NbaAllDay wrote:MavsDirk41 wrote:NbaAllDay wrote:
The "played with more all star/all NBA" players argument will never cease to amaze me. The argument is literally implying that a team is only relevant 2 to 3 players deep
The whole point of the Miami/Cavs teams were they were more top heavy. Obviously they win this idiotic argument. And most of them include all the times they DIDN'T even play together. The dishonesty is next level.
How crazy to think that one team has an extra 'all NBA player' yet it be clear the other team is better. Could it be, ust maybe they have clearly better depth?
And even if depth was the same (it's not) it's a shockingly bad argument to use because it doesn't even account for offensive or defensive fit, or literally any other peice of context that makes a team what it is.
Did James, Bosh, and Wade not agree to play together? Was their idea no?
When James got to Cleveland did he not call Love to recruit him to Cleveland?
Did he recruit Davis to LA? Westbrook?
Did all of these players have a high yearly salary? Have you heard of the nba salary cap? Most teams with 3 all star caliber players have weak benches because of this. It amazes me how the same people on here want to protect James’s legacy so much. If you think he is the greatest thats fine but quit making excuses. He played with who he wanted to play with. The Bulls had some great depth without a lot of high end all star players. Jordan won a different way. James forced it by playing with more high end talent.
It's LeGM when trades go bad but had nothing to do with him when he succeeds aye.
The funny thing about all this is it doesn't matter. Let's assume he hand picked everyone and constructed the roster. All it means is he wasn't the best at 'picking' his team. Even though its stupid and that's not how it happens.
Ok great, so what? It has NOTHING to do with how good of a player he is. The context behind how his team was constructed means nothing to how good he was as a player.
What is clear is his teams generally had less depth and the Bulls as a unit where often better and at least much deeper.
What amazes me is you pretend to play neutral yet everything you've said is so easily pulled apart into the narrative driven ideology it is against Lebron.
If you want to bring in Lebrons apparent decisions as a GM as a knock against his GOAT case then do the same for Jordan. Or is that not how it works? Because both would be stupid yet only one helps your case.
I think this is a correct point—LeBron the quasi-GM and LeBron the player are two different things, and LeBron the player isn’t really any better or worse based on whether LeBron the quasi-GM’s decisions.
However, I do think LeBron being a quasi-GM is actually still important context regarding LeBron the player. The reason for that is that I think it goes to issues of fit/portability. I often see people acknowledge that LeBron played on incredibly talented teams, but then they say the reason that these talented teams were not often super dominant is just because of issues of fit on the teams (rather than any weakness of LeBron). And, in a sense, I actually think that’s right. But I think LeBron himself is a major reason for the lack of fit. Being a ball-dominant player who is not a good shooter makes it really hard to fit very well with other great players. And that’s a serious weakness for LeBron as a player, which significantly limits his ceiling raising capability. The retort I see sometimes from people about this is that it isn’t particularly hard for good players to fit with LeBron, but rather just the specific good players he played with were not a good fit with him. In other words, this lack of fit isn’t indicative of LeBron being difficult to fit with, but rather just roster construction being bad and providing him with bad fits. And that’s where LeBron being a quasi-GM comes in. If you hand-pick large portions of your roster—including your co-stars—then it can be reasonably assumed that your roster has been built to fit with you as much as possible within the circumstances. Obviously there’s constraints (who is up for free agency, what peoples’ contract situations are, etc.), but LeBron (as well as his teams) obviously was constructing rosters specifically with fit with him in mind, and so we should generally assume that he put together an above-average fit for himself (and perhaps the best possible fit under the circumstances). If the result was *still* a team that was a bad fit, then I think the most reasonable assumption is that LeBron is simply very hard for good players to fit well with. After all, rosters kept getting constructed to fit with him while still having good players and yet they kept not being a good fit. And if LeBron is very hard for good players to fit well with, then this is a very significant limitation as a ceiling raiser.
And then that’s where the cliche “4-6 in the Finals” argument comes in too. On its own, I think that’s a dumb argument, because making the Finals is better than not making the Finals. LeBron wouldn’t be a better player if he’d lost in the conference finals those 6 years and therefore was instead 4-0 in the Finals. In fact, that’d be unambiguously worse, and yet the “4-6” argument would suggest that’d be better. And it’s true that LeBron’s team wasn’t favored in the Finals in the vast majority of those losses (the only exception being 2011, I believe). LeBron going 4-6 in the Finals isn’t actually a big surprise. But I think we should think about why that is. Why were there so often teams that were just better than LeBron’s team? There’s a lot of factors that go into that (including, for instance, Durant going to the Warriors). But one baseline reason this was the case is that LeBron’s teams just never really were historically dominant teams. They had great stretches and obviously some great playoff runs, but LeBron was never on a team that just was so good that it was head and shoulders above the opposition. But yet he *was* on extremely talented hand-picked teams. The fact that LeBron’s teams with a load of talent around him could never be historically dominant is, IMO, in significant part a reflection of his lack of ceiling raising ability (Note: Of course, this doesn’t apply to all 6 of those Finals losses. The 2007 Cavs certainly didn’t have the talent to have been a dominant team, for instance). And I think that’s caused by things discussed in the earlier paragraphs above.
