Heat Check: Which Kobe Bryant season is your favourite?

When thinking of Kobe Bryant's best season, there are plenty of candidates. Is it one of his 18 years as an All-Star? One of the five seasons that ended in a championship? One of his two years as a scoring champ? His lone MVP campaign? To pick a favourite is even harder, but since it's a matter of personal preference, our experts provide insight on their selections… Scott Rafferty : I'll never forget when Kobe scored 50-plus points in four consecutive games during the 2006-07 season. Kobe got it started with 65 points against the Portland Trail Blazers, responded with 50 points against the Minnesota Timberwolves, then went on the road to score 60 points against the Grizzlies in Memphis and 50 points against the Hornets in New Orleans ... on back-to-back nights. Kobe came back down to earth with an inefficient 23 points against Memphis Grizzlies two nights later, only to bounce back with a 53 point performance against the Houston Rockets to close the month. Considering Wilt Chamberlain is the only other player in NBA history to have ever had a similar stretch, I wouldn't be surprised if we never see anything like that again. Gilbert McGregor : I can't pick against the 2005-06 season – what Kobe did that year was unreal and will never be replicated. In December, he scored 62 points in three quarters (outscoring the entire Mavericks team), only to outdo himself by scoring 81 points (!) in a game one month later. And those were just two of his 27 regular season games with 40-plus points. What's most special about this season to me is that everything Kobe did was out of necessity. It's no secret that this is one of the least talented teams he was a member of, so he played a career-high 41.0 minutes per game over 80 games. Bryant led the league in scoring with 35.4 points per game and led LA to a 45-37 record, which was good for the seventh seed in an über-competitive Western Conference. While the series might have ended in disappointment, I'll never forget his late-game heroics in Game 4 of the Lakers' first-round battle with back-to-back MVP Steve Nash and the Suns. He had a nasty dunk and a 50-point game in that series, too. Micah Adams : I’m going with 1997-98, his second in the league. If you ranked all of his seasons from best to worst in terms of judging Kobe strictly as a basketball player, this probably finishes in the bottom five. But it’s my favourite because it’s when Kobe Bryant started to truly become “Kobe Bryant.” Despite still coming off the bench behind Eddie Jones, the 19-year-old Bryant was voted into the All-Star game, where he famously went at Michael Jordan and waved off Karl Malone multiple times to the point where the reigning MVP asked out of the game. His best game that year? A 33-point effort against Jordan in Chicago during which Bryant, in the middle of the game, asked Jordan for advice on his post game. The audacity, the brashness, the polarization, the popularity … this season was Kobe’s arrival. James McKern