It’s no secret that the late Kobe Bryant idolized Michael Jordan and patterned his game on it. For his part, Jordan said he saw Bryant as a “little brother.”
They came to the NBA in different ways. Jordan went through the great basketball finishing school of his day, Dean Smith’s UNC program, while Bryant passed up the chance to go to either UNC or Duke (he said at various times that he would have picked one or the other had he gone to college).
Both became known as relentlessly hard and fierce, though for Bryant, to an extent, it was a pose.