AEnigma wrote:Fitting with Pippen is nothing like fitting with Wade. Jordan made an adjustment (or more accurately was advised to make an adjustment by Phil Jackson) to give Pippen more ballhandling primacy, and that is used as de facto proof of his offensive (reminder that defence scales too…) scalability next to players like Wade. … But Jordan’s dominant skill is not ballhandling, it is scoring. And he cared about that skill a lot.
Phil Jackson wrote:Basically I was planning to ask Michael, who had won his third scoring title in a row the previous season, to reduce the number of shots he took so that other members of the team could get more involved in the offense. I knew this would be a challenge for him: Michael was only the second player to win both a scoring title and the league MVP award in the same year, the first being Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1971.
I told [Michael] that I was planning to implement the triangle and, as a result, he probably wouldn’t be able to win another scoring title. “You’ve got to share the spotlight with your teammates,” I said, “because if you don’t, they won’t grow.”
"Okay, I guess I could average thirty-two points,” he said. “That’s eight points a quarter. Nobody else is going to do that.”
“Well, when you put it that way, maybe you can win the title,” I said. “But how about scoring a few more of those points at the end of the game?”
Looking back, Michael says that he liked this approach because it “allowed me to be the person I needed to be.” Sometimes I would tell him that he needed to be aggressive and set the tone for the team. Other times I’d say, “Why don’t you try to get Scottie going so that the defenders will go after him and then you can attack?”
In general, I tried to give Michael room to figure out how to integrate his personal ambitions with those of the team. “Phil knew that winning the scoring title was important to me,” Michael says now, “but I wanted to do it in a way that didn’t take away from what the team was doing.”
Does that sound like a guy who is legitimately worried about not deferring enough? No. Now, as I said, Wade was not Pippen. I do not think Jordan would have taken the same approach with Wade, although obviously we have no real way of knowing. But I do think Jordan was dramatically less likely to be worried about not stepping on the toes of this other elite scorer. Jordan supporters might chalk that up to superior mentality; “Jordan knew he was the best scorer and would rightly force Wade to adjust at the outset!” Whatever. But that is not really a point for his “scalability”.
So then we look at what is being sacrificed, and here we have a nice little sample of what Pippen looks like with no Jordan eating up the entire scoring load. And… he takes like one or two extra shots a game. Pippen was not really being asked to sacrifice anything by playing with Jordan — not in the way someone like Wade, who on his own was taking just as many shots as Jordan (albeit much less effectively). And for all those comments from Phil, what did Jordan sacrifice from 1988? Again, like a shot or two a game. The mentality may have changed as advised, but the total scoring load? Pretty much the same. As mentioned, he also sacrificed some general control of the offence to Pippen, and that was very successful, because Pippen was (or at least developed into) a better passer than Jordan, and passing was his best offensive skill. Contrast this with Wade, who is a worse scorer than both Jordan and Lebron, is a worse playmaker than Lebron, and has explicitly talked about not wanting to act as the point guard on offence… but who is an elite player because on any other team he would be one of the best scorers and playmakers in the game. Suddenly that question of who sacrifices what and how much becomes a lot murkier.
It is not original to say that in many ways Lebron is like taking Pippen and giving him some of Jordan’s scoring acumen. Lebron does not really care much about scoring titles (despite how many of his detractors refuse to admit that). He is an all-time scorer regardless, so it makes sense for him to score a lot, and he does have some ego about scoring (in before the “ten points in every game!” streak gets brought up), but that is not his primary game, and even though he has basically always been the best scorer on his teams, he is perfectly happy to share the scoring load, whether it be with Wade, Kyrie, or Davis.
Lebron likes playmaking in general. This is more traditionally his best skill… but there too he is not exactly unwilling to share — with Wade, with Kyrie, or with Westbrook. Westbrook, in sort of a similar situation as Pippen, really only has abstract value now as a passer, although without his scoring threat, and without any spacing ability, it is not exactly a high value offering. But to accommodate that, what does Lebron do? He tries to pull a Jordan. He relinquishes ballhandling, focuses more on scoring, for the first time in over a decade legitimately pushes for a scoring title… but the team’s defence is bad with Davis “suffering from hurt”, the roster overall is a mess, and a diminished Westbrook is still a pretty active negative who cannot be any actual analogue for even a younger Scottie Pippen. But is any of that a real consequence of some fundamental inability of Lebron to score next to a lead ballhandler?
Kyrie and Wade like ballhandling too. Neither have anything on Lebron’s playmaking or passing ability, and to some extent they both probably know that (questionable with Kyrie lol), but Lebron is happy enough to share. With Kyrie, this works well because Kyrie is an elite spacer. With Wade, this does not work as well, because Wade is a relatively poor spacer. But then we consider Jordan and Pippen again. Is Pippen a good spacer? Not really, and not to an extent I would put him beyond Wade. Well, alright, then is Jordan a better spacer and more capable of working past the spacing limitations of players like Wade and Westbrook and Pippen? There I would say the answer is maybe, and the reason why it is maybe is why era differences are important to this question (as has been discussed).
Jordan was a pretty strong spacer in his era. 3s were not a focus and illegal defence rules limited the extent to which an individual top scorer could be hounded compared to what happened once those rules were dropped… but nevertheless, he is one of the best ever midrange scorers, and he has a degree of raw scoring gravity that really only Curry has competed with as a perimetre player. Lebron, on the other hand, has no leniency from illegal defence. Lebron takes threes, and is enough of a threat to make them that he does draw attention out there, while always having a pretty strong degree of raw scoring gravity of his own. In Jordan’s era, I definitely give the advantage as a spacer to Jordan. In a more modern era? Well, obviously some fans like to argue Jordan would become a strong three-point shooter, but if we take his skills at face value, and his own commentary about feeling that reliance on threes is bad for his own mentality, it seems a lot more debatable whether at that point he actually fits all that much better as a spacer with Pippen or Westbrook or Wade.
So we know Lebron is willing to relinquish ballhandling, as Jordan did. We know he is willing to relinquish scoring primacy, as Jordan did not do and expressly did not want to do but hypothetically could have done if given the opportunity. We know era disparities penalise spacing in different ways, to an extent that it is not clear whether in Lebron’s era Jordan would fare better playing with non-spacing (/non-defending) teammates than Lebron did. We know that Pippen did not particularly eat into Jordan’s scoring and that Jordan’s presence barely affected Pippen’s scoring load. What exactly does all that tell us about how much better Jordan fits with random teammates than Lebron does?
I would say exceedingly little. What I am comfortable saying is that Jordan fits better on offence in his own era with non-spacers than Lebron would — and in that sense, relative to their own respective eras too. I am comfortable saying Jordan fits better with non-scoring ballhandlers than Lebron would, pretty much regardless of era, in the specific sense that Lebron loses more of his innate value from that situation than Jordan does. But on the other side, I think Lebron fits better with spacers and/or off-ball players than Jordan does, by virtue of being better able to take advantage of their skillsets with his passing. I think Lebron fits better with poor defenders than Jordan does. I think Lebron also fits better with Kyrie-type playmakers than Jordan does — scorers who space and like to have some offensive control but are overtaxed as a team’s first choice to perform either skill. And I think it is unclear which of the two fits better on offence in the modern era with that particular breed of player who does not space well yet is best maximised as an on-ball scorer… such as Dwyane Wade.
Mind you, this analysis has been mostly about duos. Think back to that comment about wanting to win the scoring titles. Is that easier with Horace Grant and/or Dennis Rodman, or with Chris Bosh and/or Kevin Love? We talk all about how these third stars oh so tragically were placed into a box next to Lebron. Okay, what does Chris Bosh look like next to Wade and Jordan? Is he suddenly freed up? Is a higher volume scorer asking Bosh to score more too? Is a weaker defender letting Bosh lower his defensive load? Does the team no longer want him to space the floor? Kevin Love has more of a passing game, so he is more interesting (not that either Blatt or Lue seemed to figure out how to make that work well even with Kyrie), but there too it is hard to say his scoring volume would increase next to Jordan or that he would struggle less on defence or that his spacing would be less important.
Jordan pretty much always got to play his way. He was never forced into a situation where he seriously had to consider relinquishing his league high scoring load (his principle and most personally valued skill). He was almost never asked to take a role that did not suit him. Because we know that Lebron struggled a little bit in those situations that Jordan never faced, we conclude that Jordan is an easier fit with more players? Nonsense. This guy is not Steph — not as a spacer (obviously), nor as someone who seems at all willing to sacrifice scoring volume. And he is also not Kobe or Iverson or Carmelo, in the sense that it almost always should be best practice for him to be that primary scorer… but then it similarly has almost always been best practice for Lebron to be both the primary scorer and creator, and despite his clear willingness to compromise on either, that is being held against him, with zero evidence of whether Jordan could maintain his “impact” next to players who would force him to adapt his game or otherwise see their own games disrupted next to him. When Lebron gets strong fit teams that allow him to balance his skills, they are dismissed because he was not as good on bad fitting teams. But when Jordan wins six titles on teams that allow him to maximise his scoring above any other responsibilities? Well, that is just a good example of how scalable he is!
I have said it before, but we are essentially rewarding Jordan for having a less dynamic skillset: “well, both of them probably see diminishing returns as scorers next to other high volume scorers by virtue of both being some of the highest volume scorers ever, but Lebron’s superior passing sees more diminishing returns next to high volume creators, so that means Jordan fits better with more players!” Like, fine, for those of you who want to give Jordan an easy 38% three-point shot on good volume, this is not going to matter for you as much. Just like there are those of you who will never move past six titles, or how scoring is the number one skill, or what a failure 2011 was, or how Jordan was actually a god-tier defender, or how Lebron is a coward for not sticking with the Cavaliers from the start. But for those of you looking at the type of spacers they actually are and are ostensibly trying to be objective and properly critical of the context in which each played? You should be asking a lot more.
