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I think it's pretty much unanimous that Hakeem and Curry were the primary challengers to Jordan and LeBron during their respective eras.

So who had the larger edge on their no. 2?

ardee wrote:I think it's pretty much unanimous that Hakeem and Curry were the primary challengers to Jordan and LeBron during their respective eras.

So who had the larger edge on their no. 2?

I'd say it's fair to question whether, at least from an individual lens, who the gap favored in the first pairing

Of course, a common knock on Hakeem is his consistency as an RS performer, but even over longer periods, he looks quite good. IIRC, if you use 10-year samples...

Hakeem takes 33-win teams to 48 wins, 15 win lift
Jordan takes 38-win teams to 53.5 wins, 15 win lift
Magic takes 44-win teams to 59

...

Magic Johnson(3x MVP) 1980-1991
Lakers are +0.8 without, +7.5 with

Micheal Jordan(5x MVP) 1985-1998
Bulls are +1.3 without, +6.1 with

Hakeem(1x MVP) 1985-1999
Rockets are -2.8 without. +2.5 with

Keep in mind, unlike Curry vis Lebron, Hakeem was the biggest playoff-riser, and Hakeem was the one in a worse situation not really being maximised in terms of how he's deployed until he was in his 30's.

For whatever it's worth there's also the matter of Hakeem having Jordan's number head to head:

trex_8063 wrote:

prolific passer wrote:Idk. Bulls always had problems with Hakeem and the rockets when they had Jordan.

There does appear to be some meat to this statement.....

In '94, they split the series against the Rockets in the rs 1-1 (losing by 7 on the road, and winning by 6 at home).

Looking at adjacent years (sort of blending rosters): they were 0-2 vs the Rockets in '93 (losing by 14 at home, and by 11 on the road); and were 1-1 vs the Rockets in '95 (winning by 19 at home, but losing by 23 on the road).

So were 2-4 vs them overall across three years, and an average outcome of being outscored by 5 pts. Weirdly they were 0-2 WITH Jordan, 2-2 vs the Rockets without him (though being outscored by 1.25 pts on average).
Bear in mind that's against regular season Hakeem, who [if believing the peak claimed by many] apparently didn't give it his all through the rs.

Any they were 0-3 on the road against Houston in those three years (Rockets would have had HCA in a theoretical '94 Finals).

Bad Gatorade wrote:

OhayoKD wrote:

Mikee Lowry wrote:Hakeem vs Jordan be like:

Jordan's efficiency did tank a bunch vs Hakeem...

It's true - his efficiency with the Bulls was 58.0 TS%, and it dropped to 54.5 TS% in 21 games against Hakeem.

No shame at all in this - Hakeem's on the shortlist of the greatest multi-year peaks ever IMO, one of the very clear best defenders ever, and the idea that Hakeem's defensive advantage outweighed Jordan's offensive advantage is entirely defensible.

Hakeem's generally cooked Jordan's rockets in the regular-season despite a massive cast disparity, and Jordan struggled facing elite bigs, including in the playoffs.

There is also at least an impact case for Hakeem's 86 over what I think empericallly is likely Jordan's true peak (1990)
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?t=2312865

Hakeem also has a slight raw longetivity advantage breaking down earlier, likely in part, to never taking a break the way Jordan did.

Of course there are points for Jordan here. There is the consistently greater team success, having a fair better reputation, and he does seem to have a healthy on/off advantage(i predict that will mantain in rapm but the data right now is not meaningful comparatively given how jordan-dominated the sample is). However, I'm skeptical that reflects Jordan or Hakeem's true impact given how the Bulls platooned, the disparity between game-level and spot-minutes level data(even in 1995 and 1986 when Jordan played with the same teammates after sustained absences), and the fact that both of the times Hakeem's best teammates missed substantial time, the Rockets were seemingly unaffected.

All considered, I personally favor Olajuwon, and contrary to what some have argued, it's a position that can be defended without theoretical considerations (similar rs impact + longetivity + goat-level playoff rising gets Hakeem as more valuable on it's own)

LeBron/Curry.

Jordan/Olajuwon is interesting in that it wasn't a significant discussion at the time, in part because they never met in the playoffs.

Once he hit his prime in 2014, Steph Curry typically outdid LeBron in regular season impact (as I’ve shown a bajillion times by listing who was ahead year by year in the various metrics we have). The argument for LeBron being above Steph at all in that time period revolves around LeBron making up for inferior RS impact by being the superior playoff player. Which is potentially a valid argument, but in the end it was Steph’s teams actually winning in the playoffs more, so there’s a limit to how much persuasive emphasis we can really put on that. This was objectively very close overall.

Of course, if we compared peak LeBron (2009-2013) to Steph, we might potentially come to a different conclusion, but Steph’s prime didn’t really overlap with LeBron’s peak, so that’s not a direct comparison that was ever in play.

Meanwhile, Jordan and Hakeem wasn’t particularly close at all. No one thought it was close at the time, and subsequent data we have gotten (i.e. for instance, RAPM data, including the limited pre-play-by-play stuff we have) really doesn’t paint a picture of players that are at all close. I guess one can try to make some sort of hipster argument for Hakeem here if one is ideologically inclined to do so, but it’s really just a clear answer.

lessthanjake wrote:Once he hit his prime in 2014, Steph Curry typically outdid LeBron in regular season impact (as I’ve shown a bajillion times by listing who was ahead year by year in the various metrics we have)

The thread never specified a specific time-frame so not really meaningful. Both RAPM and game-level data give Lebron a pretty big advantage(and the former also gives KG and Duncan an advantage) so...not sure what the point of this is.

Curry looks similar to Lebron post 2014 over full-games in the regular-season with an rapm-edge but both evaporate in the playoffs so even avoiding the best, by impact, regular seasons ever doesn't really do the trick for Steph.

Meanwhile, Jordan and Hakeem wasn’t particularly close at all. No one thought it was close at the time, and subsequent data we have gotten (i.e. for instance, RAPM data.

ATM RAPM data doesn't tell us anything about Jordan vs Hakeem. You can predict it based on on/off but as you've already acknowledged rapm use is circular for Jordan vs people with dramatically smaller samples, I'm not sure why you're using that.

Maybe it's "hipster" to look at how a team actually does over 48 minutes or 82 games over a 8-12, but that lens would suggest Hakeem was more valuable to his teams, quite clearly if you factor in playoff elevation, whether you go by singular signals or extended primes.

Are we talking about the size of the gap when the #2 (Hakeem/Curry) peaked? The average gap size (throughout the #2’s prime I guess)?

Notice a few people making references to what people thought at the time. I don’t care much for that, though if I did I would point out that plenty of fans debated whether Steph was the best player on his team during the KD years. That argument has since dissipated due to 2022 and Durant’s relative lack of playoff success, but it was definitely relevant in the 2017-19 years. The narrative at the time was not that Steph was particularly close to LeBron; LeBron definitely had a considerable edge over all else in the court of public opinion until 2019, when people tended to give Kawhi or KD the BITW crown (still not Steph).

OhayoKD wrote:

lessthanjake wrote:Once he hit his prime in 2014, Steph Curry typically outdid LeBron in regular season impact (as I’ve shown a bajillion times by listing who was ahead year by year in the various metrics we have)

The thread never specified a specific time-frame so not really meaningful. Both RAPM and game-level data give Lebron a pretty big advantage(and the former also gives KG and Duncan an advantage) so...not sure what the point of this is.

Curry looks similar to Lebron post 2014 over full-games in the regular-season with an rapm-edge but both evaporate in the playoffs so even avoiding the best, by impact, regular seasons ever doesn't really do the trick for Steph.

Meanwhile, Jordan and Hakeem wasn’t particularly close at all. No one thought it was close at the time, and subsequent data we have gotten (i.e. for instance, RAPM data.

ATM RAPM data doesn't tell us anything about Jordan vs Hakeem. You can predict it based on on/off but as you've already acknowledged rapm use is circular for Jordan vs people with dramatically smaller samples, I'm not sure why you're using that.

Maybe it's "hipster" to look at how a team actually does over 48 minutes or 82 games over a 8-12, but that lens would suggest Hakeem was more valuable to his teams, quite clearly if you factor in playoff elevation, whether you go by singular signals or extended primes.

Only relevant Curry years: 2014-2019, 2021-2022; the rest don’t matter for reasons.
Relevant LeBron years: all his life including last year when he’s 39 (and was better than Curry). Also, LeBron 2020-2024 is ahead of Curry 2020-2024 even though LeBron is 35-39 in this interval while Curry is 32-36.

homecourtloss wrote:

OhayoKD wrote:

lessthanjake wrote:Once he hit his prime in 2014, Steph Curry typically outdid LeBron in regular season impact (as I’ve shown a bajillion times by listing who was ahead year by year in the various metrics we have)

The thread never specified a specific time-frame so not really meaningful. Both RAPM and game-level data give Lebron a pretty big advantage(and the former also gives KG and Duncan an advantage) so...not sure what the point of this is.

Curry looks similar to Lebron post 2014 over full-games in the regular-season with an rapm-edge but both evaporate in the playoffs so even avoiding the best, by impact, regular seasons ever doesn't really do the trick for Steph.

Meanwhile, Jordan and Hakeem wasn’t particularly close at all. No one thought it was close at the time, and subsequent data we have gotten (i.e. for instance, RAPM data.

ATM RAPM data doesn't tell us anything about Jordan vs Hakeem. You can predict it based on on/off but as you've already acknowledged rapm use is circular for Jordan vs people with dramatically smaller samples, I'm not sure why you're using that.

Maybe it's "hipster" to look at how a team actually does over 48 minutes or 82 games over a 8-12, but that lens would suggest Hakeem was more valuable to his teams, quite clearly if you factor in playoff elevation, whether you go by singular signals or extended primes.

Only relevant Curry years: 2014-2019, 2021-2022; the rest don’t matter
Relevant LeBron years: all his life including last year when he’s 39 (and was better than Curry)

Also rather telling while Hakeem defenders are willing to go peak for peak, prime for prime(defined over the same-time frame), and career for career, the Curry side of this is built-upon creating justifications for excluding x inconvienent years for one player and including convenient ones for another.

That's the difference between a challenger and a pretender.

OhayoKD wrote:

lessthanjake wrote:Once he hit his prime in 2014, Steph Curry typically outdid LeBron in regular season impact (as I’ve shown a bajillion times by listing who was ahead year by year in the various metrics we have)

The thread never specified a specific time-frame so not really meaningful. Both RAPM and game-level data give Lebron a pretty big advantage(and the former also gives KG and Duncan an advantage) so...not sure what the point of this is.

Curry looks similar to Lebron post 2014 over full-games in the regular-season with an rapm-edge but both evaporate in the playoffs so even avoiding the best, by impact, regular seasons ever doesn't really do the trick for Steph.

We’ve been around and around on this in the past, and your responses are basically always just vague word salad. I’m very comfortable with everything I said in my prior post, and am quite comfortable that I’ve substantiated it in detail many many times on these forums.

As for the idea that the thread “never specified a specific time-frame,” I think it’s heavily implied that the thread is talking about the time periods where these guys were actually star players competing for status as the best player in the world. But yes, if the thread was asking whether there was a bigger gap between Steph and LeBron in 2010-2013 or between Jordan and Hakeem, then obviously the answer would be Steph and LeBron in 2010-2013. But I’m confident that that’s not really what was being asked.

Meanwhile, Jordan and Hakeem wasn’t particularly close at all. No one thought it was close at the time, and subsequent data we have gotten (i.e. for instance, RAPM data.

ATM RAPM data doesn't tell us anything about Jordan vs Hakeem. You can predict it based on on/off but as you've already acknowledged rapm use is circular for Jordan vs people with dramatically smaller samples, I'm not sure why you're using that.

Maybe it's "hipster" to look at how a team actually does over 48 minutes or 82 games over a 8-12, but that lens would suggest Hakeem was more valuable to his teams, quite clearly if you factor in playoff elevation, whether you go by singular signals or extended primes.

We have like a full season’s worth of games for Hakeem in Squared’s sample. Again, the point you’ve noted about larger sample sizes helping players is certainly a relevant thing when there’s no prior because it will take time for a great player’s RAPM to get up to where it should be, but star players’ RAPM doesn’t just keep going up infinitely as you add more games. Squared’s stuff is incomplete and not conclusive, but I think we can make a very good inference that it’s not just a sample-size-with-no-prior thing when we have like a full season’s worth of games for Hakeem and his RAPM is still only a bit above half Jordan’s. Furthermore, we also have Engelmann’s quarter-by-quarter RAPM approximation for the 1990s, which has Jordan *way* above Hakeem. We also have actual RAPM from 1997 and 1998, which has Jordan way above Hakeem. Granted, I think we could validly define 1998 as not a prime year for Hakeem, but 1997 definitely still was and their RAPM wasn’t close. We also have WOWYR putting Jordan way above Hakeem, as well as Jordan doing better in Moonbeam’s related analysis. The bottom line is that, while we certainly don’t have perfect impact data for them, we have enough to say that the impact data seems to validate the public perception from the time period that it wasn’t particularly close.

There is an argument to prefer building a team around hakeem over jordan so that gap is definetely smaller

homecourtloss wrote:

OhayoKD wrote:

lessthanjake wrote:Once he hit his prime in 2014, Steph Curry typically outdid LeBron in regular season impact (as I’ve shown a bajillion times by listing who was ahead year by year in the various metrics we have)

The thread never specified a specific time-frame so not really meaningful. Both RAPM and game-level data give Lebron a pretty big advantage(and the former also gives KG and Duncan an advantage) so...not sure what the point of this is.

Curry looks similar to Lebron post 2014 over full-games in the regular-season with an rapm-edge but both evaporate in the playoffs so even avoiding the best, by impact, regular seasons ever doesn't really do the trick for Steph.

Meanwhile, Jordan and Hakeem wasn’t particularly close at all. No one thought it was close at the time, and subsequent data we have gotten (i.e. for instance, RAPM data.

ATM RAPM data doesn't tell us anything about Jordan vs Hakeem. You can predict it based on on/off but as you've already acknowledged rapm use is circular for Jordan vs people with dramatically smaller samples, I'm not sure why you're using that.

Maybe it's "hipster" to look at how a team actually does over 48 minutes or 82 games over a 8-12, but that lens would suggest Hakeem was more valuable to his teams, quite clearly if you factor in playoff elevation, whether you go by singular signals or extended primes.

Only relevant Curry years: 2014-2019, 2021-2022; the rest don’t matter for reasons.
Relevant LeBron years: all his life including last year when he’s 39 (and was better than Curry). Also, LeBron 2020-2024 is ahead of Curry 2020-2024 even though LeBron is 35-39 in this interval while Curry is 32-36.

I don’t really see your point. LeBron has much more longevity than Steph Curry. This isn’t news. Steph took a while to become a real star, and he doesn’t seem to be holding up to a super late age quite as well as LeBron. This longevity gap is a huge reason why LeBron is above Steph in terms of all-time greatness. But this thread is about how these players stacked up against each other during the “respective eras” in which Steph and Hakeem were “the primary challengers” to LeBron and Jordan. If you want to consider 2010-2013 to be part of that era in question for Steph, then I think that’s obviously silly, but it certainly would allow you to easily answer the question by saying LeBron had the bigger gap. If you want to instead be a bit more sensible and discuss how these players compared during the eras where they were actually superstars competing for being the best player in the world, then I think you’d not be making these objections. It’s quite possible for Steph to have been similarly good (or even better) than LeBron during the time period Steph was a very top-tier superstar, but for that period for Steph to have been shorter and to have not overlapped with LeBron’s very peak years, such that LeBron is still clearly ahead in terms of all time greatness. This thread is asking about the former inquiry, not the latter.

lessthanjake wrote:

OhayoKD wrote:

lessthanjake wrote:Once he hit his prime in 2014, Steph Curry typically outdid LeBron in regular season impact (as I’ve shown a bajillion times by listing who was ahead year by year in the various metrics we have)

The thread never specified a specific time-frame so not really meaningful. Both RAPM and game-level data give Lebron a pretty big advantage(and the former also gives KG and Duncan an advantage) so...not sure what the point of this is.

Curry looks similar to Lebron post 2014 over full-games in the regular-season with an rapm-edge but both evaporate in the playoffs so even avoiding the best, by impact, regular seasons ever doesn't really do the trick for Steph.

We’ve been around and around on this in the past, and your responses are basically always just vague word salad.

Nah, everything you typed before this was a word-salad

I think it’s heavily implied that the thread is talking about the time periods where these guys were actually star players.

The OP says "respective eras". Emphasis on "eras" which implies the polar opposite.

Meanwhile, Jordan and Hakeem wasn’t particularly close at all. No one thought it was close at the time, and subsequent data we have gotten (i.e. for instance, RAPM data.

ATM RAPM data doesn't tell us anything about Jordan vs Hakeem. You can predict it based on on/off but as you've already acknowledged rapm use is circular for Jordan vs people with dramatically smaller samples, I'm not sure why you're using that.

Maybe it's "hipster" to look at how a team actually does over 48 minutes or 82 games over a 8-12, but that lens would suggest Hakeem was more valuable to his teams, quite clearly if you factor in playoff elevation, whether you go by singular signals or extended primes.

We have like a full season’s worth of games for Hakeem in Squared’s sample.

A season of RAPM would not do much even if it was all in the same season, never mind dispersed across many. Cutting some of what comes after because I prefer my salads nutritious, not wordy. RAPM will likely prefer Jordan(by a much narrower margin) when it's useful, as of now it's a circular argument(Jordan will pull-away in a jordan-dominated sample). On/off is your steeliest counter-punch as far as any value-based arguments are concerned.

By default, really.

lessthanjake wrote:

homecourtloss wrote:

OhayoKD wrote:The thread never specified a specific time-frame so not really meaningful. Both RAPM and game-level data give Lebron a pretty big advantage(and the former also gives KG and Duncan an advantage) so...not sure what the point of this is.

Curry looks similar to Lebron post 2014 over full-games in the regular-season with an rapm-edge but both evaporate in the playoffs so even avoiding the best, by impact, regular seasons ever doesn't really do the trick for Steph.


ATM RAPM data doesn't tell us anything about Jordan vs Hakeem. You can predict it based on on/off but as you've already acknowledged rapm use is circular for Jordan vs people with dramatically smaller samples, I'm not sure why you're using that.

Maybe it's "hipster" to look at how a team actually does over 48 minutes or 82 games over a 8-12, but that lens would suggest Hakeem was more valuable to his teams, quite clearly if you factor in playoff elevation, whether you go by singular signals or extended primes.

Only relevant Curry years: 2014-2019, 2021-2022; the rest don’t matter for reasons.
Relevant LeBron years: all his life including last year when he’s 39 (and was better than Curry). Also, LeBron 2020-2024 is ahead of Curry 2020-2024 even though LeBron is 35-39 in this interval while Curry is 32-36.

I don’t really see your point. LeBron has much more longevity than Steph Curry. This isn’t news.

Still not getting the point of RAPM I see.

Lamelo Anthony wrote:You've got it backwards. Hakeem was not Jordan's challenger, Jordan was Hakeem's challenger. Hakeem was simply better by some distance. But anyway, the gap between Lebron and Curry is still probably bigger.

OhayoKD wrote:

I think it’s heavily implied that the thread is talking about the time periods where these guys were actually star players.

The OP says "respective eras". Emphasis on "eras" which implies the polar opposite.

“Eras” plural because Jordan/Hakeem and LeBron/Curry were competing against each other in different eras. Duh. Anyways, this is all silly. Obviously there was a big gap between LeBron and Steph in the years where Steph wasn’t yet a star player. If you want to base your conclusion in this thread on that, then go ahead. I’m not doing that, and I suspect the vast majority of people looking at this thread wouldn’t do that either. And if your primary response to others is to just object that they didn’t do that, I don’t think you’re going to be persuading anyone. So go ahead.

Meanwhile, Jordan and Hakeem wasn’t particularly close at all. No one thought it was close at the time, and subsequent data we have gotten (i.e. for instance, RAPM data.

ATM RAPM data doesn't tell us anything about Jordan vs Hakeem. You can predict it based on on/off but as you've already acknowledged rapm use is circular for Jordan vs people with dramatically smaller samples, I'm not sure why you're using that.

Maybe it's "hipster" to look at how a team actually does over 48 minutes or 82 games over a 8-12, but that lens would suggest Hakeem was more valuable to his teams, quite clearly if you factor in playoff elevation, whether you go by singular signals or extended primes.

We have like a full season’s worth of games for Hakeem in Squared’s sample.

A season of RAPM would not do much even if it was all in the same season, never mind dispersed across many. Cutting some of what comes after because I prefer my salads nutritious, not wordy. RAPM will likely prefer Jordan(by a much narrower margin) when it's useful, as of now it's a circular argument(Jordan will pull-away in a jordan-dominated sample). On/off is your steeliest counter-punch as far as any value-based arguments are concerned.

By default, really.

The bottom line is that if Hakeem were similar to Jordan in RAPM, we’d expect him to be substantially closer in the Squared data, given the size of the sample we have for Hakeem. It’s not some tiny sample where there’s not enough games for the model to at all figure out how impactful he is. Just for reference, the individual season RAPM that Squared has done for Jordan includes lots of seasons where the sample for Jordan in terms of possessions is similar or smaller than the overall sample he has for Hakeem. And, aside from in Jordan’s rookie season with a sample size less than half of Hakeem’s overall sample, Jordan’s single-season RAPM is still always higher than what Hakeem has in Hakeem’s overall sample (and Jordan’s very close even in that rookie year). For instance, Jordan’s 1988 RAPM is up at +7.47, despite having just 3595 possessions in the sample, compared to Hakeem’s +5.43 in 6066 possessions in the overall sample. Granted, it’s a bit problematic to compare precise numbers spit out by two different regressions, but it’s pretty clearly possible in Squared’s RAPM calculations to have notably higher RAPM than Hakeem got overall, in similar or smaller samples than he has for Hakeem. Which strongly suggests that Jordan being far ahead isn’t just a result of Hakeem having a smaller sample. Obviously Squared’s stuff always comes with the caveat that it’s partial data so isn’t conclusive, but we can certainly draw a fairly good probabilistic inference from what we have that Hakeem wasn’t nearly as impactful as Jordan. And that’s especially true when we look at it in context with all the other data we have that says similar things, discussion of which you conspicuously cut from your quote of me under the guise of making an immature snarky comment. And this data backs up what should be our baseline prior that Jordan was substantially better, based on contemporaneous perception of the two at the time.

lessthanjake wrote:

OhayoKD wrote:

I think it’s heavily implied that the thread is talking about the time periods where these guys were actually star players.

The OP says "respective eras". Emphasis on "eras" which implies the polar opposite.

“Eras” plural because Jordan/Hakeem and LeBron/Curry were competing against each other in different eras.

Barring an obscure application, eras in this context would refer to a much longer period of time than the few years you decided were relevant.

It being plural or not is a non-sequitur. The rest is salad.

ATM RAPM data doesn't tell us anything about Jordan vs Hakeem. You can predict it based on on/off but as you've already acknowledged rapm use is circular for Jordan vs people with dramatically smaller samples, I'm not sure why you're using that.

Maybe it's "hipster" to look at how a team actually does over 48 minutes or 82 games over a 8-12, but that lens would suggest Hakeem was more valuable to his teams, quite clearly if you factor in playoff elevation, whether you go by singular signals or extended primes.

We have like a full season’s worth of games for Hakeem in Squared’s sample.

A season of RAPM would not do much even if it was all in the same season, never mind dispersed across many. Cutting some of what comes after because I prefer my salads nutritious, not wordy. RAPM will likely prefer Jordan(by a much narrower margin) when it's useful, as of now it's a circular argument(Jordan will pull-away in a jordan-dominated sample). On/off is your steeliest counter-punch as far as any value-based arguments are concerned.

By default, really.

The bottom line is that if Hakeem were similar to Jordan in RAPM

No, this is the bottom line:

Bad Gatorade wrote:And yeah, the fact that it seems like this data is very Jordan centric in terms of game sampling means that there's more confidence in letting Jordan stray from the mean

When similar was sampling done using a similar approach with a certain somebody, marks as high as +11 were yielded. There is nowhere near enough here to offset this effect when comparing Hakeem and Jordan.

Salad-san out

OhayoKD wrote:No, this is the bottom line:

Bad Gatorade wrote:And yeah, the fact that it seems like this data is very Jordan centric in terms of game sampling means that there's more confidence in letting Jordan stray from the mean

When similar was sampling done using a similar approach with a certain somebody, marks as high as +11 were yielded. There is nowhere near enough here to offset this effect when comparing Hakeem and Jordan.

Salad-san out

Your post includes a good bit of non-responsive silliness and ignores pretty much everything I’ve been saying, mostly I think because you don’t have a substantive response to make on this. So I’ll just note two things: First, a decade (which is the time period I looked at the bajillion times I analyzed Steph’s and LeBron’s year-by-year impact data) certainly qualifies as an “era.” In fact, I think smaller time periods than that would qualify as an “era” by most peoples’ way of thinking. But, in any event, as I said, you can continue to answer the question in this thread by way of saying LeBron was a lot better than Steph in 2010-2013 and then object to anyone not doing that. You just almost certainly won’t convince anyone of anything with that. Second, regarding the quoted portion above, Squared has never run RAPM that includes LeBron James, so what you’re saying doesn’t make sense. Comparing RAPM values done by different sources is obviously silly, since they don’t use the same methodology or scale in the same way. And I know that you know that. You just want to respond with something, so you respond with that and a bunch of weird immature jabs. Which suggests to me that this conversation has run its course.

Salad-san out

Your post includes a good bit of non-responsive silliness and ignores pretty much everything I’ve been saying, mostly I think because you don’t have a substantive response to make on this.

You made two points, both were addressed.

First, a decade (which is the time period I looked at the bajillion times I analyzed Steph’s and LeBron’s year-by-year impact data) certainly qualifies as an “era.”

Eras cover multiple decades and in the context where Lebron and Curry are given possession of the era grammatically, it's more natural to choose the seasons for the players based on their career arcs/trajectories/internal scaling than to restrict yourself to comparing the two players over a shared period of time when both are at different places in their career

you can continue to answer the question in this thread by way of saying LeBron was a lot better than Steph in 2010-2013 and then object to anyone not doing that.

I didn't answer the question that way.

Second, regarding the quoted portion above, Squared has never run RAPM that includes LeBron James, so what you’re saying doesn’t make sense.

I didn't say he did.

Someone else copied Squared's method and formula and scaling while partially sampling data for everyone in a similar way to see how Lebron would look with that same sort of inflation.

Comparing RAPM values done by different sources is obviously silly, since they don’t use the same methodology or scale in the same way.

Replying without reading is also silly:

When similar sampling was done using a similar approach with a certain somebody

Your whole "second point" was "non-responsive silliness" to set-up another iteration of "look at how I won" as the overton window here continues to steadily shift against the players you defend because you

A. have "nothing substantive to offer".
B. clutter your posts with reassurances you do actually have something to offer when you clearly don't.

lessthanjake wrote:Once he hit his prime in 2014, Steph Curry typically outdid LeBron in regular season impact (as I’ve shown a bajillion times by listing who was ahead year by year in the various metrics we have)

and subsequent data we have gotten (i.e. for instance, RAPM data, including the limited pre-play-by-play stuff we have) really doesn’t paint a picture of players that are at all close.

Could you post the impact data comparisons for both, with values? How close were Bron/Curry vs Hakeem/Jordan? Would help bring some statistical veracity to the debate.

Have to give Hakeem and Jordan the edge because of their size and quickness compared to Curry and Lebron. Curry guarding Jordan would be ugly. Same with Lebron guarding Hakeem.