OhayoKD wrote:I'll make a quick note that using rapm or "real" impact singals, lebron still comes out as more valuable in the 2016 regular season than anythign we have for jordan per rapm, and when we consider that without lebron(i don't mean he stepped out of the lineup and the team caved, i mean in games he straight up wasn't playing), the two co-stars(one who allegdly better than pippen offensively) combined for a sub-30 win pace, which is basically where the bulls werebefore they drafted MJ. Lebron also holds a defensive advantage in stufflike dpipm(2016 favorably compares to any year and 2015/2017/2020 is the same as jordan's best score from 88). For a more apples to apples comparison, Lebron's defense between 14-2020 grades out at +2 according to pipm which isn't that far off the other great defensive wing from the 10's, kawhi whose regular season stuff is at like +2.5. Note that whever lebron has left the cavs lineup thir defense has plummeted which has never really happened with MJ. That isn't to say it's "impossible" jordan was more valuable in the regular season than "coasting" 2016 lebron, but as far as I know there's no real evidence for that outside of box-aggreates and impact/rapm seems to favor even 2016 lebron over any mj. And while there were certainnly low defensive points(14, 18), I'm not really sure that works out to jordan having a comparable prime as you can probably make a case for even the likes of 2020 lebron defensively vs a prime jordan using impact stuff(and that's disregarding the playoffs where he elevates and the lakers post a really impressive adjusted defense with lebron as the clear second best defender on the team). Heck even in 2021, before his injury and with ad playing limited minutes due to injury, paired with a strong defensive cast, the lakers were the #1 defense in the league. I don't know to what degree jordan's defensive impact mantained or improved, but I think we should be careful from conflating fluctuation with being weaker. Even if lebron's defense is more variable, if he's starting from a high enough spot, that fluctation may not neccesarily led to even primes. And really, if it's a struggle to find clean evidence for Jordan being a more impactful defender in the regular season than second cavs bron(15-17), that really really doesn't bode well for a holistic comparison assuming we consider the playoffs at all. Like a reasonable extrapolation from all this is that lebron can match jordan in value without going at full tilt which...poses problems for jordan's case as the top "peak" or "8 year prime" or whatever.
With that out of the way, I'd like to address a general trend i've seen where when we are comparing jordan and someone else as overall players, instead of examining that[i], we turn it into "whose better on offense". And there's a secondary effect where we lock the question of "who can fit/adjust to more teams/raise cielings" to "whose offense is more pliable" when really what matters here is who [i]overall fits better. With that in mind I think it's worth examining 2015 where, again, without spacing and with his offensive value presumably shot, the cavs, without kyrie or love(remember 84 bulls level with those two), were comparable in the postseason(sweeping a 55 srs 60 win team, pressing the dubs, ect) to the 88-90 bulls. It would seem at least arguable. Lebron arguably provided more value, to a team lacking in spacing, than we've ever seen jordan offer, simply by ramping up his defensive value in the playoffs. If Lebron can do this on teams that are defecient in spacing, what situations are we expecting jordan to come out as more valuable? Even if we find a situation where jordan is capable of better offensive impact, why should we assume lebron can't simply offer more by scaling down his offensive impact and replacing it with defensive impact? Regardless of why things worked out the way they did, when everyone was on the lineup, the 12 heat posted a nearly +14 rating in the playoffs despite a lack of relative to era spacing, two co-stars who lebron supposedly didn't mesh with, and a team that without lebron, played 40 win ball(as opposed to the 50 win bulls).
I also think we've spent maybe too much focus/time on lebron here. Turning this into a holistic impact comparison as opposed to a "boxscore/offensive rating!" thing, Maaany players have reasonable cases vs jordan as being comparable or more valuable in the regular season, playoff, or both(Bill russell being more valuable is basically a given at this point):On top of that, if we avoid m-regularization and go from raw signals, jordan looks signifcantly worse, something that seems to hold for MJ whenever he's compared to better or much better paint protectors(hakeem, duncan, and Kareem all compare favorably and KG compares favorably in the regular season).
There are plausible explanation for all these things on their own, but as more and more evidence is added to the pile, the likelihood that they're all just noise gets less and less likely. Especially when the most popular explnation(lebron needs shooters) falls under basic scrunity(lebron has repeatedly managed jordan" value in he absence of spacing).
I don't know why so much of this thread has been dedicated to kevin-love, but he's really besides the point. Jordan loses in any serious impact analysis versus Lebron. Loses badly in both impact analysis and accomplishment/success vs Russell, and doesn't even have a clean comparison against his own contemporary in Hakeem. Kevin Love doesn't really matter here.
This thread was presumably created by someone who thinks jordan is the goat and asks what it would take for other people to accept he is the goat. Even if we just grant that jordan is better than Lebron, the claim of "goat" requires you conquer all comers, not simply lebron. It's also somewhat telling that the various people who've advocated for jordan, have still, 44 pages in, Not addressed any of these[i][/i] arguments made by various posters over dozens of posts:The full argument, as opposed to the wierd strawman that dozens of pages worth of posts have been pushing against can be summarized by these points
-> Lebron has achieved better or comparable team results with as much or less help(multiple times across multiple contexts)
-> Various players people would dare not compare to jordan arguably had better or comparable team results with as much or less help
-> Lebron has managed to achieve comaprable results with peak jordan on teams without spacing(which theoreitcally is a situation jordan should be more valuable in according to cieling raising theory) with less help including a season which was supposed to be one of his weaker years(2015) due to a broken shot
-> Lebron's best scoring years look better in almost all impact data besides box-score aggregates where they generally split(jordan rs, lebron playoffs)
-> Jordan consistently looks worse relative to paint-protectors/two-way bigs the less the box-score plays a factor in metrics
-> Consistentlylooks worse relative to paint-protectors/two way bigs if you go by real-data as opposed to artifically capped apm stuff
-> Lebron's teammates weren't able to do **** in games he wasn't even playing in(so much for "they were minimized")
-> Lebron and two players he supposedly shouldn't fit with produced jordan bullsy results without spacing when they played games together in 2012 despite **** relative to era spacing(also did worse in games where lebron was completely absent than the jordan-bulls)
Taking this away from lebron vs jordan and making it relevant to jordan's goat case in general, the other argument which no one has really bothered dealing with is russells' which is...
-> he won way more
-> he won way more in less time
-> he won at least once with less help than jordan has ever had for a playoff series win in the season he retired
For some reason, instead of addressing these arguments(supported with a variety of evidence), we're making random unsupported claims like "jordan had no weaknesses" or "jordan never stat-padded"
I saw someone claim this was a "**** on jordan" thread, but the first 10 pages or so were dominated by pro-jordan posts. If it has become a "**** on jordan" thread, I would argue it is because when arguments/evidence was offered, instead of responding we got 20 page tangents about kevin love, another tangent about longetvity(when the arguments have almost exclusively centered on "how good" these players were), and posters complaining that everyone was biased with one going so far to say that everyone disagreeing with them proved they were the only "reasonable person there". Is that really good-faith discussion?
Also can we start talking about russell more here? People are casually claiming that Jordan was "individually more dominant" than a player who
won way more than anyone
won way more in less time
and critically(at least with all the evidence that's been presented
won a title with substantially less help
It's been established to death why offensive box-score stuff doesn't really matter with 60's players. Russell scoring 11 ppg or 2 ppg would not change that all the evidence we have suggests his imapct relative to era basically nukes any modern nba player
Interesting how comparatively little “substance” we see in the cases for Jordan in this thread…
LAPS!
