Something like you are a woman or something like that?
How does this logic even work to begin with anyways.
Someone was once arguing with Karl Malone around the topic of impregnating 13 year old girls and then abandoning the baby, Karl Malone's argument was "it felt good man!", but that person said "You are morally corrupt, you sick pedophile!" According to you, under this scenario, Karl Malone "won" the argument because he was called a pedophile, so you, in your sick twisted mind, would stand there, as a third person, thinking, "Man, Karl Malone is right, impregnating 13 year olds and then abandoning the baby is right, because that other guy just called him a sick pedophile."
Losing in playoff rounds to define players, especially when they had a huge stream of success, is looking at the trees and missing the forest.
Kobe was swept, Shaq was swept, Magic was embarrassed, Jordan was swept, and Duncan never lost in an "embarrassing" fashion in the finals, and how was losing to a lower seed "embarrassing"?
Besides, it wasn't just that one thing, there are many others:
1) Highly inefficient
2) Never led his team in most advanced stats in any championship years
3) His best numbers were posted on bad teams
4) Lakers consistently have about the same record w vs. w/o him on the court
5) Posted some of the worst advanced stats by anyone that can reasonably be considered in the top 15, even top 20 all time.
6) His teams were horrible without the best frontcourt in the league, time after time, even in his prime
7) Had 5 seasons and 8 playoffs where he had a negative ORTG-DRTG
8) Poisonous personality that drove away Shaq (at least partially), drove away MVPau, threw Bynum under the bus, drove away Dwight, and rumoured to drive away a number of free agents.
9) Played in an age where perimeter play was emphasized, and had numbers similar to T-Mac, which no one in their right minds would put in the top 30 all time. Jordan had no peers, Bird was with magic, Kareem was with Wilt and Moses, Duncan was with Garnett, Hakeem was with Robinson and Ewing (dominated them as well), Russell had Wilt, Lebron had no peers, Big O had no peers, and Kobe had .... T-Mac and Vince Carter?
I can't, for the life of me, figure out how you can not understand the difference between missing the playoffs and getting ousted in the playoffs. One is being consistently bad over the course of an entire season, over 82 games, against all other 29 teams, the other is losing to a team that is better than you, and to one single team, that's it. It's like saying, "man, this guy really suck at sport, he is below average in every single one of them", vs. "Man, this guy really suck at sport, he can't play soccer at all, even though he can play basketball, baseball, hockey, football, badminton, gymnastics and everything else."
How was 2005 missing it in a compe ive year? I listed it out, the Lakers weren't the 9th seed that year, they were the 11th seed. Clippers with Elton Brand leading them finished with a better record than the Lakers, and Kobe was at his absolute prime. It's like if Lebron James missed the playoffs last year in the West if he played on the Jazz in place of Gordon Hayward. Yeah, the team is bad, but you'd expect an all-time great top 10 player to at least lead them to the playoffs, or at least, for Pete's sake, get them a better record than a team led by Elton Brand.