Rings - star vs. team/opponent strength

[Ferulci]

While I dont agree with the conclusion (I agree with MysticOscar), I can only applaud the work and quality of the topic.

[parapooper]

Spoiler:

Ok, this turned out a tad longer than originally planned. There are graphs sprinkled in for anyone to check if they want to bother reading

A. Motivation for this post
Recently there has been an unusual amount of ring-based arguments posted around here in GOAT threads and elsewhere. Since it seems to be hard to grasp for many that using team accomplishments to rank players is nonsense I did some statistical analysis and illustrated it with colourful graphs to make that a bit more obvious than it already is.
It’s a purely statistical, very objective approach that uses common sense calculations and treats every player exactly the same.
It tries to determine how good a player was each season, how good his supporting cast was that year (and not just his 1-2 best teammates career reputation), how good his opposition was and how big the gap between his supporting cast and opposition was, which the player has to overcome to win.
Obviously it’s not perfect and does not account for series-to-series variations in supporting cast and individual play, but as shown below it works very well for determining the relative strengths of teams and supporting casts.
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)

B. Methodology
Since we 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.

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 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:

This will certainly come as a surprise to some

How about winning vs. non-winning seasons:

So MJ actually had the toughest matchups in the seasons he didn't win.
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.
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:

(except for Bird who played a lot better than usual during his title postseasons)

Here you see who had the toughest PS matchups over their prime, on average:

in title seasons, on average:

and in non-title seasons, on average:



E. Some conclusions

Overall it’s pretty clear that despite all the nonsense about LeBron having it easy he seems to be the player with the hardest-won titles, followed by Hakeem, while KAJ’s, MJ’s and TD’s titles were relatively low-hanging fruit on average mostly due to their strong (and well-performing) supporting casts. So if you actually were to use rings and consider the achievement involved in getting them then rings would actually be a pro-LeBron argument, not a pro-MJ and certainly not a pro-KAJ one. Not that I would favour this argument - you can only beat who you meet in the playoffs and you can only beat who is actually beatable (with 1-3 exceptions in NBA history). So it would be just as stupid to punish MJ for having no barely beatable matchups during his final runs as it is to punish LeBron for having more unbeatable ones.
So this doesn’t say anything against MJ for instance – he never lost a winnable series (outside of 1995) and surely also would have won those rings with tougher matchups (up to a certain point obviously). But to use his 6 rings as a discussion-ending argument over LBJ just doesn’t make sense. The variation in play between MJ, LBJ, KAJ's individual seasons is minuscule compared to the variation in play of their supporting casts.
All this should be obvious anyway, but hopefully the stats and graphs might bring it home for some who were not able (or willing) to grasp that.

I commend you for doing all this work, I can imagine the time you must have spent on putting this together. However I really don't agree with your conclusion here.

You are literally down playing players that can integrate there game well and raise the impact of players around them.

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

Looking at this list, your intention of downplaying MJ and his championship runs is really off mark. The way I look at that is how portable MJ's style and how his game really integrates into winning championships. I mean, 91, 92 all the way to 96, 97, 98 championships having the strongest tBPM. I mean, how different are the make up of the 91/92 team to the 96/97/98??

Looking at the BPM of the 2nd and 3rd options for MJ for those teams....they either are not effected negatively with MJ, in some cases they have there highest BPM in there careers when they are playing with MJ

How about Lebron? Dwyane Wade, Bosh, Kyrie, Love have there lowest BPM in there prime playing along with Lebron showing a drastic decline from the year prior without him vs the year they play with him.

Then to create pretty graphs to show how much the sum of the impact his support (that decline due to integrating there game to LEbrons) and then compare it to there opponent is really lacking proper context.

Do you see why i think your conclusion is wrong here?

No, my conclusion is that using rings as an argument is nonsensical, based on the clear correlation of rings with team matchups combined with basically zero correlation of rings with star player performance. You are not even addressing that conclusion.

These stats just show good supporting casts played each season purely statistically. You are free to speculate on why they played like they did.
I just don't see the logic in your speculation at all- rather the opposite. I don't find it strange that guys that played as first options their entire life have a lower BPM when they suddenly play second or third option and are indeed worse second and third options than guys who excel in those roles. There are many very intuitive reasons (lower usage, not used to this situation, simply not good at 2nd/3rd option stuff, mentally difficult going 1 -> 3, different position, different system, different coach different team,..) for that - but instead it is somehow all because of LeBron?
I'm just looking at how well the supporting casts performed. If you want to argue that is was somehow unexpected and LeBron's fault that for instance Wade's output as an aging, injured guy playing as lower usage second option with first option skills was lower than first option peak Wade be my guest.

What is actually unobjective about the stats? It's basketball reference's stat, the minute weighted team average with 50/50 RS/PS mix - any suggestions on how one could possibly treat this in a more neutral way?
Is it more neutral to pick exclusively facts (and fiction such as Kyrie showing a drastic BPM decline from the year prior) that can be interpreted against LeBron, while completely neglecting to mention just as many facts that point the other way?

How would you feel if you had calculated these neutral stats and I would accuse you of intentionally downplaying LeBron vs. MJ (despite the fact that you are literally just calculating averages) because:
-Wade's and Bosh's BPM dropped by about half and below zero respectively when LeBron left
-the Bulls had a higher tBPM in '94 than they had as MJ's supporting cast in '93
-Pippen's BPM more than doubled when MJ left
- someone had "there highest BPM in there careers when they are playing with "LBJ while Pippen had by far his highest BPMs (at least RS) in '94 and '95 - the exact seasons he did not play with MJ
...
Yeah, that's how easy and deceptively convincing it is to look only for things supporting your preconceived notions and ignoring everything else (see US politics for a prime example of how that ends)

Anyone can pick biased, hand-selected facts (or fictions) to support their opinion
I posted stats that are as unselective and neutral as one can possibly be (within reason), which I show are meaningful by strong correlations, that happen to support my opinion

PS: stand by this but sorry if the tone was harsh/defensive - it's Friday night in Europe (tired, drunk, blazed)

[mysticOscar]

Spoiler:

Ok, this turned out a tad longer than originally planned. There are graphs sprinkled in for anyone to check if they want to bother reading

A. Motivation for this post
Recently there has been an unusual amount of ring-based arguments posted around here in GOAT threads and elsewhere. Since it seems to be hard to grasp for many that using team accomplishments to rank players is nonsense I did some statistical analysis and illustrated it with colourful graphs to make that a bit more obvious than it already is.
It’s a purely statistical, very objective approach that uses common sense calculations and treats every player exactly the same.
It tries to determine how good a player was each season, how good his supporting cast was that year (and not just his 1-2 best teammates career reputation), how good his opposition was and how big the gap between his supporting cast and opposition was, which the player has to overcome to win.
Obviously it’s not perfect and does not account for series-to-series variations in supporting cast and individual play, but as shown below it works very well for determining the relative strengths of teams and supporting casts.
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)

B. Methodology
Since we 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.

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 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:

This will certainly come as a surprise to some

How about winning vs. non-winning seasons:

So MJ actually had the toughest matchups in the seasons he didn't win.
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.
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:

(except for Bird who played a lot better than usual during his title postseasons)

Here you see who had the toughest PS matchups over their prime, on average:

in title seasons, on average:

and in non-title seasons, on average:



E. Some conclusions

Overall it’s pretty clear that despite all the nonsense about LeBron having it easy he seems to be the player with the hardest-won titles, followed by Hakeem, while KAJ’s, MJ’s and TD’s titles were relatively low-hanging fruit on average mostly due to their strong (and well-performing) supporting casts. So if you actually were to use rings and consider the achievement involved in getting them then rings would actually be a pro-LeBron argument, not a pro-MJ and certainly not a pro-KAJ one. Not that I would favour this argument - you can only beat who you meet in the playoffs and you can only beat who is actually beatable (with 1-3 exceptions in NBA history). So it would be just as stupid to punish MJ for having no barely beatable matchups during his final runs as it is to punish LeBron for having more unbeatable ones.
So this doesn’t say anything against MJ for instance – he never lost a winnable series (outside of 1995) and surely also would have won those rings with tougher matchups (up to a certain point obviously). But to use his 6 rings as a discussion-ending argument over LBJ just doesn’t make sense. The variation in play between MJ, LBJ, KAJ's individual seasons is minuscule compared to the variation in play of their supporting casts.
All this should be obvious anyway, but hopefully the stats and graphs might bring it home for some who were not able (or willing) to grasp that.

I commend you for doing all this work, I can imagine the time you must have spent on putting this together. However I really don't agree with your conclusion here.

You are literally down playing players that can integrate there game well and raise the impact of players around them.

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

Looking at this list, your intention of downplaying MJ and his championship runs is really off mark. The way I look at that is how portable MJ's style and how his game really integrates into winning championships. I mean, 91, 92 all the way to 96, 97, 98 championships having the strongest tBPM. I mean, how different are the make up of the 91/92 team to the 96/97/98??

Looking at the BPM of the 2nd and 3rd options for MJ for those teams....they either are not effected negatively with MJ, in some cases they have there highest BPM in there careers when they are playing with MJ

How about Lebron? Dwyane Wade, Bosh, Kyrie, Love have there lowest BPM in there prime playing along with Lebron showing a drastic decline from the year prior without him vs the year they play with him.

Then to create pretty graphs to show how much the sum of the impact his support (that decline due to integrating there game to LEbrons) and then compare it to there opponent is really lacking proper context.

Do you see why i think your conclusion is wrong here?

No, my conclusion is that using rings as an argument is nonsensical, based on the clear correlation of rings with team matchups combined with basically zero correlation of rings with star player performance. You are not even addressing that conclusion.

You did a great job in collating the data, but its the conclusion you derived from the data i don't agree (or call it interpretation if you like). No one in there right mind just thinks its just basic ring counting (ie Robert Horry analogy). Rings is just one of the main component measuring Greatness because at the end of the day, its one thing the great players play for, and it really encompasses everything of what worked for a great player (rather than filled with excuses). To dismiss it completely is missing the point of the end game for these players.

These stats just show good supporting casts played each season purely statistically. You are free to speculate on why they played like they did.
I just don't see the logic in your speculation at all- rather the opposite. I don't find it strange that guys that played as first options their entire life have a lower BPM when they suddenly play second or third option and are indeed worse second and third options than guys who excel in those roles. There are many very intuitive reasons (lower usage, not used to this situation, simply not good at 2nd/3rd option stuff, mentally difficult going 1 -> 3, different position, different system, different coach different team,..) for that - but instead it is somehow all because of LeBron?
I'm just looking at how well the supporting casts performed. If you want to argue that is was somehow unexpected and LeBron's fault that for instance Wade's output as an aging, injured guy playing as lower usage second option with first option skills was lower than first option peak Wade be my guest.

But Lebron played with just role players, then when people made excuses that he needed better players, now he had no 1 options (that he basically chose himself)...now were saying that "well these guys aren't used to being role players". I really don't like this type of excuses. Because Jordan (who literally) just played with role players (according to your reasoning) maximised there output. Is this luck? I mean it seems that all the different players (spanning close to a decade) that were integrated with him seem to maximise there impact.

What is actually unobjective about the stats? It's basketball reference's stat, the minute weighted team average with 50/50 RS/PS mix - any suggestions on how one could possibly treat this in a more neutral way?
Is it more neutral to pick exclusively facts (and fiction such as Kyrie showing a drastic BPM decline from the year prior) that can be interpreted against LeBron, while completely neglecting to mention just as many facts that point the other way?

Again I have nothing against the stats you have collated. Its actually very good piece of work. It's your interpertation that I have a problem with. It's skewed to fit a narrative. If you want to be unbiased, the real conclusion you can derive is that it takes a great synergy for a team to win championships (in which Jordans teams, thanks to your data, has an argument for greatest team runs from 1980)

How would you feel if you had calculated these neutral stats and I would accuse you of intentionally downplaying LeBron vs. MJ (despite the fact that you are literally just calculating averages) because:
-Wade's and Bosh's BPM dropped by about half and below zero respectively when LeBron left
-the Bulls had a higher tBPM in '94 than they had as MJ's supporting cast in '93
-Pippen's BPM more than doubled when MJ left
- someone had "there highest BPM in there careers when they are playing with "LBJ while Pippen had by far his highest BPMs (at least RS) in '94 and '95 - the exact seasons he did not play with MJ
...
Yeah, that's how easy and deceptively convincing it is to look only for things supporting your preconceived notions and ignoring everything else (see US politics for a prime example of how that ends)

Wade's dropped to ~6 when the previous 2 years he was around 10. Bosh dropped from around 2-3, to literally a replacement player of 0....its the same trend for Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving.

Using statements like "Pippen had by far his highest" jsut shows to me your bias. With Pippen, he was around 6-7 with Jordan....then he bumped up to 8 without MJ (small compared to Lebron's counterparts).

Horace Grant had his higehst BPM with Jordan. Dennis Rodman in his 30's had some of his higher BPM seasons with Jordan.

Anyone can pick biased, hand-selected facts (or fictions) to support their opinion
I posted stats that are as unselective and neutral as one can possibly be (within reason), which I show are meaningful by strong correlations, that happen to support my opinion

Your stats are unbiased. It's your conclusion or interpretation.

PS: stand by this but sorry if the tone was harsh/defensive - it's Friday night in Europe (tired, drunk, blazed)

No need to apologise. It's just a friendly discussion on interpreting the great work you did with collating these stats.

[G35]

What I learned during statistics is that researchers that go into a study with a bias will eventually find what they are looking for.....

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G935A using RealGM mobile app

[parapooper]

You did a great job in collating the data, but its the conclusion you derived from the data i don't agree (or call it interpretation if you like). No one in there right mind just thinks its just basic ring counting (ie Robert Horry analogy). Rings is just one of the main component measuring Greatness because at the end of the day, its one thing the great players play for, and it really encompasses everything of what worked for a great player (rather than filled with excuses). To dismiss it completely is missing the point of the end game for these players.

I wasn't posting excuses. I calculated how well supporting casts (and opponents) played on average each season judged by the objectively most reasonable and available stat, saw a clear correlation with titles and made an obvious conclusion based on all the data. A conclusion which completely agrees with common sense btw.
Rings being the point of the game has nothing to do with this analysis. Clearly player's can't just get rings by themselves even if they play at GOAT level, as demonstrated by MJ pre-91 for instance.

These stats just show good supporting casts played each season purely statistically. You are free to speculate on why they played like they did.
I just don't see the logic in your speculation at all- rather the opposite. I don't find it strange that guys that played as first options their entire life have a lower BPM when they suddenly play second or third option and are indeed worse second and third options than guys who excel in those roles. There are many very intuitive reasons (lower usage, not used to this situation, simply not good at 2nd/3rd option stuff, mentally difficult going 1 -> 3, different position, different system, different coach different team,..) for that - but instead it is somehow all because of LeBron?
I'm just looking at how well the supporting casts performed. If you want to argue that is was somehow unexpected and LeBron's fault that for instance Wade's output as an aging, injured guy playing as lower usage second option with first option skills was lower than first option peak Wade be my guest.

But Lebron played with just role players, then when people made excuses that he needed better players, now he had no 1 options (that he basically chose himself)...now were saying that "well these guys aren't used to being role players". I really don't like this type of excuses. Because Jordan (who literally) just played with role players (according to your reasoning) maximised there output. Is this luck? I mean it seems that all the different players (spanning close to a decade) that were integrated with him seem to maximise there impact.

Jordan played with role players that were more impactful (regardless of MJ) in their roles than most first options even as first options and even more so shoved into different roles, in fact he had some all-time great role players.
Bosh's BPM as a first option in Toronto (a role he had adapted to for years and which makes it easier to impact games) was already lower than Pippen's, Grant's and Rodman's in their respective roles. Same for Irving regarding Grant/Pippen.
Pippen had a 6ish BPM as second option with 24% usage - that's pretty GOATish for that role. Rodman has a case for GOAT rebounder and was a great defender - again pretty GOATish role player. Horace Grant had better BPMs in his prime (with and without MJ) than any player LeBron ever played with outside of Wade before he got old and injured in 2013 (and that really happened - Wade got even worse when LeBron left for Cleveland). Sure, Love fell of his outlier BPM season before more than one would expect - but then what would one expect from a first option going behind LBJ and Irving and a guy who does only rebounding? Would he have done better behind a 36% usage MJ than a 31% usage LBJ? I don't see the slightest reason to just assume that as you seem to do.

As for your "all players maximising their impact with MJ"-argument:
I showed in the post you quote that Pippen didn't
I show below that Grant didn't
I show below that Rodman didn't
Harper clearly didn't.
Kukoc had is prime age 25-29 (shocker), had the same BPM '99 without MJ as '98 and then slowly drifted off.
The bulls team was better on average in '94 than '93 outside of MJ, then they were worse again when MJ came back in 95
Who exactly are all these player that were so much better because of MJ?

What is actually unobjective about the stats? It's basketball reference's stat, the minute weighted team average with 50/50 RS/PS mix - any suggestions on how one could possibly treat this in a more neutral way?
Is it more neutral to pick exclusively facts (and fiction such as Kyrie showing a drastic BPM decline from the year prior) that can be interpreted against LeBron, while completely neglecting to mention just as many facts that point the other way?

Again I have nothing against the stats you have collated. Its actually very good piece of work. It's your interpertation that I have a problem with. It's skewed to fit a narrative. If you want to be unbiased, the real conclusion you can derive is that it takes a great synergy for a team to win championships (in which Jordans teams, thanks to your data, has an argument for greatest team runs from 1980)

Ok, the stats show based on neutrally derived data over 300+ playoff series of GOATish players:
a) individual performance (within the +/- of GOATish players) correlates very weakly with titles
b) supporting cast performance correlates exceptionally well with titles
Based on all those data I conclude that using rings to rank players makes little sense

Then you call that interpretation "skewed to fit a narrative" while proceeding to talk exclusivele about MJ/LBJ and pick a few data points that support the view that MJ maximized his supporting casts much better than LBJ, while ignoring all data points that don't agree with that.
Who of us is actually trying to skew data to fit a narrative?

How would you feel if you had calculated these neutral stats and I would accuse you of intentionally downplaying LeBron vs. MJ (despite the fact that you are literally just calculating averages) because:
-Wade's and Bosh's BPM dropped by about half and below zero respectively when LeBron left
-the Bulls had a higher tBPM in '94 than they had as MJ's supporting cast in '93
-Pippen's BPM more than doubled when MJ left
- someone had "there highest BPM in there careers when they are playing with "LBJ while Pippen had by far his highest BPMs (at least RS) in '94 and '95 - the exact seasons he did not play with MJ
...
Yeah, that's how easy and deceptively convincing it is to look only for things supporting your preconceived notions and ignoring everything else (see US politics for a prime example of how that ends)

Wade's dropped to ~6 when the previous 2 years he was around 10. Bosh dropped from around 2-3, to literally a replacement player of 0....its the same trend for Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving.

Using statements like "Pippen had by far his highest" jsut shows to me your bias. With Pippen, he was around 6-7 with Jordan....then he bumped up to 8 without MJ (small compared to Lebron's counterparts).

Horace Grant had his higehst BPM with Jordan. Dennis Rodman in his 30's had some of his higher BPM seasons with Jordan.

Of course those facts I picked in the MJ/LBJ response were biased. I was doing what you were doing but from the opposite viewpoint - that's what I was trying to show:
Anyone can pick a few nuggets supporting their agenda and make a seemingly convincing case when ignoring all counter-arguments.

Picking more one-sided factoids isn't really helping your case of being more objective than stats. Especially since you already seem to run out of supportive facts at around 3 of them and start making some "alternative facts":

-Kyrie's BPM was flat trending marginally lower before LBJ and went marginally up his first year with LBJ before his injury (even though all his value is in on-ball stuff)
-Rodman's BPM with Jordan was 3.0 - just like his career average BPM that includes rookie and older seasons (and is still better than Bosh's last seasons as first option in Toronto). His BPM with DRob was 3.6. Rodman's BPM with Isisah Thomas was 3.1. His career high was 4.9, with Isaiah Thomas. His top6 seasons were not with MJ.
-Horace Grant's BPM with MJ was 3.2 (and since I am not trying to be biased: 5.1 91-93) - it was 5.2 in his only non-MJ season with the Bulls
- Pippen's BPM was also higher without MJ

So clearly you need to check your facts

Pippen, Grant's, Rodman's impact is to a large part from off-ball stuff (rebounding, defense) - so it's no surprise MJ had only a small negative impact on those guys. They were doing the same thing with and without him.
Why compare that to guys making big changes and sacrifices (which would be larger with a 36%usage MJ) to play together?

I mean you strike me as a good poster (as far as I can tell) but if you look at this don't you think you are letting your pre-formed opinion influence your arguments?

Anyone can pick biased, hand-selected facts (or fictions) to support their opinion
I posted stats that are as unselective and neutral as one can possibly be (within reason), which I show are meaningful by strong correlations, that happen to support my opinion

Your stats are unbiased. It's your conclusion or interpretation.

Possibly, but what you are really saying is that my (pretty obvious I think) conclusion needs interpretation because it does not fit your view on a particular side-issue which you claim as truth based on a few hand-picked facts and "alternative facts" that support it while ignoring similar facts (even those in just-quoted posts) that support the opposite view

This forth-and-back of bits selected to support a view and the opposing view is just the kind of thing I was not trying to do. Obviously everyone has a tendency to do that, but I try (with mixed success, obviously) not to

PS: stand by this but sorry if the tone was harsh/defensive - it's Friday night in Europe (tired, drunk, blazed)

No need to apologise. It's just a friendly discussion on interpreting the great work you did with collating these stats.

Yeah, doesn't seem we will agree on this but good to keep it cool, which I admittedly have problems with sometimes.
Feel free to counter the above but I feel we are both completely drifting into LBJ-vs-MJ stuff, which is not what this thread is about (not that this analysis gets the level of attention of any "the ref didn't call a foul on this one inconsequential play in a meaningless regular season game"-thread anyway

[parapooper]

Since the opinion was voiced that titles do not actually correlate with team support because LBJ makes his teammates worse I wanted to check if that assumption actually makes a difference and calculated the RS sBPM of the 2011 Heat with their 2010 BPMs (same minutes)
2010 ---> 2011
sBPM:
1.05 ---> 0.47
LBJ pBPM
1.93 ---> 1.41
tBPM
2.99 ---> 1.8

So if everyone had continued producing the same as the previous year despite basically all of them being in a new city, having new teammates, new (often sub-optimal) roles, new coaches, sometimes new positions, lower usage and being the team everyone went after (which seems a tad unreasonable to expect) than their RS sBPM would have been 0.6 BPM higher but still below those of 5 of MJ's teams (92, 95-98).
That can be explained by a little known statistical quirk that few are aware of: there are more than 3 players on each team

More importantly, if you assume that it was indeed all LeBron's fault that the team was 0.6 sBPM worse than their average from their situations the year before it still doesn't contradict my conclusions in the slightest
If you assume LBJ made each of his teams as much worse as the 2011 Heat cast was in the above situation (extremely harsh and without any factual support, but whatever), then the correlation between support strength and titles is even stronger because LBJ was a bit of an outlier:




I'm sure there will be a bunch of posters crawling out and claiming that this correlation does indeed show LBJ made his teams worse - but that is fine with me because then they would also have to acknowledge that rings almost perfectly correlate with matchup strength so that using them to rank players makes no sense

[Ambrose]

I commend you for doing all this work, I can imagine the time you must have spent on putting this together. However I really don't agree with your conclusion here.

You are literally down playing players that can integrate there game well and raise the impact of players around them.



Looking at this list, your intention of downplaying MJ and his championship runs is really off mark. The way I look at that is how portable MJ's style and how his game really integrates into winning championships. I mean, 91, 92 all the way to 96, 97, 98 championships having the strongest tBPM. I mean, how different are the make up of the 91/92 team to the 96/97/98??

Looking at the BPM of the 2nd and 3rd options for MJ for those teams....they either are not effected negatively with MJ, in some cases they have there highest BPM in there careers when they are playing with MJ

How about Lebron? Dwyane Wade, Bosh, Kyrie, Love have there lowest BPM in there prime playing along with Lebron showing a drastic decline from the year prior without him vs the year they play with him.

Then to create pretty graphs to show how much the sum of the impact his support (that decline due to integrating there game to LEbrons) and then compare it to there opponent is really lacking proper context.

Do you see why i think your conclusion is wrong here?

No, my conclusion is that using rings as an argument is nonsensical, based on the clear correlation of rings with team matchups combined with basically zero correlation of rings with star player performance. You are not even addressing that conclusion.

You did a great job in collating the data, but its the conclusion you derived from the data i don't agree (or call it interpretation if you like). No one in there right mind just thinks its just basic ring counting (ie Robert Horry analogy). Rings is just one of the main component measuring Greatness because at the end of the day, its one thing the great players play for, and it really encompasses everything of what worked for a great player (rather than filled with excuses). To dismiss it completely is missing the point of the end game for these players.

These stats just show good supporting casts played each season purely statistically. You are free to speculate on why they played like they did.
I just don't see the logic in your speculation at all- rather the opposite. I don't find it strange that guys that played as first options their entire life have a lower BPM when they suddenly play second or third option and are indeed worse second and third options than guys who excel in those roles. There are many very intuitive reasons (lower usage, not used to this situation, simply not good at 2nd/3rd option stuff, mentally difficult going 1 -> 3, different position, different system, different coach different team,..) for that - but instead it is somehow all because of LeBron?
I'm just looking at how well the supporting casts performed. If you want to argue that is was somehow unexpected and LeBron's fault that for instance Wade's output as an aging, injured guy playing as lower usage second option with first option skills was lower than first option peak Wade be my guest.

But Lebron played with just role players, then when people made excuses that he needed better players, now he had no 1 options (that he basically chose himself)...now were saying that "well these guys aren't used to being role players". I really don't like this type of excuses. Because Jordan (who literally) just played with role players (according to your reasoning) maximised there output. Is this luck? I mean it seems that all the different players (spanning close to a decade) that were integrated with him seem to maximise there impact.

What is actually unobjective about the stats? It's basketball reference's stat, the minute weighted team average with 50/50 RS/PS mix - any suggestions on how one could possibly treat this in a more neutral way?
Is it more neutral to pick exclusively facts (and fiction such as Kyrie showing a drastic BPM decline from the year prior) that can be interpreted against LeBron, while completely neglecting to mention just as many facts that point the other way?

Again I have nothing against the stats you have collated. Its actually very good piece of work. It's your interpertation that I have a problem with. It's skewed to fit a narrative. If you want to be unbiased, the real conclusion you can derive is that it takes a great synergy for a team to win championships (in which Jordans teams, thanks to your data, has an argument for greatest team runs from 1980)

How would you feel if you had calculated these neutral stats and I would accuse you of intentionally downplaying LeBron vs. MJ (despite the fact that you are literally just calculating averages) because:
-Wade's and Bosh's BPM dropped by about half and below zero respectively when LeBron left
-the Bulls had a higher tBPM in '94 than they had as MJ's supporting cast in '93
-Pippen's BPM more than doubled when MJ left
- someone had "there highest BPM in there careers when they are playing with "LBJ while Pippen had by far his highest BPMs (at least RS) in '94 and '95 - the exact seasons he did not play with MJ
...
Yeah, that's how easy and deceptively convincing it is to look only for things supporting your preconceived notions and ignoring everything else (see US politics for a prime example of how that ends)

Wade's dropped to ~6 when the previous 2 years he was around 10. Bosh dropped from around 2-3, to literally a replacement player of 0....its the same trend for Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving.

Using statements like "Pippen had by far his highest" jsut shows to me your bias. With Pippen, he was around 6-7 with Jordan....then he bumped up to 8 without MJ (small compared to Lebron's counterparts).

Horace Grant had his higehst BPM with Jordan. Dennis Rodman in his 30's had some of his higher BPM seasons with Jordan.

Anyone can pick biased, hand-selected facts (or fictions) to support their opinion
I posted stats that are as unselective and neutral as one can possibly be (within reason), which I show are meaningful by strong correlations, that happen to support my opinion

Your stats are unbiased. It's your conclusion or interpretation.

PS: stand by this but sorry if the tone was harsh/defensive - it's Friday night in Europe (tired, drunk, blazed)

No need to apologise. It's just a friendly discussion on interpreting the great work you did with collating these stats.

You are just coming off very anti-Lebron here. At no point does the OP use these numbers as a Jordan vs Lebron battle. He even said if you want to interpret it as Jordan is the reason his supporting casts played better than go ahead.

[trex_8063]

I commend you for doing all this work, I can imagine the time you must have spent on putting this together. However I really don't agree with your conclusion here.

You are literally down playing players that can integrate there game well and raise the impact of players around them.

...............................

Looking at this list, your intention of downplaying MJ and his championship runs is really off mark. The way I look at that is how portable MJ's style and how his game really integrates into winning championships. I mean, 91, 92 all the way to 96, 97, 98 championships having the strongest tBPM. I mean, how different are the make up of the 91/92 team to the 96/97/98??

Looking at the BPM of the 2nd and 3rd options for MJ for those teams....they either are not effected negatively with MJ, in some cases they have there highest BPM in there careers when they are playing with MJ

How about Lebron? Dwyane Wade, Bosh, Kyrie, Love have there lowest BPM in there prime playing along with Lebron showing a drastic decline from the year prior without him vs the year they play with him.

Hmmm, while what you’re suggesting could hypothetically be true----if a star depresses the BPM of those around him, he may generally rate well by the means parapooper has used----I feel you’re drawing some broad conclusion from a mere few cherry-picked players (and looking at them outside of context).

Where Wade, Bosh, Love, and Kyrie are concerned, ALL of them were #1 options prior to teaming up with Lebron. BPM is heavily influenced by volume, so of course their BPM is going to fall somewhat when going from a #1 option role to a #2 or even #3 role. In fact, it’s bloody hard to find a #2 or #3 option with a BPM greater than about +7.5 (outside of the unique player combo/circumstance that was Westbrook/Durant in OKC, they’re exceedingly rare).

Someone like Horace Grant, otoh, goes from being a 3rd option next to Jordan, to being a 3rd option somewhere else (was once more of a 2a to Armstrong’s 2b on the ‘94 Bulls), so we don’t really expect a great deal of change in his BPM (except perhaps a slight uptick on the highest efficiency differential team, as BPM does have a pinch of winner’s bias). And indeed, we don’t see much shift when Jordan leaves compared to how Grant was with Jordan around, outside of ‘92 (his somewhat outlier statistical peak, which [non-coincidentally] was the single best efficiency differential team he ever played on). Presumably though, the years immediately adjacent to ‘94 would be a more accurate reflection of where he was as a player at that time (and he went from +3.7 in ‘93 with Jordan to +5.2 in ‘94 without Jordan). Even if we look at the time period ‘92-’93 collectively, his BPM over that stretch was +5.5; ‘91-’93 it was +5.1 collectively.

In short, I would say his BPM was more or less static with/without Jordan.


Pippen’s BPM is predictably highest in those two prime years without Jordan (when he had to become the #1 option). Why Pippen’s drop in BPM when Jordan returns to the line-up isn’t quite as large as what we see in Wade’s BPM when Lebron joins the line-up is, imo, primarily because Wade is a significantly BETTER #1 option than Pippen.


That’s not to say that one couldn’t validly argue that because some of Lebron’s teammates are more capable of being #1 options (Wade is certainly by far the most capable of shouldering that role in his prime), it means they are better/more talented players. That fits right into the “Lebron had better talent, but Jordan had better fit” arguments, and there’s some bite to it; although more recent impact data is suggesting that certain role players are much more valuable than “conventional wisdom” previously dictated, and this could be used as a counterpoint. Nonetheless, I could potentially buy into the notion that their “#1 option capabilities” is evidence that they are indeed more talented players.

However, within the context of this debate there are two important considerations one must carry with that assumption: 1) this argument only extends as far as the 2nd and 3rd best players on the team (and not at all to the remainder of the supporting cast, which people tend to overlook).
And 2) it doesn’t really prove much of anything wrt specifically how Jordan/Lebron lift or depress their teammates’ impact. Because except for exceedingly rare and unique player combos/situations (like Westbrook/Durant in OKC), there is simply a cap on how high of BPM a 2nd option player is going to be capable of (especially when you also have a very capable 3rd option); so naturally guys who were previously #1 options are going to see a drop compared to guys who are basically 3rd option players regardless of where they are (e.g Horace Grant). And the better a #1 they were, likely the larger the drop will be.


Beyond that discussion point, I wanted to look and see if there was any real truth to this notion that Jordan allows (or even potentiates) his teammates’ full impact [as measured by BPM] while Lebron suppresses his teammates’.
I looked at A LOT of teammates for each, preferentially focusing on teammates during prime years, especially near their contending years). I’m breaking them into three basic groups: BPM improved with star, BPM unchanged, BPM worsened with star. ****And fwiw, I’ve endeavored to be a little generous to the “pro-Jordan” side of this debate.
If you want to read all the details, that is what immediately follows. Though as that gets pretty long, you can scroll down to the “SUMMARY” section toward the bottom for a more concise review.

Lebron’s teammates
Teammates whose BPM went down with Lebron
*Dwyane Wade: was +9.4 in ‘10, fell to around +6 for the next couple seasons with Lebron. *again, the “#1 option going to #2 option” considerations apply.
*Chris Bosh: was +2.3 in ‘10, dropped to +0.4 in ‘11 with Lebron (ranged from 0.0 to +1.2 with Lebron, avg of +0.6). *again, same arguments as above apply, though here he’s actually going from being a #1 option to a #3 option.
*Kevin Love: was a +8.4 in ‘14 (though fwiw this is somewhat an outlier year; he otherwise had never been better than +4.5); dropped to +1.9 in ‘15 (has averaged +2.1 with Lebron thus far). *this is going from a #1 option down to #3 option.
Shane Battier: He was +2.5 in ‘11 (+2.3 in two seasons prior to joining Lebron); falls only as far as +1.7 in ‘12 when he joins the Heat (and avg +1.9 in first two seasons with Heat). So idk, this one could easily go into the group of “unchanged” below (as his age by the time he’s joining Lebron is definitely a factor in any decline noted), but I’m trying to be relatively generous to the other side of the table. I’ll even include Mike Miller in this group, too….
Mike Miller: was +2.0 in ‘10 (+1.6 in three years prior joining Lebron in Miami). Dropped to -0.6 in ‘11, though averages -0.1 in three seasons in Miami. The thing that muddies the water for me is that Miller is perpetually injured in these years (especially ‘11 and ‘12); when he’s finally semi-healthy in ‘13 is when his BPM goes back up to +0.6, despite being well past his prime at this point. His BPM takes big dip on joining Lebron in Cleveland in ‘15; however, it doesn’t improve at all in leaving Lebron and joining Denver (i.e. I think that’s simply the stage of his career that we’re in: declined output).
Ray Allen: +2.6 with Boston in ‘12. Drops to +0.2 with Lebron in Miami.
Larry Hughes: Not sure if he truly belongs in this group, looking at how his career after Lebron panned out, but whatev. Had a huge outlier individual season in ‘05 (+4.1 BPM; his previous best was +0.4) before joining the Cavs. Dropped to -0.3 in ‘06 with Cavs; -0.7 BPM in his combined 2.5 seasons with Lebron. However, he was marginally worse after leaving Cleveland.
Damon Jones: all over the map, but was combined -0.8 BPM in his career pre-Lebron, and a career-best +2.5 just before joining the Cavs. -1.1 BPM in first season with Cavs, and combined -1.6 BPM In three seasons with Cleveland (fell out of league shortly after departing Cleveland, however).
Donyell Marshall: suffice to say his BPM takes a dip upon joining the Cavs (though age likely becoming a partial factor, too).
Eric Snow: His BPM takes a definite dip upon joining the Cavs.
Ira Newble: a small dip overall in his BPM in Cleveland years.

Teammates whose BPM is basically unchanged with Lebron
Kyrie Irving: he was +3.3, +3.3, +3.2 in first three seasons without Lebron. First season with Lebron was +3.3. Next year was +1.6, though this was coming back mid-season after injury/surgery, etc.
Udonis Haslem: Haslem was a -2.6 BPM in ‘10. Falls to -3.3 in ‘11 (which is an injury-hit season for him); averages -2.9 in first three seasons with Lebron despite being past prime at this stage. I’d label that negligible change.
Joel Anthony: +0.4 in ‘10, improves to +0.9 in ‘11 with Lebron (averages +0.6 over three seasons with Lebron). That’s pretty negligible.
Mike Bibby: Was a -0.2 in ‘10, -0.3 thru half season with ATL in ‘11, then -0.9 thru partial season with Lebron in Miami. I’d declare that negligible, especially considering he drops to -2.5 the following season in NYK.
Chris Andersen: was a +1.4 in the year before joining Miami, +1.2 his first year with Lebron/Miami, +1.6 his second (despite being 35 years old at this point). +1.0 the following year (after Lebron left).
Norris Cole: was -3.0 in final season with Lebron (avg -3.7 in last two seasons with Lebron, which were only his 2nd and 3rd seasons overall--->likely still developing as a player). -3.0 in his first season after Lebron, and avg -3.3 in two seasons following Lebron (is now out of the league, fwiw).
Rashard Lewis: was -3.0 BPM in ‘12 (season immediately before joining Lebron); combined -0.8 BPM in ‘11-’12. Was -3.2 first season with Lebron, though +0.1 in his second (combined -1.4 in two seasons with Lebron/Miami--->his final two seasons at age 33-34).
Anderson Varejao: his BPM takes a significant dip when Lebron left (from +3.0 down to +0.8), though I think injury played a significant part in this. Was a combined +2.3 BPM in two prime seasons with Lebron, +2.6 in first four seasons without Lebron.
Iman Shumpert: virtually no change with/without Lebron.
Richard Jefferson: no change. Was -0.7 BPM in ‘15 in Dallas, -0.8 in ‘16 with Cavs/Lebron. Was combined 1.4 BPM in three seasons before joining Cavs, is combined -1.6 since joining them (despite being older, now 36 years old).
Channing Frye: minimal change (and if anything it’s positive)--->was +0.4 BPM in 1.5 seasons prior to joining Cavs, has been +0.7 BPM since joining Cavs (considering he’s only getting older, that’s neutral at worst; a positive shift at best).

Teammates whose BPM appears improved with Lebron
Mario Chalmers: imo marginal improvement while playing alongside Lebron--->was a -0.4 in ‘10, improves to only 0.0 in ‘11, though averages +1.0 (peaking at +1.4) during four seasons with Lebron. One might argue these could be natural improvements frequently seen as a young player becomes a veteran; however, he falls from +1.2 in his final season with Lebron down to -1.0 in ‘15 (with same team).
James Jones: imo is a marginal improvement--->he’s a -1.5 BPM in ‘10 (avg -2.3 in ‘09-’10 in Miami); improves to +0.9 in ‘11. Age (and/or injury) increasingly take their toll over the next SIX seasons (all played with Lebron in either Miami or Cleveland), though he’s still an average of -1.2 BPM in those six years combined (still slightly better than his -1.5 (‘10) or -2.3 (‘09-’10). His career best BPM came in Portland (+1.2); but otherwise his 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-best BPM’s all occurred with Lebron, despite being >age 30 for all of his time with Lebron.
Dexter Pittman: fwiw, had his one actual serviceable season (301 minutes played) with the ‘12 Heat (10.4 PER, .101 WS/48, -4.0 BPM). Was otherwise a -0.2 PER, -.155 WS/48, -19.2 BPM in a grand total of 46 minutes played (now out of league).
Daniel Gibson: -0.4 BPM in final season alongside Lebron, combined -0.5 in four seasons playing with Lebron. Was -1.0 in first year without Lebron, combined -1.9 in three seasons without Lebron (out of the league well before his 30th birthday).
Zydrunas Ilgauskas: -0.9 in the season immediately before Lebron’s arrival; a combined -0.3 in five seasons prior to Lebron. +1.7 BPM in first season with Lebron, and combined +1.0 to +1.3 BPM in the 5-6 prime years played with Lebron (depending on whether or not you want to call ‘09 his prime).
Delonte West: a combined +0.4 BPM in 3.5 seasons prior to joining Lebron in Cleveland, though -3.3 BPM in half season with Seattle just before joining the Cavs. +0.3 BPM in his first half-season with Cleveland, career-best +2.3 BPM in first full season with Cavs; combined +1.1 avg BPM in his 2.5 seasons with Lebron. +0.2 in his two seasons following Lebron.
Drew Gooden: was -3.3 BPM in year(s) before joining Lebron in Cleveland. +0.9 BPM in first season with Cavs. Combined -0.4 BPM in 3.5 years with Cavs. Combined -1.3 BPM in what might be called 4.5 “prime” years after Lebron.
Sasha Pavlovic: Is kinda all over the map in his years with Lebron (as high as -0.7 BPM, or as low as -5.1), but averaged -2.9 BPM in his five seasons in Cleveland. Was a career worst -7.0 BPM in his first season after Lebron, and a combined -4.4 BPM during his final four seasons (after Lebron); -3.7 BPM in his rookie year before Lebron, too, fwiw.
Tristan Thompson: combined -1.3 BPM in two seasons prior to Lebron’s return to Cleveland. Combined +0.8 BPM with Lebron.
Matthew Dellavedova: combined -2.1 BPM in three seasons with Lebron (-1.6 in ‘16). Is -4.4 BPM so far this season with Milwaukee.
J.R.Smith: -0.5 BPM in last 1.5 seasons with NY. +1.8 BPM In first 1.5 seasons with Lebron in Cleveland.
Timofey Mosgov: a combined -1.0 BPM in the 3.5 seasons before joining the Cavs (peaking at -0.5). Is +0.6 in his first half-season with the Cavs, combined -0.2 BPM in 1.5 seasons with Cavs. Has been a -3.6 BPM player with the Lakers this season after leaving Cleveland.


Now let’s look at the bulk of Jordan’s teammates, again sort of preferentially focusing on prime years and especially near contending years…..
MJ’s teammates
Teammates whose BPM went down with MJ
*Scottie Pippen: was +4.3 in ‘93, combined +5.7 in ‘91-’93; jumped to +8.3 in ‘94 without Jordan, and +7.8 in ‘95 (mostly without Jordan). Fell to +6.8 when Jordan back for full season (and only went down from there). *same factors as above apply, in going from #2 option to #1, and vice versa.
Bill Cartwright: was a +0.9 BPM in his final season in NY, then fell precipitously to -4.8 in his first season in Chicago. Improved a little for a few years after, but was still a combined -2.7 BPM in his first three or four seasons in Chicago.
Cliff Levingston: +0.5 BPM in final season with Atlanta (avg +1.3 BPM in final two seasons there); -1.2 BPM in first season with Bulls (avg -0.1 BPM during first two seasons in Bulls uniform).
Dennis Hopson: Avg -1.5 BPM in two seasons with NJ prior to joining Bulls for ‘91 season. Was -3.8 BPM in Chicago (then improved to -1.3 BPM for one season after with Sacramento).
Mike Brown: -4.4 BPM with ‘88 Bulls. Improves to -2.6 BPM with ‘89 Jazz (and avg -2.0 BPM over next SIX seasons without Jordan).
Sedale Threatt: -2.4 BPM during one season with Bulls in late 80’s; immediately improved to +2.9 BPM in first half-season after leaving Chicago (though lolsamplesize for that). +0.9 in his first 1.5 seasons after leaving Chicago, though, and +0.6 BPM collectively over his first 4.5 seasons after leaving Chicago. Otoh, he was roughly a -3.0 BPM the year before joining the Bulls. I’ll ultimately classify this as a negative effect, as during the ‘88 season (mid-season trade to Seattle) he was -2.8 for the Bulls and +2.9 for the Sonics.

Teammates whose BPM is basically unchanged with MJ
Horace Grant: had an outlier BPM peak of +7.3 in ‘92, though was otherwise an average +5.1 in ‘91-’93 (and only +3.7 BPM in ‘93). Was +5.2 in ‘94 without Jordan.
**John Paxson: **I’m not entirely sure which group to place him in. In his first season with Chicago (played mostly without Jordan, due to injury) he was a -2.9 BPM. Over the next four seasons played with Jordan he was a -2.7 BPM combined (no real change); and the worst BPM of his prime (-3.4) was with the ‘89 Bulls. However, in ‘91-’92 he was a combined -1.3 BPM (best stretch of his career). This is around the time when Jordan relinquished the reins to his team somewhat; also when Pippen became much more relevant as a play-maker; also not uncommon to simply see relatively non-athletic guards peak around 30-31 years of age, too. Perhaps a combination of all of these factors, idk.
B.J.Armstrong: was a -0.9 BPM in ‘93 in Chicago (his career best to that point). With the ‘94 Bulls he’s again a -0.9 BPM. In ‘95 (played mostly without Jordan) he improves to a new career best +0.2 BPM. In ‘96 with the Warriors he’s +0.1. So if anything, he’s better without Jordan, but I’m again trying to be generous to the other side of the table and simply assume this is the result of natural player development.
Toni Kukoc: was +4.3 BPM in ‘95 (mostly without Jordan). Is then +4.5 in ‘96 and ‘97, +2.9 in ‘98, then +2.9 in ‘99 without Jordan.
Bill Wennington: -1.5 BPM for ‘94 Bulls (2nd-best of his career, without Jordan), -3.3 BPM in ‘95 (mostly without Jordan). -2.5 BPM in first full season with Jordan, though only gets worse from there.
Craig Hodges: -0.8 BPM in 2.5 seasons prior to joining Bulls. -1.2 BPM in first 1.5 seasons with Bulls.
Dennis Rodman: +3.6 BPM for ‘94-’95 Spurs (inlcuding +3.8 in '95). Is +3.2 in both ‘96 and ‘97 for Bulls, +2.7 in ‘98. So he does actually have a small fall-off, though he’s also getting old at this point.
Jud Buechler: Never had a positive BPM prior to the second 3peat Bulls--->was -1.6 BPM with the ‘94 Warriors, -0.1 BPM with ‘95 Bulls (mostly without Jordan). His BPM bounces around a bit over the next three years with the Bulls (but avg’s +0.3 BPM). But then hits a career best +1.9 BPM with the ‘99 Pistons.
Randy Brown: +0.6 BPM with ‘95 Kings, falls to -0.3 with ‘96 Bulls. Overall was avg of -0.9 BPM from ‘93-’95 with Kings; avg of -1.0 during second 3-peat. Was -2.1 BPM with ‘98 Bulls, -1.8 with ‘99 Bulls (without Jordan). If any change can be declared, it would probably be a marginal negative change associated with being Jordan’s teammate, but again: I am trying to be a touch generous to the pro-Jordan side of things.
Dickey Simpkins: -4.9 BPM with ‘95 Bulls (mostly without Jordan). -3.7 BPM in 2.5 seasons with Jordan’s Bulls. -2.2 BPM in first 1.5 seasons without Jordan.
Charles Oakley: he actually had a marginal improvement in years WITHOUT Jordan, but I’m placing him in this group because his improvements may just be related to natural player development (most players do hit their best stretch approximately age 27-30).
Dave Corzine: no relevant change.
Will Perdue: avg -0.4 BPM during first 3-peat. Falls to -4.1 BPM with ‘94 Bulls, but was an injury-decimated season for him (played <400 minutes total that year, majority coming AFTER his injury); was a +0.4 BPM with the ‘95 Bulls (mostly without Jordan). Avg -0.4 BPM over next four seasons after leaving Chicago.
Sam Vincent: no relevant trend noted.
Stacey King: was a -2.4 BPM in ‘93, and -2.4 collectively from ‘90-’93. -2.9 in first season without Jordan. Declined from there, however, there were significant injuries (as well as major gluttony/health issues) involved.

Teammates whose BPM appears improved with MJ
Luc Longley: was -1.9 BPM in half-season with Minny before joining the Bulls. -0.3 BPM in 4.5 seasons with Chicago. Fell to -2.4 BPM In first season after Chicago.
Scott Williams: +0.5 BPM in ‘92-’93 combined. **-1.2 for ‘94 Bulls (**difficult to say whether this is real, though, as this was a half-season after coming back from injury). However, his BPM does get even worse upon leaving Chicago.
Steve Kerr: -0.4 BPM for the ‘94-’95 Bulls; +2.4 avg BPM for ‘96-’97 Bulls.
Brad Sellers: -1.9 BPM in three seasons with Jordan; -4.8 BPM in next two seasons without Jordan.
Ron Harper: +1.5 BPM in *four seasons played prior to Jordan (*fraction of that fourth season Jordan was around). +2.5 BPM for ‘96-’98 Bulls.
Jason Caffey: -0.9 BPM in final 1.5 seasons with Jordan’s Bulls. -2.7 BPM in first three seasons after leaving Chicago.


SUMMARY:
For quick reference, I’ll just list the teammate’s name in one of the three categories (BPM improved with star, worsened with star, or unchanged). And for both the improved and worsened categories, I’ll color-code them red if the change from surrounding years averages ~2.5 or higher, blue if ~1.2 or less, and just leave standard black if the change is somewhere in between. And again * if some of the conditions discussed at top of post apply.
And one last time, I want to emphasize I was (imo) marginally generous to the pro-Jordan side of the argument wrt who I did or did not place in the “unchanged” category.

Lebron’s teammates
BPM worsened with Lebron
*Dwyane Wade
*Kevin Love
*Chris Bosh
Shane Battier
Mike Miller
Ray Allen
Larry Hughes
Damon Jones
Donyell Marshall
Eric Snow
Ira Newble

BPM unchanged with Lebron
Kyrie Irving
Udonis Haslem
Joel Anthony
Mike Bibby
Chris Andersen
Norris Cole
Rashard Lewis
Anderson Varejao
Iman Shumpert
Richard Jefferson
Channing Frye

BPM improved with Lebron
Mario Chalmers
James Jones
Dexter Pittman
Daniel Gibson
Zydrunas Ilgauskas
Delonte West
Drew Gooden
Sasha Pavlovic
Tristan Thompson
Matthew Dellavedova
J.R. Smith
Timofey Mosgov


Jordan’s teammates
BPM worsened with Jordan
*Scottie Pippen
Bill Cartwright
Cliff Levingston
Dennis Hopson
Mike Brown
Sedale Threatt

BPM unchanged with Jordan
Horace Grant
John Paxson
B.J. Armstrong
Toni Kukoc
Bill Wennington
Craig Hodges
Dennis Rodman
Jud Buechler
Randy Brown
Dickey Simpkins
Charles Oakley
Dave Corzine
Stacey King
Will Perdue
Sam Vincent

BPM improved with Jordan
Luc Longley
Steve Kerr
Scott Williams
Brad Sellers
Ron Harper
Jason Caffey


So I don't see a lot by way of distinction here between the two as far as who's helping their teammates succeed and who's crippling their teammates' impact. Looks nearly equivalent. Maybe a marginal edge to Jordan, but kinda debatable (and certainly splittin' hairs).

[mysticOscar]

I wasn't posting excuses. I calculated how well supporting casts (and opponents) played on average each season judged by the objectively most reasonable and available stat, saw a clear correlation with titles and made an obvious conclusion based on all the data. A conclusion which completely agrees with common sense btw.
Rings being the point of the game has nothing to do with this analysis. Clearly player's can't just get rings by themselves even if they play at GOAT level, as demonstrated by MJ pre-91 for instance.

Of course...no one person can win it by themselves...not even Jordan...you need to be able to integrate your game so everyone in your team can maximise there synergy with the aim to win it all. This is my point. What is the point of dominating all the statistics on your team if it doesn't meet the main objective? We all know these great players are dominant in there own way.....high/low usage impact players with different roles etc.. what is the point of dominating certain stats, or a sum of the stats on your team when in reality your actually not maximising your team's synergy? Do we measure GOAT by stats alone? Then how do we put weight on which stats are important if we ignore rings and team success?

Pre 91 MJ was a dominant player...but no way was he near as complete as he was 91 and after. I was not as impressed with pre 90's vs 91+ MJ as much as some posters here (who merely look at stats). Phil Jackson instilled the philosophy when he took over about ensuring everyone in the team feels like they are contributing and involved...and MJ learned to trust his team mates and to be just as effective without having the ball....which really made him that much more of a complete player for the betterment of the team.

Jordan played with role players that were more impactful (regardless of MJ) in their roles than most first options even as first options and even more so shoved into different roles, in fact he had some all-time great role players.

Bosh's BPM as a first option in Toronto (a role he had adapted to for years and which makes it easier to impact games) was already lower than Pippen's, Grant's and Rodman's in their respective roles. Same for Irving regarding Grant/Pippen.
Pippen had a 6ish BPM as second option with 24% usage - that's pretty GOATish for that role. Rodman has a case for GOAT rebounder and was a great defender - again pretty GOATish role player. Horace Grant had better BPMs in his prime (with and without MJ) than any player LeBron ever played with outside of Wade before he got old and injured in 2013 (and that really happened - Wade got even worse when LeBron left for Cleveland). Sure, Love fell of his outlier BPM season before more than one would expect - but then what would one expect from a first option going behind LBJ and Irving and a guy who does only rebounding? Would he have done better behind a 36% usage MJ than a 31% usage LBJ? I don't see the slightest reason to just assume that as you seem to do.

Jordan must have been the luckiest player. Having drafted 2 of some all-time great role players. And Lebron one of the unluckiest. Are we really just going to categorise it like this? I don't believe Horace and Pippen were that exceptional coming into the league. Are we not going to credit Jordan at all in allowing these "role players" to be able to develop and maximise there impact?

As for your "all players maximising their impact with MJ"-argument:
I showed in the post you quote that Pippen didn't
I show below that Grant didn't
I show below that Rodman didn't
Harper clearly didn't.
Kukoc had is prime age 25-29 (shocker), had the same BPM '99 without MJ as '98 and then slowly drifted off.
The bulls team was better on average in '94 than '93 outside of MJ, then they were worse again when MJ came back in 95
Who exactly are all these player that were so much better because of MJ?

I never said "All players maximising their impact".....i said "Some". I give you the benefit that you mis read my post. Please re-read.

Ok, the stats show based on neutrally derived data over 300+ playoff series of GOATish players:
a) individual performance (within the +/- of GOATish players) correlates very weakly with titles
b) supporting cast performance correlates exceptionally well with titles
Based on all those data I conclude that using rings to rank players makes little sense

If you're aim is who has the just the most dominant stats to rank your players...then go ahead. It sounds like i wont change your mind regardless of waht i say.

Then you call that interpretation "skewed to fit a narrative" while proceeding to talk exclusivele about MJ/LBJ and pick a few data points that support the view that MJ maximized his supporting casts much better than LBJ, while ignoring all data points that don't agree with that.

Such as? The data you presented had a strong case to show that MJ allowed his team mates to maximise there impact. I mean, his team had the highest tBPM in his championship seasons. His team's sBPM remaining high while Jordan's personal BPM is also high. Your data points showed that LBJ consistently for how many seasons...regardless of what team mates had low sBPM. Is there something to that or he is just extremely unlucky?

Of course I picked 2nd and 3rd options since they are the ones that will skew the sBPM the most right?

Of course those facts I picked in the MJ/LBJ response were biased. I was doing what you were doing but from the opposite viewpoint - that's what I was trying to show:
Anyone can pick a few nuggets supporting their agenda and make a seemingly convincing case when ignoring all counter-arguments.

Picking more one-sided factoids isn't really helping your case of being more objective than stats. Especially since you already seem to run out of supportive facts at around 3 of them and start making some "alternative facts":

-Kyrie's BPM was flat trending marginally lower before LBJ and went marginally up his first year with LBJ before his injury (even though all his value is in on-ball stuff)
-Rodman's BPM with Jordan was 3.0 - just like his career average BPM that includes rookie and older seasons (and is still better than Bosh's last seasons as first option in Toronto). His BPM with DRob was 3.6. Rodman's BPM with Isisah Thomas was 3.1. His career high was 4.9, with Isaiah Thomas. His top6 seasons were not with MJ.
-Horace Grant's BPM with MJ was 3.2 (and since I am not trying to be biased: 5.1 91-93) - it was 5.2 in his only non-MJ season with the Bulls
- Pippen's BPM was also higher without MJ

So clearly you need to check your facts

Again you need to re-read the post you are originally quoting. I never said all of them were higher BPM with Jordan...i said they werent really negatively impacted with MJ...some of them were actually higher with Jordan than without.

Pippen, Grant's, Rodman's impact is to a large part from off-ball stuff (rebounding, defense) - so it's no surprise MJ had only a small negative impact on those guys. They were doing the same thing with and without him.
Why compare that to guys making big changes and sacrifices (which would be larger with a 36%usage MJ) to play together?

I mean you strike me as a good poster (as far as I can tell) but if you look at this don't you think you are letting your pre-formed opinion influence your arguments?

How can you accuse me of that when you had your clear Lebron agenda surrounding those stats? I mean, i don't know you as a poster, nor have I read any of your post...but i don't think I will be going on a whim to say that your general posts would be pro Lebron?

I have nothing against Lebron...i have stated that I have Lebron in my top 3 of all time even tho many ppl don't even have them in there top 5. But I just dont like it how his fans try to shove these agenda based stats and claim it as unbiased.

Possibly, but what you are really saying is that my (pretty obvious I think) conclusion needs interpretation because it does not fit your view on a particular side-issue which you claim as truth based on a few hand-picked facts and "alternative facts" that support it while ignoring similar facts (even those in just-quoted posts) that support the opposite view

This forth-and-back of bits selected to support a view and the opposing view is just the kind of thing I was not trying to do. Obviously everyone has a tendency to do that, but I try (with mixed success, obviously) not to

No thats not what i'm implying at all. You provided your interpreation on your data and i provided mine. Again the only real conclusion you can get with your data is that it takes great synergy to win it all.

But then to make graphs and show how difficult it is for Lebron due to his supporting cast shows agenda vs other greats...when one can easily interpret this as players finding it difficult to integrate with Lebron. Lebron has now been in the league for 13 years...having been on 3 different teams...with many different players (role and talented players)....and to consisntantly have low sBPM...one has to start wondering....is Lebron the unluckiest great when it comes to team mates...or is there something more to it than that?

Yeah, doesn't seem we will agree on this but good to keep it cool, which I admittedly have problems with sometimes.
Feel free to counter the above but I feel we are both completely drifting into LBJ-vs-MJ stuff, which is not what this thread is about (not that this analysis gets the level of attention of any "the ref didn't call a foul on this one inconsequential play in a meaningless regular season game"-thread anyway

It's all good, its just a forum where we discuss NBA stuff. No need to be worked up

[mysticOscar]

Hmmm, while what you’re suggesting could hypothetically be true----if a star depresses the BPM of those around him, he may generally rate well by the means parapooper has used----I feel you’re drawing some broad conclusion from a mere few cherry-picked players (and looking at them outside of context).

Where Wade, Bosh, Love, and Kyrie are concerned, ALL of them were #1 options prior to teaming up with Lebron. BPM is heavily influenced by volume, so of course their BPM is going to fall somewhat when going from a #1 option role to a #2 or even #3 role. In fact, it’s bloody hard to find a #2 or #3 option with a BPM greater than about +7.5 (outside of the unique player combo/circumstance that was Westbrook/Durant in OKC, they’re exceedingly rare).

Someone like Horace Grant, otoh, goes from being a 3rd option next to Jordan, to being a 3rd option somewhere else (was once more of a 2a to Armstrong’s 2b on the ‘94 Bulls), so we don’t really expect a great deal of change in his BPM (except perhaps a slight uptick on the highest efficiency differential team, as BPM does have a pinch of winner’s bias). And indeed, we don’t see much shift when Jordan leaves compared to how Grant was with Jordan around, outside of ‘92 (his somewhat outlier statistical peak, which [non-coincidentally] was the single best efficiency differential team he ever played on). Presumably though, the years immediately adjacent to ‘94 would be a more accurate reflection of where he was as a player at that time (and he went from +3.7 in ‘93 with Jordan to +5.2 in ‘94 without Jordan). Even if we look at the time period ‘92-’93 collectively, his BPM over that stretch was +5.5; ‘91-’93 it was +5.1 collectively.

In short, I would say his BPM was more or less static with/without Jordan.


Pippen’s BPM is predictably highest in those two prime years without Jordan (when he had to become the #1 option). Why Pippen’s drop in BPM when Jordan returns to the line-up isn’t quite as large as what we see in Wade’s BPM when Lebron joins the line-up is, imo, primarily because Wade is a significantly BETTER #1 option than Pippen.


That’s not to say that one couldn’t validly argue that because some of Lebron’s teammates are more capable of being #1 options (Wade is certainly by far the most capable of shouldering that role in his prime), it means they are better/more talented players. That fits right into the “Lebron had better talent, but Jordan had better fit” arguments, and there’s some bite to it; although more recent impact data is suggesting that certain role players are much more valuable than “conventional wisdom” previously dictated, and this could be used as a counterpoint. Nonetheless, I could potentially buy into the notion that their “#1 option capabilities” is evidence that they are indeed more talented players.

However, within the context of this debate there are two important considerations one must carry with that assumption: 1) this argument only extends as far as the 2nd and 3rd best players on the team (and not at all to the remainder of the supporting cast, which people tend to overlook).
And 2) it doesn’t really prove much of anything wrt specifically how Jordan/Lebron lift or depress their teammates’ impact. Because except for exceedingly rare and unique player combos/situations (like Westbrook/Durant in OKC), there is simply a cap on how high of BPM a 2nd option player is going to be capable of (especially when you also have a very capable 3rd option); so naturally guys who were previously #1 options are going to see a drop compared to guys who are basically 3rd option players regardless of where they are (e.g Horace Grant). And the better a #1 they were, likely the larger the drop will be.


Beyond that discussion point, I wanted to look and see if there was any real truth to this notion that Jordan allows (or even potentiates) his teammates’ full impact [as measured by BPM] while Lebron suppresses his teammates’.
I looked at A LOT of teammates for each, preferentially focusing on teammates during prime years, especially near their contending years). I’m breaking them into three basic groups: BPM improved with star, BPM unchanged, BPM worsened with star. ****And fwiw, I’ve endeavored to be a little generous to the “pro-Jordan” side of this debate.
If you want to read all the details, that is what immediately follows. Though as that gets pretty long, you can scroll down to the “SUMMARY” section toward the bottom for a more concise review.

Lebron’s teammates
Teammates whose BPM went down with Lebron
*Dwyane Wade: was +9.4 in ‘10, fell to around +6 for the next couple seasons with Lebron. *again, the “#1 option going to #2 option” considerations apply.
*Chris Bosh: was +2.3 in ‘10, dropped to +0.4 in ‘11 with Lebron (ranged from 0.0 to +1.2 with Lebron, avg of +0.6). *again, same arguments as above apply, though here he’s actually going from being a #1 option to a #3 option.
*Kevin Love: was a +8.4 in ‘14 (though fwiw this is somewhat an outlier year; he otherwise had never been better than +4.5); dropped to +1.9 in ‘15 (has averaged +2.1 with Lebron thus far). *this is going from a #1 option down to #3 option.
Shane Battier: He was +2.5 in ‘11 (+2.3 in two seasons prior to joining Lebron); falls only as far as +1.7 in ‘12 when he joins the Heat (and avg +1.9 in first two seasons with Heat). So idk, this one could easily go into the group of “unchanged” below (as his age by the time he’s joining Lebron is definitely a factor in any decline noted), but I’m trying to be relatively generous to the other side of the table. I’ll even include Mike Miller in this group, too….
Mike Miller: was +2.0 in ‘10 (+1.6 in three years prior joining Lebron in Miami). Dropped to -0.6 in ‘11, though averages -0.1 in three seasons in Miami. The thing that muddies the water for me is that Miller is perpetually injured in these years (especially ‘11 and ‘12); when he’s finally semi-healthy in ‘13 is when his BPM goes back up to +0.6, despite being well past his prime at this point. His BPM takes big dip on joining Lebron in Cleveland in ‘15; however, it doesn’t improve at all in leaving Lebron and joining Denver (i.e. I think that’s simply the stage of his career that we’re in: declined output).
Ray Allen: +2.6 with Boston in ‘12. Drops to +0.2 with Lebron in Miami.
Larry Hughes: Not sure if he truly belongs in this group, looking at how his career after Lebron panned out, but whatev. Had a huge outlier individual season in ‘05 (+4.1 BPM; his previous best was +0.4) before joining the Cavs. Dropped to -0.3 in ‘06 with Cavs; -0.7 BPM in his combined 2.5 seasons with Lebron. However, he was marginally worse after leaving Cleveland.
Damon Jones: all over the map, but was combined -0.8 BPM in his career pre-Lebron, and a career-best +2.5 just before joining the Cavs. -1.1 BPM in first season with Cavs, and combined -1.6 BPM In three seasons with Cleveland (fell out of league shortly after departing Cleveland, however).
Donyell Marshall: suffice to say his BPM takes a dip upon joining the Cavs (though age likely becoming a partial factor, too).
Eric Snow: His BPM takes a definite dip upon joining the Cavs.
Ira Newble: a small dip overall in his BPM in Cleveland years.

Teammates whose BPM is basically unchanged with Lebron
Kyrie Irving: he was +3.3, +3.3, +3.2 in first three seasons without Lebron. First season with Lebron was +3.3. Next year was +1.6, though this was coming back mid-season after injury/surgery, etc.
Udonis Haslem: Haslem was a -2.6 BPM in ‘10. Falls to -3.3 in ‘11 (which is an injury-hit season for him); averages -2.9 in first three seasons with Lebron despite being past prime at this stage. I’d label that negligible change.
Joel Anthony: +0.4 in ‘10, improves to +0.9 in ‘11 with Lebron (averages +0.6 over three seasons with Lebron). That’s pretty negligible.
Mike Bibby: Was a -0.2 in ‘10, -0.3 thru half season with ATL in ‘11, then -0.9 thru partial season with Lebron in Miami. I’d declare that negligible, especially considering he drops to -2.5 the following season in NYK.
Chris Andersen: was a +1.4 in the year before joining Miami, +1.2 his first year with Lebron/Miami, +1.6 his second (despite being 35 years old at this point). +1.0 the following year (after Lebron left).
Norris Cole: was -3.0 in final season with Lebron (avg -3.7 in last two seasons with Lebron, which were only his 2nd and 3rd seasons overall--->likely still developing as a player). -3.0 in his first season after Lebron, and avg -3.3 in two seasons following Lebron (is now out of the league, fwiw).
Rashard Lewis: was -3.0 BPM in ‘12 (season immediately before joining Lebron); combined -0.8 BPM in ‘11-’12. Was -3.2 first season with Lebron, though +0.1 in his second (combined -1.4 in two seasons with Lebron/Miami--->his final two seasons at age 33-34).
Anderson Varejao: his BPM takes a significant dip when Lebron left (from +3.0 down to +0.8), though I think injury played a significant part in this. Was a combined +2.3 BPM in two prime seasons with Lebron, +2.6 in first four seasons without Lebron.
Iman Shumpert: virtually no change with/without Lebron.
Richard Jefferson: no change. Was -0.7 BPM in ‘15 in Dallas, -0.8 in ‘16 with Cavs/Lebron. Was combined 1.4 BPM in three seasons before joining Cavs, is combined -1.6 since joining them (despite being older, now 36 years old).
Channing Frye: minimal change (and if anything it’s positive)--->was +0.4 BPM in 1.5 seasons prior to joining Cavs, has been +0.7 BPM since joining Cavs (considering he’s only getting older, that’s neutral at worst; a positive shift at best).

Teammates whose BPM appears improved with Lebron
Mario Chalmers: imo marginal improvement while playing alongside Lebron--->was a -0.4 in ‘10, improves to only 0.0 in ‘11, though averages +1.0 (peaking at +1.4) during four seasons with Lebron. One might argue these could be natural improvements frequently seen as a young player becomes a veteran; however, he falls from +1.2 in his final season with Lebron down to -1.0 in ‘15 (with same team).
James Jones: imo is a marginal improvement--->he’s a -1.5 BPM in ‘10 (avg -2.3 in ‘09-’10 in Miami); improves to +0.9 in ‘11. Age (and/or injury) increasingly take their toll over the next SIX seasons (all played with Lebron in either Miami or Cleveland), though he’s still an average of -1.2 BPM in those six years combined (still slightly better than his -1.5 (‘10) or -2.3 (‘09-’10). His career best BPM came in Portland (+1.2); but otherwise his 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-best BPM’s all occurred with Lebron, despite being >age 30 for all of his time with Lebron.
Dexter Pittman: fwiw, had his one actual serviceable season (301 minutes played) with the ‘12 Heat (10.4 PER, .101 WS/48, -4.0 BPM). Was otherwise a -0.2 PER, -.155 WS/48, -19.2 BPM in a grand total of 46 minutes played (now out of league).
Daniel Gibson: -0.4 BPM in final season alongside Lebron, combined -0.5 in four seasons playing with Lebron. Was -1.0 in first year without Lebron, combined -1.9 in three seasons without Lebron (out of the league well before his 30th birthday).
Zydrunas Ilgauskas: -0.9 in the season immediately before Lebron’s arrival; a combined -0.3 in five seasons prior to Lebron. +1.7 BPM in first season with Lebron, and combined +1.0 to +1.3 BPM in the 5-6 prime years played with Lebron (depending on whether or not you want to call ‘09 his prime).
Delonte West: a combined +0.4 BPM in 3.5 seasons prior to joining Lebron in Cleveland, though -3.3 BPM in half season with Seattle just before joining the Cavs. +0.3 BPM in his first half-season with Cleveland, career-best +2.3 BPM in first full season with Cavs; combined +1.1 avg BPM in his 2.5 seasons with Lebron. +0.2 in his two seasons following Lebron.
Drew Gooden: was -3.3 BPM in year(s) before joining Lebron in Cleveland. +0.9 BPM in first season with Cavs. Combined -0.4 BPM in 3.5 years with Cavs. Combined -1.3 BPM in what might be called 4.5 “prime” years after Lebron.
Sasha Pavlovic: Is kinda all over the map in his years with Lebron (as high as -0.7 BPM, or as low as -5.1), but averaged -2.9 BPM in his five seasons in Cleveland. Was a career worst -7.0 BPM in his first season after Lebron, and a combined -4.4 BPM during his final four seasons (after Lebron); -3.7 BPM in his rookie year before Lebron, too, fwiw.
Tristan Thompson: combined -1.3 BPM in two seasons prior to Lebron’s return to Cleveland. Combined +0.8 BPM with Lebron.
Matthew Dellavedova: combined -2.1 BPM in three seasons with Lebron (-1.6 in ‘16). Is -4.4 BPM so far this season with Milwaukee.
J.R.Smith: -0.5 BPM in last 1.5 seasons with NY. +1.8 BPM In first 1.5 seasons with Lebron in Cleveland.
Timofey Mosgov: a combined -1.0 BPM in the 3.5 seasons before joining the Cavs (peaking at -0.5). Is +0.6 in his first half-season with the Cavs, combined -0.2 BPM in 1.5 seasons with Cavs. Has been a -3.6 BPM player with the Lakers this season after leaving Cleveland.


Now let’s look at the bulk of Jordan’s teammates, again sort of preferentially focusing on prime years and especially near contending years…..
MJ’s teammates
Teammates whose BPM went down with MJ
*Scottie Pippen: was +4.3 in ‘93, combined +5.7 in ‘91-’93; jumped to +8.3 in ‘94 without Jordan, and +7.8 in ‘95 (mostly without Jordan). Fell to +6.8 when Jordan back for full season (and only went down from there). *same factors as above apply, in going from #2 option to #1, and vice versa.
Bill Cartwright: was a +0.9 BPM in his final season in NY, then fell precipitously to -4.8 in his first season in Chicago. Improved a little for a few years after, but was still a combined -2.7 BPM in his first three or four seasons in Chicago.
Cliff Levingston: +0.5 BPM in final season with Atlanta (avg +1.3 BPM in final two seasons there); -1.2 BPM in first season with Bulls (avg -0.1 BPM during first two seasons in Bulls uniform).
Dennis Hopson: Avg -1.5 BPM in two seasons with NJ prior to joining Bulls for ‘91 season. Was -3.8 BPM in Chicago (then improved to -1.3 BPM for one season after with Sacramento).
Mike Brown: -4.4 BPM with ‘88 Bulls. Improves to -2.6 BPM with ‘89 Jazz (and avg -2.0 BPM over next SIX seasons without Jordan).
Sedale Threatt: -2.4 BPM during one season with Bulls in late 80’s; immediately improved to +2.9 BPM in first half-season after leaving Chicago (though lolsamplesize for that). +0.9 in his first 1.5 seasons after leaving Chicago, though, and +0.6 BPM collectively over his first 4.5 seasons after leaving Chicago. Otoh, he was roughly a -3.0 BPM the year before joining the Bulls. I’ll ultimately classify this as a negative effect, as during the ‘88 season (mid-season trade to Seattle) he was -2.8 for the Bulls and +2.9 for the Sonics.

Teammates whose BPM is basically unchanged with MJ
Horace Grant: had an outlier BPM peak of +7.3 in ‘92, though was otherwise an average +5.1 in ‘91-’93 (and only +3.7 BPM in ‘93). Was +5.2 in ‘94 without Jordan.
**John Paxson: **I’m not entirely sure which group to place him in. In his first season with Chicago (played mostly without Jordan, due to injury) he was a -2.9 BPM. Over the next four seasons played with Jordan he was a -2.7 BPM combined (no real change); and the worst BPM of his prime (-3.4) was with the ‘89 Bulls. However, in ‘91-’92 he was a combined -1.3 BPM (best stretch of his career). This is around the time when Jordan relinquished the reins to his team somewhat; also when Pippen became much more relevant as a play-maker; also not uncommon to simply see relatively non-athletic guards peak around 30-31 years of age, too. Perhaps a combination of all of these factors, idk.
B.J.Armstrong: was a -0.9 BPM in ‘93 in Chicago (his career best to that point). With the ‘94 Bulls he’s again a -0.9 BPM. In ‘95 (played mostly without Jordan) he improves to a new career best +0.2 BPM. In ‘96 with the Warriors he’s +0.1. So if anything, he’s better without Jordan, but I’m again trying to be generous to the other side of the table and simply assume this is the result of natural player development.
Toni Kukoc: was +4.3 BPM in ‘95 (mostly without Jordan). Is then +4.5 in ‘96 and ‘97, +2.9 in ‘98, then +2.9 in ‘99 without Jordan.
Bill Wennington: -1.5 BPM for ‘94 Bulls (2nd-best of his career, without Jordan), -3.3 BPM in ‘95 (mostly without Jordan). -2.5 BPM in first full season with Jordan, though only gets worse from there.
Craig Hodges: -0.8 BPM in 2.5 seasons prior to joining Bulls. -1.2 BPM in first 1.5 seasons with Bulls.
Dennis Rodman: +3.5 BPM for ‘94-’95 Spurs. Is +3.2 in both ‘96 and ‘97 for Bulls, +2.7 in ‘98. So he does actually have a small fall-off, though he’s also getting old at this point.
Jud Buechler: Never had a positive BPM prior to the second 3peat Bulls--->was -1.6 BPM with the ‘94 Warriors, -0.1 BPM with ‘95 Bulls (mostly without Jordan). His BPM bounces around a bit over the next three years with the Bulls (but avg’s +0.3 BPM). But then hits a career best +1.9 BPM with the ‘99 Pistons.
Randy Brown: +0.6 BPM with ‘95 Kings, falls to -0.3 with ‘96 Bulls. Overall was avg of -0.9 BPM from ‘93-’95 with Kings; avg of -1.0 during second 3-peat. Was -2.1 BPM with ‘98 Bulls, -1.8 with ‘99 Bulls (without Jordan). If any change can be declared, it would probably be a marginal negative change associated with being Jordan’s teammate, but again: I am trying to be a touch generous to the pro-Jordan side of things.
Dickey Simpkins: -4.9 BPM with ‘95 Bulls (mostly without Jordan). -3.7 BPM in 2.5 seasons with Jordan’s Bulls. -2.2 BPM in first 1.5 seasons without Jordan.
Charles Oakley: he actually had a marginal improvement in years WITHOUT Jordan, but I’m placing him in this group because his improvements may just be related to natural player development (most players do hit their best stretch approximately age 27-30).
Dave Corzine: no relevant change.
Will Perdue: avg -0.4 BPM during first 3-peat. Falls to -4.1 BPM with ‘94 Bulls, but was an injury-decimated season for him (played <400 minutes total that year, majority coming AFTER his injury); was a +0.4 BPM with the ‘95 Bulls (mostly without Jordan). Avg -0.4 BPM over next four seasons after leaving Chicago.
Sam Vincent: no relevant trend noted.
Stacey King: was a -2.4 BPM in ‘93, and -2.4 collectively from ‘90-’93. -2.9 in first season without Jordan. Declined from there, however, there were significant injuries (as well as major gluttony/health issues) involved.

Teammates whose BPM appears improved with MJ
Luc Longley: was -1.9 BPM in half-season with Minny before joining the Bulls. -0.3 BPM in 4.5 seasons with Chicago. Fell to -2.4 BPM In first season after Chicago.
Scott Williams: +0.5 BPM in ‘92-’93 combined. **-1.2 for ‘94 Bulls (**difficult to say whether this is real, though, as this was a half-season after coming back from injury). However, his BPM does get even worse upon leaving Chicago.
Steve Kerr: -0.4 BPM for the ‘94-’95 Bulls; +2.4 avg BPM for ‘96-’97 Bulls.
Brad Sellers: -1.9 BPM in three seasons with Jordan; -4.8 BPM in next two seasons without Jordan.
Ron Harper: +1.5 BPM in *four seasons played prior to Jordan (*fraction of that fourth season Jordan was around). +2.5 BPM for ‘96-’98 Bulls.
Jason Caffey: -0.9 BPM in final 1.5 seasons with Jordan’s Bulls. -2.7 BPM in first three seasons after leaving Chicago.


SUMMARY:
For quick reference, I’ll just list the teammate’s name in one of the three categories (BPM improved with star, worsened with star, or unchanged). And for both the improved and worsened categories, I’ll color-code them red if the change from surrounding years averages ~2.5 or higher, blue if ~1.2 or less, and just leave standard black if the change is somewhere in between. And again * if some of the conditions discussed at top of post apply.
And one last time, I want to emphasize I was (imo) marginally generous to the pro-Jordan side of the argument wrt who I did or did not place in the “unchanged” category.

Lebron’s teammates
BPM worsened with Lebron
*Dwyane Wade
*Kevin Love
*Chris Bosh
Shane Battier
Mike Miller
Ray Allen
Larry Hughes
Damon Jones
Donyell Marshall
Eric Snow
Ira Newble

BPM unchanged with Lebron
Kyrie Irving
Udonis Haslem
Joel Anthony
Mike Bibby
Chris Andersen
Norris Cole
Rashard Lewis
Anderson Varejao
Iman Shumpert
Richard Jefferson
Channing Frye

BPM improved with Lebron
Mario Chalmers
James Jones
Dexter Pittman
Daniel Gibson
Zydrunas Ilgauskas
Delonte West
Drew Gooden
Sasha Pavlovic
Tristan Thompson
Matthew Dellavedova
J.R. Smith
Timofey Mosgov


Jordan’s teammates
BPM worsened with Jordan
*Scottie Pippen
Bill Cartwright
Cliff Levingston
Dennis Hopson
Mike Brown
Sedale Threatt

BPM unchanged with Jordan
Horace Grant
John Paxson
B.J. Armstrong
Toni Kukoc
Bill Wennington
Craig Hodges
Dennis Rodman
Jud Buechler
Randy Brown
Dickey Simpkins
Charles Oakley
Dave Corzine
Stacey King
Will Perdue
Sam Vincent

BPM improved with Jordan
Luc Longley
Steve Kerr
Scott Williams
Brad Sellers
Ron Harper
Jason Caffey


So I don't see a lot by way of distinction here between the two as far as who's helping their teammates succeed and who's crippling their teammates' impact. Looks nearly equivalent. Maybe a marginal edge to Jordan, but kinda debatable (and certainly splittin' hairs).

I appreciate your long post and the time you must have taken to put this together. However, by just casting the reason for Wade, Bosh, Love and Kyrie (to a smaller extent) sharp drop to going from 1st option to 2nd and 3rd....while then downplaying (or ignoring) the development of Pippen and Grant's rookie to the impactful players they are in there championshp runs as a mere formality for these players (as if Jordan did not have a major role in there developemnt and maximising there impact) is already very unfair to me and of course it will make it seem like the difference is splitting hairs.

Do you really think that Wade, Bosh, Love were able to maximise there impact with Lebron? I certainly didnt and we have heard from Bosh already about the struggle in integrating and the sacrifice they had to do to play with Lebron. Whereas, I saw Grant, Pippen and Rodman (at his age) certainly maximising theirs.

I mean how lucky is Jordan and unlucky is Lebron really? I mean they both now have approximately both played 13 years...

[parapooper]

Do you really think that Wade, Bosh, Love were able to maximise there impact with Lebron? I certainly didnt and we have heard from Bosh already about the struggle in integrating and the sacrifice they had to do to play with Lebron.

Bosh said absolutely nothing about playing with LeBron being a struggle.
The struggle is integrating 3 players who have their maximum potential as first options in a situation where only one of them can be first option. LeBron for instance gained weight (which was very detrimental to his game and caused him back problems that lasted for years) to play a different position, played more off-ball than he was ever used to ... and his BPM dropped more than those of Wade and Bosh. Why blame everything on him?
And by everything I mean the 0.6BPM drop his cast had vs. the year before when they were all playing in familiar situations, the way they were used to, in the positions they were used to having their typical usage - you know the way Jordan's casts played with or without him because his best teammates did not need the ball to impact the game (impact it more than Bosh and Irving even as first options btw)

Whereas, I saw Grant, Pippen and Rodman (at his age) certainly maximising theirs.

I just corrected you in a previous post - those guys were on average slightly worse with Jordan. But nice of you to mention Rodman's age while ignoring Wade's age and knees:
Wade's BPM in 2 year spans:
2009-10: 10.0
2011-12: 6.1
2013-14: 3.2
2015-16: 1.0
Already a stretch to see any LeBron-impact in that progression...
Plus, these guys got most of their impact from off-ball stuff like defense and rebounding - so how exactly could Jordan possibly make them less impactful even he tried to do that? Box them out? Tie their shoes together? Wrestle them to the ground?

I mean how lucky is Jordan and unlucky is Lebron really? I mean they both now have approximately both played 13 years...

Jordan and LeBron have pretty equal supporting cast strengths over their careers (about 0.2 sBPM difference). Jordan just got a better distribution (LeBron's later casts were about as much worse than Jordan's as his early casts were better).
LeBron does not have unusually bad supporting casts on average (Garnett and Hakeem had worse sBPMs and a bunch of others are in the same range). The only outliers are Kobe and Duncan. looking at finer details late Jordan, late Garnett, late LeBron also have above average casts.

LeBron has the hardest matchups because of his combination of sBPM and hardest opponent BPM.
I suppose your next post is about how LeBron is somehow making the toughest team he meets in the PS better over that entire season while that wiley Jordan makes it worse?

Most importantly (see earlier posts:
A)Even if I calculate the 2011 Heat RS sBPM using the BPMs of those players from 2010 that sBPM is still lower than 5 Jordan teams and lower than the 1994 Bulls

B) If we assume that LeBron does in fact make all his teams worse than the correlation between toughest PS matchup and titles over these GOATish players becomes insanely good (as in I would never dream of such correlation before putting the stats together).

So my main point (which is not about LeBron or MJ btw) still stands:
On teams that have a top10ish GOAT guy titles correlate with the size of the gap between his opponent and his supporting cast, while hardly correlating with his personal play
And if you think LeBron made his teams worse than the above conclusion is even more obvious - because LeBron is the biggest outlier in my data. So you have basically been arguing against yourself this whole time, no?

[trex_8063]

I appreciate your long post and the time you must have taken to put this together. However, by just casting the reason for Wade, Bosh, Love and Kyrie (to a smaller extent) sharp drop to going from 1st option to 2nd and 3rd

We can ignore the context (and the little "*" I put to mark it), and simply tally the players in each grouping (and color-coding)-->for which I was marginally generous to Jordan; there still is only a small distinction (yes, in Jordan's favor) between Jordan/Lebron as far as how their teammates perform with/without. Read again: small (and that's ignoring 1st/2nd/3rd option context, and being marginally hard on Lebron as far as who is classified as "unchanged").

And Kyrie didn't drop off......like, at all. He had his best statistical season the first year Lebron arrived.

....while then downplaying (or ignoring) the development of Pippen and Grant's rookie to the impactful players they are in there championshp runs as a mere formality for these players (as if Jordan did not have a major role in there developemnt

The bolded is a fair amount of conjecture and insinuation. Pippen has expressed gratitude to Jordan for mentoring him, but I'm not sure what you're insinuating (that Pippen would only have been like Andre Iguodala----or worse???----without Jordan?). And I've not heard much of anything wrt Jordan mentoring or developing Horace Grant, fwiw.

Off-hand I can't think of any other player who receives more credit as being responsible [literally] for the ANOTHER player [or players] being great players, than Jordan gets for Pippen (+/- Grant) being great.

Barkley at his HOF induction ceremony thanked Moses Malone for taking him under his wing and teaching him to work hard and showing him how to be a professional.......but no one ever includes that as part of Moses' legacy or credits him for that contribution to his own success.

Karl Malone's detractors often would have us believe he wasn't all that great, stating he's largely a product of Sloan's system and Stockton's playmaking. Ironically, most of those same people don't rank Stockton particularly high either. They use this argument as a means of knocking Mailman down a peg or two, but conveniently ignore it when evaluating Stockton.

Suffice to say I'm a little skeptical how much credit Jordan deserves for developing, incorporating, and potentiating all-time talents, especially considering there was Phil Jackson's potential role in making it all work. Up until a few years ago, he was probably the consensus GOAT coach.

Do you really think that Wade, Bosh, Love were able to maximise there impact with Lebron? I certainly didnt and we have heard from Bosh already about the struggle in integrating and the sacrifice they had to do to play with Lebron.

Whereas, I saw Grant, Pippen and Rodman (at his age) certainly maximising theirs.

I've heard snippets of such interviews; Bosh refers to sacrificing touches/numbers/primacy in order play next to Lebron (and Wade). In other words, he's basically referring to what I was talking about (going from a #1 to a #3).
And other than a slight decline as the years went by (mostly just in minutes, which I attributed to age), Bosh achieved what I expected of him offensively in a 3rd option role. And he expanded his shooting range and [imo] was playing the best defense of his career during these contending years in Miami. The only thing I was a bit disappointed in about his performance was his rebounding.


And fwiw, it's a bit disingenuous to give Rodman a pass due to age, but make no mention of age/health status where Wade is concerned.

[Colbinii]

Nice to see some objective posts come out here. Keep it up! I will be posting something unrelated to this topic shortly in another thread.

[mysticOscar]

Do you really think that Wade, Bosh, Love were able to maximise there impact with Lebron? I certainly didnt and we have heard from Bosh already about the struggle in integrating and the sacrifice they had to do to play with Lebron.

Bosh said absolutely nothing about playing with LeBron being a struggle.
The struggle is integrating 3 players who have their maximum potential as first options in a situation where only one of them can be first option. LeBron for instance gained weight (which was very detrimental to his game and caused him back problems that lasted for years) to play a different position, played more off-ball than he was ever used to ... and his BPM dropped more than those of Wade and Bosh. Why blame everything on him?
And by everything I mean the 0.6BPM drop his cast had vs. the year before when they were all playing in familiar situations, the way they were used to, in the positions they were used to having their typical usage - you know the way Jordan's casts played with or without him because his best teammates did not need the ball to impact the game (impact it more than Bosh and Irving even as first options btw)

I agree with you. There was certainly a struggle in integrating the main players skillset, and Lebron certain had that in their first season. Regardless of our opinion why that is (changing from 1st option to 2nd and 3rd vs Lebron's style not really portable in maximising certain players impact)....it shows you that your initial graphs lacked a lot of context by merely just outlying the star players sBPM to make certain players look great...when there is a lot more to it than that (i.e. overall team synergy)...certainly when it comes to championships.

Whereas, I saw Grant, Pippen and Rodman (at his age) certainly maximising theirs.

I just corrected you in a previous post - those guys were on average slightly worse with Jordan. But nice of you to mention Rodman's age while ignoring Wade's age and knees:
Wade's BPM in 2 year spans:
2009-10: 10.0
2011-12: 6.1
2013-14: 3.2
2015-16: 1.0
Already a stretch to see any LeBron-impact in that progression...
Plus, these guys got most of their impact from off-ball stuff like defense and rebounding - so how exactly could Jordan possibly make them less impactful even he tried to do that? Box them out? Tie their shoes together? Wrestle them to the ground?

Grant had his highest BPM with Jordan, Pippen was consistently close to 7...and rising to just above 8 once becoming the first option. Rodman was 33 when he went to the Bulls...coming off an injury season. He also had his fair share of injuries with the Bulls. Pippen was in his 30s in the 2nd 3peat and also had injuries in 98. I didn't mention Wade's knees since you have already brought it up several times. It's about time we brought up some of the age and injuries that Jordan's team had don't u think?

If you followed Jordan closely, the transformation of him dominating and having the ball go through him most play...to passing the ball around (to find a better play) and actually allowing team mates to also create while doing all the right things off the ball....these types of things allow your players around you to just get better.

I mean what I saw from James in highschool and first stint in Cleveland was he needed the ball, to create for others, score...and off the ball he just wasnt as involved.

Again this is my opinion (and i don't know what stats i can use to back that up) but regardless of our differing opinions of the reason of the struggle of Lebron's team integrating with him....your outlay of stats portraying how much harder Lebron had it due to his cast is only telling a part of the story...since a lot of times it wasn't the poor support cast...it's just the synergy was not there.

I mean how lucky is Jordan and unlucky is Lebron really? I mean they both now have approximately both played 13 years...

Jordan and LeBron have pretty equal supporting cast strengths over their careers (about 0.2 sBPM difference). Jordan just got a better distribution (LeBron's later casts were about as much worse than Jordan's as his early casts were better).
LeBron does not have unusually bad supporting casts on average (Garnett and Hakeem had worse sBPMs and a bunch of others are in the same range). The only outliers are Kobe and Duncan. looking at finer details late Jordan, late Garnett, late LeBron also have above average casts.

LeBron has the hardest matchups because of his combination of sBPM and hardest opponent BPM.
I suppose your next post is about how LeBron is somehow making the toughest team he meets in the PS better over that entire season while that wiley Jordan makes it worse?

Better distribution of impact is telling....shows how great the synergy was for that Bulls team and there championship runs (team synergy and rings should have been the real takeaway on your data that you initially posted). Because of Lebron played in teams that did not have great synergy....that can easily be interpreted as him being part of the problem right?

Regarding the opponent BPM, i have a tough time accepting that Lebron in most of his finals run had tougher matchups throughout the playoffs than a lot of other greats. I mean, I accept 2014 Spurs and 2016 Warriors...maybe, but who else? East playoffs were a cake walk for most years with him. Somethng does not add up.

Most importantly (see earlier posts:
A)Even if I calculate the 2011 Heat RS sBPM using the BPMs of those players from 2010 that sBPM is still lower than 5 Jordan teams and lower than the 1994 Bulls

I'll give you that. Jordan's teams synergy in those championship runs were off the charts...hence why had the highest tBPM according to your data. Regarding the 1994 Bulls...i mean if your subtracting the highest BPM player from a team then comparing it to another team with all there players...then of course its going to be lower.

B) If we assume that LeBron does in fact make all his teams worse than the correlation between toughest PS matchup and titles over these GOATish players becomes insanely good (as in I would never dream of such correlation before putting the stats together).

So my main point (which is not about LeBron or MJ btw) still stands:
On teams that have a top10ish GOAT guy titles correlate with the size of the gap between his opponent and his supporting cast, while hardly correlating with his personal play
And if you think LeBron made his teams worse than the above conclusion is even more obvious - because LeBron is the biggest outlier in my data. So you have basically been arguing against yourself this whole time, no?

Not sure what your trying to portray here. It's quite basic....Lebron's support players did not really produce high BPM's from highest minutes to lowest minutes...and of course this will have a high correlation with wins...it's common sense. But to layout with those pretty graphs like Lebron vs other greats (when in reality it just shows his teams could just well be not as well oiled team like other great players managed to do with there team mates)...is not telling the whole story.

[mysticOscar]

I appreciate your long post and the time you must have taken to put this together. However, by just casting the reason for Wade, Bosh, Love and Kyrie (to a smaller extent) sharp drop to going from 1st option to 2nd and 3rd

We can ignore the context (and the little "*" I put to mark it), and simply tally the players in each grouping (and color-coding)-->for which I was marginally generous to Jordan; there still is only a small distinction (yes, in Jordan's favor) between Jordan/Lebron as far as how their teammates perform with/without. Read again: small (and that's ignoring 1st/2nd/3rd option context, and being marginally hard on Lebron as far as who is classified as "unchanged").

And Kyrie didn't drop off......like, at all. He had his best statistical season the first year Lebron arrived.

Not sure how you are being generous to Jordan here? I mean just looked up some of the players...you had Mike Brown's in the "worse with Jordan" category for his 1st and 2nd year low mins....and those 2 seasons were not even his worst BPMs? Again you had Sedale Threatt...who played 40 games with Mike (at very low mins) in the same category...and he had a lot worse BPM's before and after??

For Lebron...just looking at JR's...i don't really see any proof there his BPM is better with Lebron....his had one season where it's highest...but the other 2 are low....why don't we call that an outlier like u do with some of Jordan's team mates and put him in the no change category? Why don't we call Kyries 1st season with Lebron as an outlier since his had the 2 worst BPM of his career with him and place him in the made worse category?

Regardless of how you have categorised it....the bottom line is, the players (high minutes) that skew the sBPM the most are on the made worse category with Lebron.

....while then downplaying (or ignoring) the development of Pippen and Grant's rookie to the impactful players they are in there championshp runs as a mere formality for these players (as if Jordan did not have a major role in there developemnt

The bolded is a fair amount of conjecture and insinuation. Pippen has expressed gratitude to Jordan for mentoring him, but I'm not sure what you're insinuating (that Pippen would only have been like Andre Iguodala----or worse???----without Jordan?). And I've not heard much of anything wrt Jordan mentoring or developing Horace Grant, fwiw.

Off-hand I can't think of any other player who receives more credit as being responsible [literally] for the ANOTHER player [or players] being great players, than Jordan gets for Pippen (+/- Grant) being great.

Barkley at his HOF induction ceremony thanked Moses Malone for taking him under his wing and teaching him to work hard and showing him how to be a professional.......but no one ever includes that as part of Moses' legacy or credits him for that contribution to his own success.

Karl Malone's detractors often would have us believe he wasn't all that great, stating he's largely a product of Sloan's system and Stockton's playmaking. Ironically, most of those same people don't rank Stockton particularly high either. They use this argument as a means of knocking Mailman down a peg or two, but conveniently ignore it when evaluating Stockton.

Suffice to say I'm a little skeptical how much credit Jordan deserves for developing, incorporating, and potentiating all-time talents, especially considering there was Phil Jackson's potential role in making it all work. Up until a few years ago, he was probably the consensus GOAT coach.

It's not just the off court stuff (i mean there has been many stories of how Jordan instilled leadership,drive and focus on this team off court)...but to transform his game and adopt the triangle and still flourish....i mean a lot of Jordan's development in know what it takes to win is credited to Phil Jackson without a doubt.

Do you really think that Wade, Bosh, Love were able to maximise there impact with Lebron? I certainly didnt and we have heard from Bosh already about the struggle in integrating and the sacrifice they had to do to play with Lebron.

Whereas, I saw Grant, Pippen and Rodman (at his age) certainly maximising theirs.

I've heard snippets of such interviews; Bosh refers to sacrificing touches/numbers/primacy in order play next to Lebron (and Wade). In other words, he's basically referring to what I was talking about (going from a #1 to a #3).
And other than a slight decline as the years went by (mostly just in minutes, which I attributed to age), Bosh achieved what I expected of him offensively in a 3rd option role. And he expanded his shooting range and [imo] was playing the best defense of his career during these contending years in Miami. The only thing I was a bit disappointed in about his performance was his rebounding.


And fwiw, it's a bit disingenuous to give Rodman a pass due to age, but make no mention of age/health status where Wade is concerned.

I mean let's face it, its not just going from option 1 to option 2 and 3....its having a lot of skills or play styles that probably don't mesh well with Lebron's or the system that they ran did not maximise there impact as a whole. I mean i saw no issue with Pao and Kobe.

Rodman was 33-34 and also had his share of injuries. Sure, i should have mentioned Wade also.

[andrewww]

Conclusions can definitely be drawn that Lebron isnt the most portable player but that in and of itself doesnt mean someone like Wilt or Shaq were either. Since he isnt a great shoote and needs the ball in his hands to be what makes him great, its not a surprise that he is best utilized by clearing out space in the post (mitigating big men) for him to operate, along with plenty or 3pt shooters around him.

I have a tough time accepting that MJ's competition in the Finals was inferior as a whole.

The 96 Sonics won 64 games and were a great team. The 97 Jazz won 64 games while the 98 Jazz had HCA over an aging Bulls team thay MJ literally will to victory. Pippen was playing at much less than 100% and had that series gone 7 games the Bulls likely would have lost based on momentum alone.

Meanwhile, the 2011 Heat blew a 1-0 lead and a double digit lead going into the 4th quarter of game 2 of Im not mistaken. Had the Heat won that series, all indications points to Wade being the FMVP.

The 2013 Finals outside of game 7 was underwhelming for Lebron. His poor last two minutes of the 4th quarter in game 6 will be a footnote since they came back, and in the pivotal game 4 to tie the series it was Wade again who was the catalyst (Lebron was stat stuffing at the end anyone who saw that game would realize this). Not exactly what youd expect from a peak Lebron. The Spurs basically dared him to beat them shooting jumpers and it worked from games 1-6.

The 2014 Finals he played very well and his team was overmatched.

The 2016 Finals on paper was a huge upset, but we all know that if you account for context (game 5 suspension initiated by Lebron's step over and the subsequent post game lobbying to the press, the Bogut absence from game 5 onwards, the bs Curry foul trouble in game 6), the same conclusion can be drawn from the 2015 Finals. That is one of an incomplete picture of the two teams at full strength for both Finals.

Dont forget that the 96 Sonics and 97/98 Jazz had some tough competition just to get to the Finals. You had the Shaq/Eddie Jones/Nick Van Exel/Elden Campbell/young Kobe Lakers, the Hakeem/Barkley/Pippen Rockets. Hardly slouches in competition.

The Bulls had the 60 win Pacers, Shaq/Penny Magic, Heat and Knicks to go through.

Then once you get to the Finals,

MJ never got pushed to more than 6 games.

Lebron was down 3-2 or worse facing elimination in 6 out of 7 Finals.

Draw your own conclusions from that. The whole Lebron leading both teams in 5 categories can be countered by Jordan's scoring prowess. Its what theyre both supposed to be doing.

[Colbinii]

Conclusions can definitely be drawn that Lebron isnt the most portable player but that in and of itself doesnt mean someone like Wilt or Shaq were either. Since he isnt a great shoote and needs the ball in his hands to be what makes him great, its not a surprise that he is best utilized by clearing out space in the post (mitigating big men) for him to operate, along with plenty or 3pt shooters around him.

Lebron doesn't mitigate big men. That fictional notion needs to stop, right now. There is no evidence that LeBron mitigates big men. In fact, he has raised the efficiency of the "old school" big men he has played with like Thompson and Mozgov. With regards to Love and Bosh, do you want them to be operating out of the high post or LeBron? Seems like a no brainer to me who I would want with the ball.

I have a tough time accepting that MJ's competition in the Finals was inferior as a whole.

That is fine, let's see what the stats say.

The 96 Sonics won 64 games and were a great team. The 97 Jazz won 64 games while the 98 Jazz had HCA over an aging Bulls team thay MJ literally will to victory. Pippen was playing at much less than 100% and had that series gone 7 games the Bulls likely would have lost based on momentum alone.

Meanwhile, the 2011 Heat blew a 1-0 lead and a double digit lead going into the 4th quarter of game 2 of Im not mistaken. Had the Heat won that series, all indications points to Wade being the FMVP.

Why are you focusing on one blemish for the Heat yet only focus on the positives for the Bulls? Smells like some bias here.

What about the fact that Jordan put up 5/19 shooting in game 6 against the Sonics. Or how about the fact that the Bulls were up 3-0 in the series, and then in the final 3 games of the series Jordan shot 22/60? Even if you compare that to how LeBron played in games 4-6 against Dallas, he still played better than Jordan, shooting 20/45 in the final 3 games. This doesn't even take into account the fact that LeBron averaged 7.6 rebounds and 7.6 assists over games 4-6, while Jordan averaged 5.3 rebounds and 3.3 assists over the final 3 games.

The 2013 Finals outside of game 7 was underwhelming for Lebron. His poor last two minutes of the 4th quarter in game 6 will be a footnote since they came back, and in the pivotal game 4 to tie the series it was Wade again who was the catalyst (Lebron was stat stuffing at the end anyone who saw that game would realize this). Not exactly what youd expect from a peak Lebron. The Spurs basically dared him to beat them shooting jumpers and it worked from games 1-6.

LeBron averaged 23.3/10.7/7.5 with 2.3 steals, and only 2.7 turnovers in games 1-6 in 2013. Sure, it wasn't a GOAT series, but to act like it was underwhelming, and then ignoring all of Jordan's "underwhelming" finals is not being objective. What about in 1998 when Jordan, in games 5 and 6, shot 24/61, averaged only 2.5 rebounds and 2.5 assists, while turning the ball over 5 times? That seems like a lot less impact on those games than what LeBron did in games 1-6, no?

The 2016 Finals on paper was a huge upset, but we all know that if you account for context (game 5 suspension initiated by Lebron's step over and the subsequent post game lobbying to the press, the Bogut absence from game 5 onwards, the bs Curry foul trouble in game 6), the same conclusion can be drawn from the 2015 Finals. That is one of an incomplete picture of the two teams at full strength for both Finals.

What conclusion? In 2015, Lebron and the Cavaliers EASILY win the series if he has Kryie. I don't see Jordan winning ANY finals with both Pippen and any one of Grant/Rodman/Kukoc going down before the Finals. 2016, say what you want, but the fact is LeBron played better, or at the very least on par, with ANY Jordan Finals.

Dont forget that the 96 Sonics and 97/98 Jazz had some tough competition just to get to the Finals. You had the Shaq/Eddie Jones/Nick Van Exel/Elden Campbell/young Kobe Lakers, the Hakeem/Barkley/Pippen Rockets. Hardly slouches in competition.

What is the point of this? Are you implying that the Spurs/Thunder/Warriors didn't play good teams? Are you implying they played against slouches?

The 1997 Lakers were NOT a title contender; not close. They were a sub-4 SRS team. The 1998 Lakers were solid, but they got swept by Utah. They were a lot like the 2015 Hawks. Nick Van Exel, Kobe Bryant, and Eddie Jones all forgot how to shoot in that series, and they simple got out matched by a clearly superior and mature team in the 1998 Jazz. To act like "They had young Kobe" means anything is a fallacy, because Kobe was nothing close to resembling prime Kobe Bryant in 1998.

The Spurs in 2014 played against the 2014 Thunder, a team that was equally as good as the 1998 Lakers, and far superior to the 1997 Lakers. The 2013 Spurs played against the Grizzles, who were one of the best defensive teams in the league, won 56 games, and were also superior to the 1997 Lakers. The 2012 Thunder beat the 2012 Spurs, who were on par with ANY team that Jordan faced in the Finals.

MJ never got pushed to more than 6 games.

Lebron was down 3-2 or worse facing elimination in 6 out of 7 Finals.

Yes, that happens when your TEAM and COACH are superior to the other team.

Here is some food for thought:
The average Bulls Finals team had an SRS of 9.1, and their average opponent had an SRS of 6.84.
The average LeBron Finals team had an SRS of 5.2, and their average opponent had an SRS of 7.75.

The fact is, Jordan had better teams, and his teams were clearly superior to the competition. We know from what Parapooper posted earlier that Jordan had stronger teammates as well, and we can all agree that Phil Jackson is a better coach than Brown, Spoelstra, Blatt, and Lue (lol, Tryonn Lue!).

Draw your own conclusions from that. The whole Lebron leading both teams in 5 categories can be countered by Jordan's scoring prowess. Its what theyre both supposed to be doing.

LeBron is suppose to be leading his team in 5 categories while Jordan is only suppose to score? I think that should answer your question as to who has more responsibility and who has teammates that can do other things. This is the most asinine thing I have read here in a while. "LeBron is suppose to do everything, Jordan is only suppose to score" is what you said, thanks for making my point andru.

[parapooper]

Again this is my opinion (and i don't know what stats i can use to back that up) but regardless of our differing opinions of the reason of the struggle of Lebron's team integrating with him....your outlay of stats portraying how much harder Lebron had it due to his cast is only telling a part of the story...since a lot of times it wasn't the poor support cast...it's just the synergy was not there.

Agreed, where we disagree is that you place the blame for the lack of synergy on LeBron while I say synergy is a lot harder to achieve for three first options joining (two of whom even have to change positions) than it is for a ball-dominant player playing with guys who have star-impact without needing the ball through defense and rebounding. I see no reason to assume 3 other 30%usage first option guys with such poor fit could achieve higher synergy.
Without any evidence for LeBron being the problem I don't see a reason to treat LeBron differently than every other guy I checked.

Regarding the opponent BPM, i have a tough time accepting that Lebron in most of his finals run had tougher matchups throughout the playoffs than a lot of other greats. I mean, I accept 2014 Spurs and 2016 Warriors...maybe, but who else? East playoffs were a cake walk for most years with him. Somethng does not add up.

What has the correlation with titles and is plotted are the toughest matchups, be they in the finals or whenever.
As I wrote before: matchups of +1, +1, +1, +1 vs. matchups of 0, 0, 0, 4 add up to the same average PS matchup difficulty, but scenario 1 is basically a must win while scenario 2 is basically impossible (nobody ever overcame a matchup harder than 2.
I was probably a bit confusing above, here are the stats for just finals runs (on average):
Jordans sBPM: 1.69
Jordans toughest opponent tBPM: 2.01

LBJ's sBPM: 0.43
LBJ's opp tBPM: 2.56
(all of the toughest opponent were in the finals, except 98 when the Sonics were slightly better than the Jazz)

Yes, in the first 3 rounds Jordan had tougher opponents during finals runs:
-0.52, 1.24, 1.53, 2.0 vs.
-0.36, 0.78, 1.11, 2.56

So if you want to give Jordan a bonus for that - fine (anyone should of course)
However, to integrate the other rounds into my stats would be really hard to do properly and impartially (I discussed this with somebody else earlier here) and the toughest matchups correlate so well with title already that that is all I need to make my point that titles should not be used to rank players

Regarding the 1994 Bulls...i mean if your subtracting the highest BPM player from a team then comparing it to another team with all there players...then of course its going to be lower.

Not really, I compared '93 sBPM vs. 94 tBPM. sBPM is the supporting cast BPM where the BPM of the main guy (here Jordan) is replaced with a 0 BPM replacement player for his minutes. If your theory that MJ makes his teammates better is true than it is strange that their '94 tBPM is better than their '93 sBPM (1.49 vs. 1.2, RS +PS) even though the guy who replaced Jordan had a BPM of -2.3 (so lower than what I use in the '93 sBPM calculation)

In contrast, the tBPM of the 2015 Heat was significantly lower than the sBPM of the 2014 Heat (-0.8 vs. -0.16, RS only) even though LeBron was replaced with a positive BPM player in Deng.

This can probably be explained by Bosh going down and Deng/Dragic/Whiteside being worse than whoever the Bulls got in '94, so let's not get into that. Just saying, if one wanted to come up with arguments contrary to what you say and ignore all context and qualifiers one could do that, but what's the point?

Not sure what your trying to portray here. It's quite basic....Lebron's support players did not really produce high BPM's from highest minutes to lowest minutes...and of course this will have a high correlation with wins...it's common sense.

Thank you, that's what I've been saying in general, not just for LeBron

But to layout with those pretty graphs like Lebron vs other greats (when in reality it just shows his teams could just well be not as well oiled team like other great players managed to do with there team mates)...is not telling the whole story.

Once again, my main conclusion here is that the stats clearly demonstrate that using rings to rank GOATish players makes no sense. Because their supporting casts matchup difficulty is extremely well correlated with wins, while their personal performance is not.
The biggest outlier in my data is LeBron. If you say his teams were actually better than the stats show and move his matchup difficulties down (see graphs above) by the maximum punishment (gap between Heat supporting cast performance in 2011 vs. 2010) than that (almost) closes the gap. That removes the one outlier in the overall data and makes the argument even more convincing. You however have been saying my overall conclusion is wrong because LeBron's teams were better than the stats indicate - when in fact, if it were true, that would strengthen my conclusion.

Personally, an obvious explanation for LeBron being an outlier is the eastern conference being worse. If you would look at the stars coming out of the east in the early 2000's they were in a similar situation - yeah, they had an easier path to the finals but then they faced the toughest team from the west - so they had less opportunities to fail at an easier hurdle before they ran into a juggernaut. That easier path to the finals doesn't mean it was easier for Iverson or Kidd than Kobe or Shaq to win a title though - in fact in was basically impossible for them. Another (anecdotal) reason why using rings to rank players makes no sense.

[parapooper]

MJ never got pushed to more than 6 games.

Lebron was down 3-2 or worse facing elimination in 6 out of 7 Finals.

Draw your own conclusions from that. The whole Lebron leading both teams in 5 categories can be countered by Jordan's scoring prowess. Its what theyre both supposed to be doing.

Yes MJ never even reached the finals before 1991 and starting 1991 he never even got pushed to 6 games (ignoring 1995).

One could say that is either because:
A) by an unknown magic mechanism Jordan suddenly went from EC failure to NBA-wide dominator while having the same personal stats as before

or

B) the gap between Jordan's supporting casts and his playoff adversaries was much easier to surmount with his strong, well-assembled teams of the '90s against aging dynasties and a diluted league

You say A, I say B
Here is what the stats* say:



* that "predict" 87+% of all GOATish guy playoff series post 1980 correctly and where average matchup for wrong predictions is 0.38

[G35]

Conclusions can definitely be drawn that Lebron isnt the most portable player but that in and of itself doesnt mean someone like Wilt or Shaq were either. Since he isnt a great shoote and needs the ball in his hands to be what makes him great, its not a surprise that he is best utilized by clearing out space in the post (mitigating big men) for him to operate, along with plenty or 3pt shooters around him.

Lebron doesn't mitigate big men. That fictional notion needs to stop, right now. There is no evidence that LeBron mitigates big men. In fact, he has raised the efficiency of the "old school" big men he has played with like Thompson and Mozgov. With regards to Love and Bosh, do you want them to be operating out of the high post or LeBron? Seems like a no brainer to me who I would want with the ball.

LeBron is suppose to be leading his team in 5 categories while Jordan is only suppose to score? I think that should answer your question as to who has more responsibility and who has teammates that can do other things. This is the most asinine thing I have read here in a while. "LeBron is suppose to do everything, Jordan is only suppose to score" is what you said, thanks for making my point andru.

I don't get this whole mindset of "who do you want insert dribbling/shooting/doing anything on the court" as if that means no one else should touch the ball much less shoot it. I get it if your teammates are not talented but they do need to be involved or a whole lot of people need to recant their statements about 2006 Kobe.

Just because a player on your team is talented or is better at something than another teammate does not mean they should dominate the ball and usage. Larry Bird was the best shooter on the team but he passed it out to Ainge and Dennis Johnson for game deciding shots all the time. He did not mitigate them because he was a better shooter. He did not tell Kevin McHale and Robert Parish to get out of the post, I'm Larry Bird I should be doing all the shooting.

Magic Johnson, even after he took over as the #1 option/playmaker on the Lakers still gave the ball to Kareem when they needed a high percentage shot. In fact Pat Riley would hold his fist in the air indicating that the team would clear out for Kareem to go one on one even when he was 37 and 38 years old.

Tim Duncan was the best option for the Spurs every time but the way the Spurs built their team everybody contributed. Tim pulled back and did not mitigate the growth/development of Parker/Ginobli/Kahwi and even helped benefit the role players like Bowen/Bonner.

You don't bring in a big man with post skills and then tell him to clear out, that is ridiculous......