Did MJ really go against tougher competition?

[therealbig3]

Ostertag being considered a good defender due to his block numbers kind of proves the flaw with regards to these "the 90s had trees in the paint" logic...Ostertag was like Roy Hibbert, and was so freaking slow. He would get absolutely abused today, and he would be barely playable. Having slow-footed trees is actually the number 1 way to get lit up today.

But he was the starting center for the Utah Jazz in 97, and their first big off the bench in 98, when they went to the Finals.

[Pg81]

No, but he met a prime Kendrick Perkins. (shudder)

Yeah, let us forget the 3 times he met Tim Duncan in the playoffs in 2007, 2013 and 2014.

Duncan was not in his prime in 2013 and 2014.

He was still one of the best defensive players in the league.

[therealbig3]

KG was still in his prime in 08, and he was still arguably the best defender in the league from 2010-2012.

[Duke4life831]

Ostertag being considered a good defender due to his block numbers kind of proves the flaw with regards to these "the 90s had trees in the paint" logic...Ostertag was like Roy Hibbert, and was so freaking slow. He would get absolutely abused today, and he would be barely playable. Having slow-footed trees is actually the number 1 way to get lit up today.

But he was the starting center for the Utah Jazz in 97, and their first big off the bench in 98, when they went to the Finals.

No Im saying Ostertag was a good defender because he was a good defender. Every single defensive statistic shows this and the reason Ostertag was in the NBA and got minutes in the NBA was because of his defense. I never once said Ostertag would be a great defender in today's game. I said that today's Clippers are built very similar to those Jazz teams.

[bmurph128]

To properly analyse this would take days.

B. Methodology
Since many of us use advanced stats to rank players the obvious choice seems to use the same stats to rank teams. For this one would just calculate the minute-weighted average stat of the team.
Since it’s a bit of work I only did it for top12ish players (minus Russel, Wilt and only partially for pre-74 KAJ due to lack of stats back then)

I had to decide which stat to use between a few widely available ones:
RAPM and similar - would be my favorite but only available back to 2000 --> have to use boxscore-derived stats instead
PER - has almost no correlation with defense, strongest usage dependence
So it was between WS/48 and BPM. WS/48 seems to be more influenced by teammate-quality – particularly defensively.
I also picked BPM because it’s independently verified by its much better correlation with RAPM, a completely orthogonal, non-boxscore stat:
http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/bpm.html:
RAPM correlation:
PER 0.388
Win Shares/48 0.525
Box Plus/Minus 0.661

I’m sure there are going to be the usual replies along the lines of “BPM is trash – player X had a BPM of y in 19xx”. Fair enough, but there are always outliers and for the main approach here I calculate the minute weighted average BPM of a team between 15ish players in the RS and in the PS, average that, then do the same for the opponent and calculate the difference. Then I average that over 10+ years of a player’s career for some of the results below. So there is a lot of averaging going on that should even out the outliers quite well.

For 10 GOAT-list players I calculated the following values for their own teams and their PS opponents separately and combined for the RS and PS of each of their prime seasons:
tBPM = team-BPM = minute-weighted average BPM of the whole team
sBPM = support-BPM = minute-weighted average BPM of the whole team, but with the GOAT-list player minutes replaced by a 0 BPM player (a reasonable replacement level that’s also easy to use in Excel)
pBPM = personal-BPM = tBPM - sBPM (basically how much a player bumps up a team's BPM [BPM and fraction of team-minutes determine this])
matchup toughness = opponent tBPM - own sBPM – how much a player has to lift his team to make it as good as the opponent
RS and PS versions of all of these
50/50-weighted RS/PS averages of the above

I could not do this for Russell and Wilt (no BPM) and pre74 KAJ due technically to absence of BPM and ultimately of detailed stats in general back then since other stats are calculate differently pre74 as well.
(For KAJ I did approximate his pre-74 pBPMs by scaling his 1974 pBPM according the the PER and minutes played before 1974 vs. 1974 - obviously I couldn't do it for tBPM and sBPM due to work amount).
I only did the calculations back to 1980 anyway since anything before seems hard to compare anyway and doesn’t interest me personally.
Obviously, despite the averaging there is quite a bit of +/- left in these numbers – the reason I calculated them to 2 decimals is mainly to have less confusing overlaps in the graphs below.
Really the only judgement calls were using BPM (with WS the only real alternative, which agrees less well with the only available orthogonal statistical method), weighting RS and PS 50/50 and using a replacement level BPM of 0. Those are about as neutral as one could possibly be and don’t inherently favour any specific player.

C. Confirmation of the validity of the method:
C.1. tBPM in advancing PS rounds
To check if tBPM is a good rough measure of team strength here are the average tBPMs of the opponents of the last 37 champions (who as champions had on average high seeds):
1st round: -0.06 tBPM
2nd round: 1.01 tBPM
conf. final: 1.49 tBPM
NBA finals: 1.71 tBPM
champion: 2.36 tBPM
----> So that increasing tBPM each round is a good indication the method roughly makes sense.

C.2. best tBPM ranking
The strongest champion teams (tBPM) since 1980 were led by:
MJ 1996 3.88
MJ 1997 3.26
MJ 1991 3.245
Kawhi 2014 3.04
MJ 1992 2.95
LAL 2001 2.935
Bird 1986 2.88
MJ 1998 2.66
KG 2008 2.595
LBJ 2016 2.595
----> looks reasonable as well

C.3. tBPM matchup results
To check in more detail if the minute-weighted tBPM is actually a good measure of relative team strength I calculated the tBPM difference in all playoff matchups these players were involved in in their primes and checked if the win-loss result "predicted" by that matched the actual result of the playoff series.
For the 366 playoff series I checked (I counted series that 2 or more greats played in multiple times to save work):
320 (87.4%) were predicted correctly, while only 46 (12.6%) were predicted incorrectly with an average tBPM difference the wrong way of 0.38 tBPM and not a single series with a tBPM difference >1 tBPM predicted incorrectly.
----> this is an extremely solid result, considering that there are always surprises and evenly matched series. Even if you had a perfect way of measuring team strength (not saying this is) you would not expect a success rate >90%


C.4. PS toughest matchup vs. title chances

For further confirmation of the method here are the statistics on how often these players (in roughly their prime) won a championship when their toughest PS matchup (x=opp tBPM – sBPM) was:
X < 0: 100%
0 < x < 0.5: 82%
0.5 < x < 1: 63%
1< x < 1.5: 42%
1.5 < x < 1.8: 33% (without LBJ: 18%)
1.8 < x: 0 %
(there is one example where x>1.8 was done (by a player not on this list): Wade 2006 [1.995]– but that was aided by some unusual refereeing)

D. Results:
1. Star performance vs rings
First a look at the pBPMs (50/50 averages of RS and PS values) of the star players chronologically:


And here ordered from best to worst:
RS pBPM:

Here we see MJ, LBJ and KAJ clearly separated from the other all-time greats

PS pBPM:

Here MJ and LBJ are also clearly ahead while KAJ is bridging the gap between those two and rest - having similar peak seasons but falling off more.

RS/PS 50/50 pBPM:

Again MJ, KAJ and LBJ are so clearly separate that their curves are not even touching the curves of the rest.
This of course correlates well with those 3 being the pretty clear top3 GOAT candidates (disregarding Russel and Wilt)

Now to check how this personal performance correlates with titles:
RS/PS 50/50 pBPM, rings marked

Hmm, this looks like basically no correlation.

How about personal performance in the playoffs though:

There is a slight correlation (Bird won in his 3 best PS for instance) but overall it's hardly worth mentioning.

--> So the correlation between rings and personal performance of superstars is very marginal.
This may shock some in the “count the rings” camp but should not be a surprise to anyone capable of logical thought

2. matchup difficulty vs. rings
So what is logically the factor most likely to correlate with winning a ring? In my opinion the difficulty of the hardest matchup encountered in the playoffs.
So here I calculated matchup difficulty by calculating the tBPM (using RS and PS 50/50) for each playoff opponent of the 10 GOATish players I looked at and substracted the sBPM of their supporting casts that year (also using RS and PS 50/50) from that value.
The resulting value is the amount the star would have to bump his team's tBPM above the same team with a 0 BPM replacement player to make his team better than that particular opponent.

I considered adding the matchup difficulties over a playoff run, but ultimately the factor determining winning a ring or losing seems to be the difficulty of the toughest matchup that is encountered during a PS:


As you can see winning rings correlates exceptionally well with the difficulty of the toughest PS matchup.
For every player their rings are concentrated to an extremely clear extent in season when they had their easiest PS matchups and none of them won in their hardest couple of postseasons.

And the same is true when looking across all players (from above): the statistics on how often these players (in roughly their prime) won a championship when their toughest PS matchup (x=opp tBPM – sBPM) was:
X < 0: 100%
0 < x < 0.5: 82%
0.5 < x < 1: 63%
1< x < 1.5: 42%
1.5 < x < 1.8: 33% (without LBJ: 18%)
1.8 < x: 0 %

With that in mind, who among these stars actually had the hardest PS matchups:
(prime years except for KAJ pre74 - won almost all his rings in the 80s anyway)

This will certainly come as a surprise to some
In agreement with the overall theme the GOATlist guys with the easiest matchups on average also have the most titles (MJ's matchups rank as pretty hard because he had the hardest matchups in non-winning seasons (see below)

How about winning vs. non-winning seasons:
in non-title seasons on average:

So MJ actually had the toughest matchups in the seasons he didn't win. (roughly 99-03 Garnett level [overall Garnett is lower due to 04 and 09-12 (which I included here although questionably prime)
For perspective, the only one among these players who won a matchup with a tBPM-sBPM >1.8 was MJ in the first rounds in 88 and 89 (2.19, 2.41). That was somewhat facilitated by shorter series though.

in title seasons, on average:

The toughest matchup that was one by one of these players in a 4-win series was 2000 Shaq vs. the Blazers at 1.79.

Obviously this method cannot account for outlier performances in particular series – but as the correlation with rings shows it still works exceptionally well.

Here are the rings were won by these GOATlist players ranked by toughest finals matchup:
(unless something really unusual was going on my over-the-thumb estimate from calculating all these numbers is that they are probably +/- 0.3ish correct, so please don’t reply with “haha 2012 harder than 2016” when we are talking about a gap of 0.02)
LBJ 2012 1.735
LBJ 2016 1.715
LBJ 2013 1.605
Magic 1988 1.525
Hakeem 1994 1.265
Magic 1982 1.245
Bird 1984 1.195
TD 2003 0.945
Hakeem 1995 0.875
Kobe 2010 0.86
Shaq 2000 0.835
Magic 1980 0.77
MJ 1991 0.74
KG 2008 0.69
MJ 1997 0.59
MJ 1992 0.565
Kobe 2009 0.475
Magic 1985 0.24
Magic 1987 0.215
MJ 1993 0.21
TD 2005 0.21
MJ 1998 0.16
Bird 1986 0.075
TD 1999 -0.04
TD 2007 -0.305
Bird 1981 -0.38
Shaq 2002 -0.395
MJ 1996 -0.44
Shaq 2001 -0.745
TD 2014 -1.19

And here the same with toughest PS matchup instead of finals matchup:
Shaq 2000 1.795
LBJ 2012 1.735
LBJ 2016 1.715
LBJ 2013 1.605
Magic 1988 1.525
Hakeem 1994 1.265
Magic 1982 1.245
Bird 1984 1.195
Hakeem 1995 1.13
Kobe 2010 1.08
TD 2003 1.05
TD 2007 1.01
Shaq 2002 0.96
Bird 1981 0.91
Magic 1980 0.77
TD 2005 0.75
MJ 1991 0.74
KG 2008 0.69
Kobe 2009 0.595
MJ 1997 0.59
MJ 1992 0.565
MJ 1998 0.245
Magic 1985 0.24
Magic 1987 0.215
MJ 1993 0.21
TD 1999 0.195
Bird 1986 0.08
Shaq 2001 0.06
MJ 1996 -0.44
TD 2014 -0.87

And here is how much these players lifted their teams during their championship postseasons, chronologically:


Here we can again see that winning rings correlates extremely strongly with this “toughest PS matchup” criterium (obviously a strongly negative correlation)……

…….and basically does not correlate at all with personal performance:

Bird is the one exception here where rings actually do clearly correlate with personal peformance- he played a lot better than usual during his title postseasons - but even for him the correlation between rings and matchup difficulty is stronger.
KAJ was actually a lot worse during his title seasons – probably because he won a bunch of rings when he was old and won nothing at peak bball age [yet another classic example for rings correlating with support-performance, not player performance]

E. Some additional thoughts

First of all to repeat the main point from above:
Overall, there it is very clear that once a player has superstar impact him winning titles or not correlates _extremely_ well with the quality of his supporting cast and has almost no correlation with the variation in his personal performance (yes, there are counter-examples, but this is the overall-view.


Conclusion for this thread:
MJ's title runs were the 2nd most cakewalky after KAJ
In all of MJ's non-title season except '95 he had basically zero chance to win a title.
The difference in difficulty between his early and late seasons is gigantic and dwarfs LeBron's and even Garnett's

I can't believe this thread went on for so long after this post. This should have ended it.

[yesh]

MJ never had to face up to David Lee's elbow. So there's that.

[therealbig3]

So essentially, there's actual statistical evidence that MJ didn't face strong competition when he won titles, had no chance to win titles when his competition was strong, and people in this thread are basically completely ignoring that and continuing to glorify the 90s?

Typical.

[slothrop8]

It's been a great time for super teams recently. I'd say at the highest tier - LeBron's most recent Finals opponents were better than any of the teams MJ met in the Finals. The 13-14 Spurs won 62 games with only Duncan starting at least 70 (he started 74) and nobody on the roster playing 30 minutes per game. That was a team that if it cared about the regular season and had some injury luck could have won 70+ games if they wanted to. When they cranked it up in the Finals and started playing their main guys more minutes - it was something to behold. The Heat that year were a little thin, little top heavy - but they had LeBron James and were going for a 3-peat and they got straight demolished. That Spurs team was no joke. The Warriors that won it all were 2 in O and 1 in D and won 67 games, and of course last year's edition won 73 games. I'd say all 3 of those teams were better than any of the team Jordan faced in the Finals.

I've generally considered the '93 Suns, the '96 Sonics, and '97 Jazz as the best teams MJ played in the Finals - a slight cut above the '91 Lakers, '92 Blazers, and '98 Jazz, and I'd say also a slight cut above the '13 Spurs when Kawhi wasn't quite Kawhi!! yet (and definitely not Kawhi!!!!! like he is now), the '12 Thunder, the '11 Mavs, and even the '07 Spurs. However, with the Spurs teams it's so hard to say because Pop played his best guys so much more when he needed them than he did in the regular season - it's really tough to look at those Spurs' teams reg season ORtg, DRtg, NetRtg, and W-L record and draw good conclusions because it's so up in the air how hard they were even really trying in those reg seasons.

So, where have I landed. I'd say LeBron faced tougher squads in the last 3 Finals than MJ ever did. I'd say the rest of the Finals matchups for both there isn't a lot to choose. Jordan's 3rd, 4th, and 5th titles were against teams I hold in pretty high esteem but I certainly wouldn't be my life on those teams being definitively better than the '13 or '07 Spurs.

I'd say the path through the East has been softer for LeBron the last few seasons - but there were some better opposition in the early part of the decade. However, on the whole MJ faced tougher Eastern Conference opposition with the early 90s Cavs and Knicks being pretty good, and the mid-90s Magic with Penny/Shaq and even the Zo/Hardaway Heat being a defensive power in the later 90s.

Tougher Easts for MJ to navigate on the whole, tougher Finals for LeBron on the whole - not an awful lot to choose either way though I'd say. Obviously this is all strength relative to their era. I saw a few try to go down the path of dipping their toe in the water of overall quality of play or player being superior in MJs era - that I reject out of hand - though at least a somewhat respectable % of those guys could actually make rosters now unlike when that argument comes around as it does now and then about players from the '60s.

[likashing]

To properly analyse this would take days.

B. Methodology
Since many of us use advanced stats to rank players the obvious choice seems to use the same stats to rank teams. For this one would just calculate the minute-weighted average stat of the team.
Since it’s a bit of work I only did it for top12ish players (minus Russel, Wilt and only partially for pre-74 KAJ due to lack of stats back then)

I had to decide which stat to use between a few widely available ones:
RAPM and similar - would be my favorite but only available back to 2000 --> have to use boxscore-derived stats instead
PER - has almost no correlation with defense, strongest usage dependence
So it was between WS/48 and BPM. WS/48 seems to be more influenced by teammate-quality – particularly defensively.
I also picked BPM because it’s independently verified by its much better correlation with RAPM, a completely orthogonal, non-boxscore stat:
http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/bpm.html:
RAPM correlation:
PER 0.388
Win Shares/48 0.525
Box Plus/Minus 0.661

I’m sure there are going to be the usual replies along the lines of “BPM is trash – player X had a BPM of y in 19xx”. Fair enough, but there are always outliers and for the main approach here I calculate the minute weighted average BPM of a team between 15ish players in the RS and in the PS, average that, then do the same for the opponent and calculate the difference. Then I average that over 10+ years of a player’s career for some of the results below. So there is a lot of averaging going on that should even out the outliers quite well.

For 10 GOAT-list players I calculated the following values for their own teams and their PS opponents separately and combined for the RS and PS of each of their prime seasons:
tBPM = team-BPM = minute-weighted average BPM of the whole team
sBPM = support-BPM = minute-weighted average BPM of the whole team, but with the GOAT-list player minutes replaced by a 0 BPM player (a reasonable replacement level that’s also easy to use in Excel)
pBPM = personal-BPM = tBPM - sBPM (basically how much a player bumps up a team's BPM [BPM and fraction of team-minutes determine this])
matchup toughness = opponent tBPM - own sBPM – how much a player has to lift his team to make it as good as the opponent
RS and PS versions of all of these
50/50-weighted RS/PS averages of the above

I could not do this for Russell and Wilt (no BPM) and pre74 KAJ due technically to absence of BPM and ultimately of detailed stats in general back then since other stats are calculate differently pre74 as well.
(For KAJ I did approximate his pre-74 pBPMs by scaling his 1974 pBPM according the the PER and minutes played before 1974 vs. 1974 - obviously I couldn't do it for tBPM and sBPM due to work amount).
I only did the calculations back to 1980 anyway since anything before seems hard to compare anyway and doesn’t interest me personally.
Obviously, despite the averaging there is quite a bit of +/- left in these numbers – the reason I calculated them to 2 decimals is mainly to have less confusing overlaps in the graphs below.
Really the only judgement calls were using BPM (with WS the only real alternative, which agrees less well with the only available orthogonal statistical method), weighting RS and PS 50/50 and using a replacement level BPM of 0. Those are about as neutral as one could possibly be and don’t inherently favour any specific player.

C. Confirmation of the validity of the method:
C.1. tBPM in advancing PS rounds
To check if tBPM is a good rough measure of team strength here are the average tBPMs of the opponents of the last 37 champions (who as champions had on average high seeds):
1st round: -0.06 tBPM
2nd round: 1.01 tBPM
conf. final: 1.49 tBPM
NBA finals: 1.71 tBPM
champion: 2.36 tBPM
----> So that increasing tBPM each round is a good indication the method roughly makes sense.

C.2. best tBPM ranking
The strongest champion teams (tBPM) since 1980 were led by:
MJ 1996 3.88
MJ 1997 3.26
MJ 1991 3.245
Kawhi 2014 3.04
MJ 1992 2.95
LAL 2001 2.935
Bird 1986 2.88
MJ 1998 2.66
KG 2008 2.595
LBJ 2016 2.595
----> looks reasonable as well

C.3. tBPM matchup results
To check in more detail if the minute-weighted tBPM is actually a good measure of relative team strength I calculated the tBPM difference in all playoff matchups these players were involved in in their primes and checked if the win-loss result "predicted" by that matched the actual result of the playoff series.
For the 366 playoff series I checked (I counted series that 2 or more greats played in multiple times to save work):
320 (87.4%) were predicted correctly, while only 46 (12.6%) were predicted incorrectly with an average tBPM difference the wrong way of 0.38 tBPM and not a single series with a tBPM difference >1 tBPM predicted incorrectly.
----> this is an extremely solid result, considering that there are always surprises and evenly matched series. Even if you had a perfect way of measuring team strength (not saying this is) you would not expect a success rate >90%


C.4. PS toughest matchup vs. title chances

For further confirmation of the method here are the statistics on how often these players (in roughly their prime) won a championship when their toughest PS matchup (x=opp tBPM – sBPM) was:
X < 0: 100%
0 < x < 0.5: 82%
0.5 < x < 1: 63%
1< x < 1.5: 42%
1.5 < x < 1.8: 33% (without LBJ: 18%)
1.8 < x: 0 %
(there is one example where x>1.8 was done (by a player not on this list): Wade 2006 [1.995]– but that was aided by some unusual refereeing)

D. Results:
1. Star performance vs rings
First a look at the pBPMs (50/50 averages of RS and PS values) of the star players chronologically:


And here ordered from best to worst:
RS pBPM:

Here we see MJ, LBJ and KAJ clearly separated from the other all-time greats

PS pBPM:

Here MJ and LBJ are also clearly ahead while KAJ is bridging the gap between those two and rest - having similar peak seasons but falling off more.

RS/PS 50/50 pBPM:

Again MJ, KAJ and LBJ are so clearly separate that their curves are not even touching the curves of the rest.
This of course correlates well with those 3 being the pretty clear top3 GOAT candidates (disregarding Russel and Wilt)

Now to check how this personal performance correlates with titles:
RS/PS 50/50 pBPM, rings marked

Hmm, this looks like basically no correlation.

How about personal performance in the playoffs though:

There is a slight correlation (Bird won in his 3 best PS for instance) but overall it's hardly worth mentioning.

--> So the correlation between rings and personal performance of superstars is very marginal.
This may shock some in the “count the rings” camp but should not be a surprise to anyone capable of logical thought

2. matchup difficulty vs. rings
So what is logically the factor most likely to correlate with winning a ring? In my opinion the difficulty of the hardest matchup encountered in the playoffs.
So here I calculated matchup difficulty by calculating the tBPM (using RS and PS 50/50) for each playoff opponent of the 10 GOATish players I looked at and substracted the sBPM of their supporting casts that year (also using RS and PS 50/50) from that value.
The resulting value is the amount the star would have to bump his team's tBPM above the same team with a 0 BPM replacement player to make his team better than that particular opponent.

I considered adding the matchup difficulties over a playoff run, but ultimately the factor determining winning a ring or losing seems to be the difficulty of the toughest matchup that is encountered during a PS:


As you can see winning rings correlates exceptionally well with the difficulty of the toughest PS matchup.
For every player their rings are concentrated to an extremely clear extent in season when they had their easiest PS matchups and none of them won in their hardest couple of postseasons.

And the same is true when looking across all players (from above): the statistics on how often these players (in roughly their prime) won a championship when their toughest PS matchup (x=opp tBPM – sBPM) was:
X < 0: 100%
0 < x < 0.5: 82%
0.5 < x < 1: 63%
1< x < 1.5: 42%
1.5 < x < 1.8: 33% (without LBJ: 18%)
1.8 < x: 0 %

With that in mind, who among these stars actually had the hardest PS matchups:
(prime years except for KAJ pre74 - won almost all his rings in the 80s anyway)

This will certainly come as a surprise to some
In agreement with the overall theme the GOATlist guys with the easiest matchups on average also have the most titles (MJ's matchups rank as pretty hard because he had the hardest matchups in non-winning seasons (see below)

How about winning vs. non-winning seasons:
in non-title seasons on average:

So MJ actually had the toughest matchups in the seasons he didn't win. (roughly 99-03 Garnett level [overall Garnett is lower due to 04 and 09-12 (which I included here although questionably prime)
For perspective, the only one among these players who won a matchup with a tBPM-sBPM >1.8 was MJ in the first rounds in 88 and 89 (2.19, 2.41). That was somewhat facilitated by shorter series though.

in title seasons, on average:

The toughest matchup that was one by one of these players in a 4-win series was 2000 Shaq vs. the Blazers at 1.79.

Obviously this method cannot account for outlier performances in particular series – but as the correlation with rings shows it still works exceptionally well.

Here are the rings were won by these GOATlist players ranked by toughest finals matchup:
(unless something really unusual was going on my over-the-thumb estimate from calculating all these numbers is that they are probably +/- 0.3ish correct, so please don’t reply with “haha 2012 harder than 2016” when we are talking about a gap of 0.02)
LBJ 2012 1.735
LBJ 2016 1.715
LBJ 2013 1.605
Magic 1988 1.525
Hakeem 1994 1.265
Magic 1982 1.245
Bird 1984 1.195
TD 2003 0.945
Hakeem 1995 0.875
Kobe 2010 0.86
Shaq 2000 0.835
Magic 1980 0.77
MJ 1991 0.74
KG 2008 0.69
MJ 1997 0.59
MJ 1992 0.565
Kobe 2009 0.475
Magic 1985 0.24
Magic 1987 0.215
MJ 1993 0.21
TD 2005 0.21
MJ 1998 0.16
Bird 1986 0.075
TD 1999 -0.04
TD 2007 -0.305
Bird 1981 -0.38
Shaq 2002 -0.395
MJ 1996 -0.44
Shaq 2001 -0.745
TD 2014 -1.19

And here the same with toughest PS matchup instead of finals matchup:
Shaq 2000 1.795
LBJ 2012 1.735
LBJ 2016 1.715
LBJ 2013 1.605
Magic 1988 1.525
Hakeem 1994 1.265
Magic 1982 1.245
Bird 1984 1.195
Hakeem 1995 1.13
Kobe 2010 1.08
TD 2003 1.05
TD 2007 1.01
Shaq 2002 0.96
Bird 1981 0.91
Magic 1980 0.77
TD 2005 0.75
MJ 1991 0.74
KG 2008 0.69
Kobe 2009 0.595
MJ 1997 0.59
MJ 1992 0.565
MJ 1998 0.245
Magic 1985 0.24
Magic 1987 0.215
MJ 1993 0.21
TD 1999 0.195
Bird 1986 0.08
Shaq 2001 0.06
MJ 1996 -0.44
TD 2014 -0.87

And here is how much these players lifted their teams during their championship postseasons, chronologically:


Here we can again see that winning rings correlates extremely strongly with this “toughest PS matchup” criterium (obviously a strongly negative correlation)……

…….and basically does not correlate at all with personal performance:

Bird is the one exception here where rings actually do clearly correlate with personal peformance- he played a lot better than usual during his title postseasons - but even for him the correlation between rings and matchup difficulty is stronger.
KAJ was actually a lot worse during his title seasons – probably because he won a bunch of rings when he was old and won nothing at peak bball age [yet another classic example for rings correlating with support-performance, not player performance]

E. Some additional thoughts

First of all to repeat the main point from above:
Overall, there it is very clear that once a player has superstar impact him winning titles or not correlates _extremely_ well with the quality of his supporting cast and has almost no correlation with the variation in his personal performance (yes, there are counter-examples, but this is the overall-view.


Conclusion for this thread:
MJ's title runs were the 2nd most cakewalky after KAJ
In all of MJ's non-title season except '95 he had basically zero chance to win a title.
The difference in difficulty between his early and late seasons is gigantic and dwarfs LeBron's and even Garnett's

I can't believe this thread went on for so long after this post. This should have ended it.

Because it was a flawed analysis tailored to shine LeBron with a better light. Looking at the "hardest" matchup only and ignoring teams that played *multiple* hard matchups before even hitting the Finals.

Again, not a fault that LeBron only got to beat ~10 50+ win teams during his playoff career, but there are others who had to beat 20+ 50+ win teams while having played *fewer* playoff games than LeBron.

His analysis is a great example on how you can massage any data to show the results you want to see.

[therealbig3]

Because it was a flawed analysis tailored to shine LeBron with a better light. Looking at the "hardest" matchup only and ignoring teams that played *multiple* hard matchups before even hitting the Finals.

Again, not a fault that LeBron only got to beat ~10 50+ win teams during his playoff career, but there are others who had to beat 20+ 50+ win teams while having played *fewer* playoff games than LeBron.

His analysis is a great example on how you can massage any data to show the results you want to see.

Um, no. You just didn't understand the data.

He used entire post season runs, from every season these guys played.

[mixerball]

Using expansion teams as an exuse has to be the weakest argument ever.

How is it an excuse for the fact that 6 terrible expansion teams who could not win more than 20 games and even as low as 11 wins in 1998 were part of the reason that some teams had record highs in terms of win column. Or do you think it was the 25+ to 35+ win teams who feasted upon them?

There are always terrible teams in the nba

[therealbig3]

Using expansion teams as an exuse has to be the weakest argument ever.

How is it an excuse for the fact that 6 terrible expansion teams who could not win more than 20 games and even as low as 11 wins in 1998 were part of the reason that some teams had record highs in terms of win column. Or do you think it was the 25+ to 35+ win teams who feasted upon them?

There are always terrible teams in the nba

Yeah, but not to that extent, where that many expansions teams are added WITHOUT the talent pool to compensate. This was before the surge of Euro talent coming to the NBA that we see today.

[likashing]

Because it was a flawed analysis tailored to shine LeBron with a better light. Looking at the "hardest" matchup only and ignoring teams that played *multiple* hard matchups before even hitting the Finals.

Again, not a fault that LeBron only got to beat ~10 50+ win teams during his playoff career, but there are others who had to beat 20+ 50+ win teams while having played *fewer* playoff games than LeBron.

His analysis is a great example on how you can massage any data to show the results you want to see.

Um, no. You just didn't understand the data.

He used entire post season runs, from every season these guys played.

He has mentioned in multiple places that his data are off the "toughest matchup" and in a place even the "toughest Finals matchup". It was not "how tough was the entire post season run"

I have read his analysis multiple times and even posted questions about it un-answered by him.

Unless clarified by him I don't think you are correct.

[Pg81]

Using expansion teams as an exuse has to be the weakest argument ever.

How is it an excuse for the fact that 6 terrible expansion teams who could not win more than 20 games and even as low as 11 wins in 1998 were part of the reason that some teams had record highs in terms of win column. Or do you think it was the 25+ to 35+ win teams who feasted upon them?

There are always terrible teams in the nba

That is not an argument.

[LLJ]

MJ's title teams were extremely strong, so much more than every team in the NBA. They were stacked, probably more than any other teams featuring a non-MJ "GOAT" candidate.

The question is still subjective: were the teams in MJ's era so bad or were the Bulls just that damned good? It's hard to quantify this using just win totals and the like of opposing teams.

[Pg81]

MJ's title teams were extremely strong, so much more than every team in the NBA. They were stacked, probably more than any other teams featuring a non-MJ "GOAT" candidate.

The question is still subjective: were the teams in MJ's era so bad or were the Bulls just that damned good? It's hard to quantify this using just win totals and the like of opposing teams.

They were not bad per se. If not for the Bulls the 90s would have been one of the most evenly matched era in NBA history. 94 Bulls showed that they were at least an ECF/title contender with just Pippen and Grant.

The 90s Bulls were imho about as good as any other all time great team like Magic/Kareem Lakers, Bird's Celtics, etc.
Sawp those 90s Bulls with Magic/Kareem Lakers or Bird Celtics and the result would be more or less the same.

[LLJ]

They were not bad per se. If not for the Bulls the 90s would have been one of the most evenly matched era in NBA history. 94 Bulls showed that they were at least an ECF/title contender with just Pippen and Grant.

The 90s Bulls were imho about as good as any other all time great team like Magic/Kareem Lakers, Bird's Celtics, etc.
Sawp those 90s Bulls with Magic/Kareem Lakers or Bird Celtics and the result would be more or less the same.

I haven't checked the stats lately, but I recall the Bulls were often top 5 in both offense and defense for nearly all of their title years. The Lakers and Celtics weren't always top 5 in offense AND defense in the league except maybe for 1 or 2 years. I recall the Lakers being great offense but more like top 10-15 on defense.

I believe the Bulls, relative to their competition, were better than the Bird Celtics and Magic Lakers relative to theirs.

[Synciere]

This is an excellent question and the simple answer is no.

People like to say that the league was 'better' back then, but that's a completely subjective term. Was the league tougher? With more big men, hand checking and substantially harder fouls, I think it's fair to say the league was tougher. But was the overall talent level of the league where it is today? ABSOLUTELY NOT.

The NBA has expanded into a worldwide conglomerate, and with that comes more little kids playing and watching, and more talent. Add in the advances made in nutrition and health, and players today are more skilled and better than they were during the Jordan era.

Players today could EASILY compete with players back in the day. I'm not sure that the players then are in the same class as today's athlete. And for the record, I'm not one of these young whippersnappers; I remember the young Jordan era VERY well.

[SocalJazz]

538 has a ELO rating for all-time teams Link: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-best-nba-teams-of-all-time-according-to-elo/

Bull's Finals opponents '97 and '98 Jazz are 15th and 17th on that list, respectively.

Jordan's 6 titles on the Bulls make up 5 of the top 8 teams.

LeBron's top team is the 2013 Heat, 11th overall.

That link is from the end of 2015 season. Looked at updated, 2016 Warriors placed 2nd all-time.

[The4thHorseman]

Why does everyone focus on just the championship when they need to focus on the playoffs as a whole?

That's what Kobe fans like to do cause he played much better in the first 3 rounds than he did in the majority of the Finals he played in.

People remember what you did in the Finals, not the 2nd round.