Uh oh, here comes the next toxic lbj thread
It's a hard question, and there's legitimate points in favor of each player. If I had to do tiers (small gaps between), I'd do something like
-Jordan, Curry
-Magic
-LeBron, Jokic
Qualitatively, I tend to agree with a lot of Djoker's comments. Since I see to have slightly different top and bottom choices than some, I'll give a little more detail on my top and bottom:
~For Jordan~:
-Clearly the best playoff scorer; underrated wholistic creation when you consider underrated passing at his peak and how well he uses his GOAT-level scoring gravity
-Great off-ball play (a clear level up from Magic/LeBron); good scalability and versatility next to more defensive oriented casts, and more on-ball perimeter players (better than Magic/LeBron), and 90s bigs.
-one of the most resilient offensive players ever (clearly improves more in the playoffs than Curry/Magic/Jokic... although playoff improvement does depend on where you're starting too)
-great team results, often with more defensively oriented casts
Statistically, clear GOAT Box Score peak
-Best Backpicks BPM in 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year samples in both the Regular Season and the Playoffs (for a box stat that's significantly closer to APM and PIPM than PER or PPG in accuracy of evaluating current season value, and actually outperforms single-season APM and PIPM in predicting future value since 1998)
-Best 3-year postseason Basketball reference BPM and ws/48 for those who care about more basic box stats
Clear GOAT level in box estimates of impact metrics:
-1st all time in 3-year RS + PS PIPM
-2nd all time in 3-year PS PIPM (ahead of everyone else here)
-1st all time in 3-year RS RAPTOR
-1st all time in 3-year PS RAPTOR
Clear GOAT level in available impact metrics
-On pace for 1st All time in available ~3/5 year Regular Season on/off (though higher uncertainty from partial data)
-8th all-time in 3-year Postseason on/off (ahead of Miami LeBron, 2nd Cavs LeBron, Curry)
-2nd all-time in 5-year Postseason on/off (ahead of all LeBron and Curry stints)
-2nd all-time in 3-year Augmented Plus Minus (ahead of all LeBron and Curry stints)
-Tier 1 all-time in multi-year RAPM (it's hard to compare to compare different RAPM samples like Squared2020 vs Engelmann because they scale differently, but from some sort of standard deviation point of view, Jordan's within uncertainty of the top )
Biased sample of games for raw WOWY scores which have been pretty thoroughly shown to be underrating him, but he's within uncertainty range of having GOAT level adjusted WOWY metrics (WOWYR, GPM, and RWOWY have him behind Magic but ahead of LeBron/Curry/available Jokic data)
Now basically all these metrics include defense, and I would put Jordan's defense over Curry/Magic/Jokic. But I'd also put Jordan behind LeBron defensively, and the majority of these metrics put Jordan ahead of LeBron overall, so my naive prediction would be that going to offensive-only stats (which isn't available for many of these) wouldn't help LeBron vs Jordan here.
~For Curry~:
I'm a bit surprised so many have him last. I'm definitely not sure about that. A lot of people point out playoff struggles, but I really don't see much evidence for an overall playoff decline outside of injury. Are people including injury concerns in their evaluation? For peaks, I tend to prefer analyzing a player when healthy, although reasonable people might disagree.
The impact metrics portray him pretty favorably and at least in the same tier vs LeBron and Jokic offensively:
-GOAT level RS On/off: (1) better 1-year RS On/off than both, (2) better 3-year RS On/off than LeBron (only 0.1 behind Jokic with a massively better On rating and thus better ceiling raising / more chance of diminishing returns), (3) better 5 year RS On/off than both
-1st all-time in raw WOWY, over everyone here
-There's some variation RAPM and unfortunately my preferred version of RAPM (Goldstein or Engellmann) isn't available in season-long stints through Jokic's peak, but in "vanilla" RAPM (the Basketball Database), peak Curry clearly has the best Offensive 3-year RAPM (16-18 Curry +5.23 > 09-11 LeBron +4.34 > 16-18 LeBron +4.26 > 22-24 Jokic + 3.65)
-EPM: This is our best available descriptive stat at measuring current value, and 3-year Curry's peak ranks 2nd (08-10 LeBron +9.26 > 15-17 Curry +9.2 > all other samples). All other samples of LeBron and Jokic have them lower in the RS.
Curry definitely has health concerns in the playoff, but e.g. his 5-year Playoff On/off massively outpaces Jokic's:
15-19 PS Curry +12.8 (only looking at games played) > 15-19 Curry +8.3 (all games) > 20-24 Jokic -2.5 (so far; though including 2019 makes it +3.1 and I'd expect it to become positive with more data this season).
For LeBron: 16-21 LeBron +18.2 passes all Curry's samples, but Healthy 15-19 Curry +15.8 is higher than any other LeBron sample.
And likewise for Jordan, I'd expect much more of LeBron's value to be defensive relative to Curry, which means more of Curry's wholistic value here is proportionally coming from offense.
Indeed, for all the people who cite LeBron's postseason team offenses as reason for having him over Curry, when you actually look at the team offenses with just the star players on, Curry's on-court PS Offense > LeBron's on-court PS offense in 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5-year stints (and indeed it looks better than Nash's and Jokic's too).
And for those who bring up the teammates, when we include large enough samples in the RS to isolate on/off regardless of teammates, we find Curry's having this massive lift regardless of whether Draymond or Klay or KD are on the court or not.
In sum:
-[Healthy] Curry's an all-time scorer, significantly better than Magic and Jokic, with arguably the GOAT 1-year RS scoring peak in 2016.
-[Healthy] Curry's a GOAT level wholistic creator, when we consider his all-star passing + GOAT level scoring gravity, floor spacing, off-ball creation, all-time guard screens. Curry created better shots for his teammates and improved his teammates' efficiency more than 2nd Cavs LeBron, Harden, Jokic, Luka, Westbrook, and older Chris Paul, when looking at 1-year through 5 year stints.
-[Healthy] Curry's GOAT level off-ball ability leads to GOAT level ceiling raising, which remains in the playoffs (his on-court offensive rating is better than any modern star in the playoffs). The GOAT level scalability fits perfectly with intelligent teammates, whether they're defensively oriented, or offensive on-ball perimeter players, hybrid players, or bigs.
He's such a unique archetype. He's not tall. He doesn't dunk on people. He doesn't pound the ball long enough to rack up the same assist numbers, and isn't as good of a passer as Magic/Lebron/Jokic per pass anyway. And yet the numbers are in pretty clear consensus that at his peak (at least when he's healthy), he belongs in this tier, and not at the bottom of it, including in the playoffs. I think we have to ask ourselves whether having an outlier play style might cause us to underrate all the stuff he does.
~For Jokic~:
The main thing is playoff sample size. I have him at the bottom, because when players are mid peak and have only had a single long playoff run mid-peak, I'd prefer to be a bit conservative before anointing them above the true all-time Mount Rushmores of a certain area (e.g. offense, like here). Although it's pretty obvious he's on pace to belong in this conversation.
The RS impact metrics are very strong (although below Curry e.g., and others). But the playoff plus minus data seems a bit disappointing 2020-2022, and even a bit in 2023. How much of this is noise (e.g. 2 of those runs are too short to trust) vs genuine improvement since 2021 vs a lack of playoff resilience? If there's a lack of playoff resilience, how much is it just from the defensive vulnerability? The 2023 playoff run was long, but it was also against pretty disappointing opponents... better than something like SRS would predict, worse than the tougher opponents these other stars have faced.
Note that I say this as a big Jokic fan -- I'm probably rooting for him this postseason, and I was someone who thought he was in contention for being the best in the NBA back in the 2022 regular season including having him overtaking Giannis (when most others were saying it was a forgone conclusion Giannis was the best in the league and would be for the upcoming seasons)
To me, that's why this current postseason run is so interesting. How do the Nuggets perform with a 2nd larger-sample run, against different defenses? How does Jokic's offense look versus some actual great defenses (e.g. Minnesota or Celtics)? A really strong performance in these circumstances would go a long way to clarify those questions about the earlier playoff struggles individually/statistically.
Film-wise / qualitatively, each of these players have an ability to break the game. Magic has his GOAT passing and transition play, Jordan has his GOAT scoring; LeBron has his GOAT drive and kick game; Curry has his GOAT shooting. Jokic looks like he's in contention for having GOAT level passing, clearly a level of passing above Jordan/Curry. Skill-wise, he checks a lot of the boxes to be the offensive GOAT -- e.g. he seems to have stronger scoring than Magic, his floor spacing as a big adds a ton of off-ball value in addition to his better screening and rebounding and lower possession timer than e.g. Lebron.
So why might he not be better than them all? I think it can be hard to qualitatively capture the exact value of a game-breaking skill (at least without a massive volume of detailed film study that many here don't have the time to do). And furthermore, it can be even harder to qualitatively capture the chemistry between different skillsets. It's possible that some of the other players' game breaking skills could be more game breaking than Jokic's, or that the chemistry of their skillset could enable higher offensive impact, despite Jokic checking so many boxes. Or maybe Jokic really does check all the boxes, and his passing really is that game breaking. Worst case, it's no shame to be 5th among the offensive players in this tier. Best case, we're about to watch a really crazy postseason run