if not always consistent.

He started with the Los Angeles Clippers and played briefly with the Miami Heat. He is one of the players the Heat traded for Shaquille O’Neal, and while Shaq and the Heat won a title in 2006, Odom’s contributions to the Lakers over a seven-year span allow for the argument to be made that L.A. won the trade. After all, the Lakers made three trips to the Finals in a three-year span, winning the Larry O’Brien trophy in two of those efforts.

Odom’s game was neither as graceful nor as conventional as Gasol’s, but the all-around play of both bigs made them the league’s best frontcourt over a three-year span (with a little help from Andrew Bynum). Both could pass. Both could score. Together they gave Kobe a margin for error, to shoot and shoot and shoot. Then more tragedy arrived, players departed and an Achilles ruptured.

(Oh, and Odom never made an All-Star team, which is something that can probably be explained away, but still feels like a glaring omission to my galaxy brain.)