AEnigma wrote:Dutchball97 wrote:Jaivl wrote:Aren't LeBron's and Russell's arguments the straight-forward ones, Jordan getting there with rankings that emphasize XYZ over ABC?
Describing Jordan's combination of individual dominance and team success as having to emphasize complicated criteria honestly sounds a bit agenda-driven. I'll assume it's because you're replying to someone who also is making a clearly agenda-driven statement?
Look how abstracted that is lol. He does not top Russell in team success, so the measure has to be team success plus “peak/prime individual dominance” — which basically just seems to mean big box score numbers — in some unspecified blend. You can phrase it simply, sure, but it is ultimately going more on expected vibes of what “individual dominance” looks like.To a lot of people Jordan has the highest peak
Well yeah, he scored a ton, was a good defender for his position, and won; for a lot of people, that is basically where the analysis stops.
Which takes us back to the arbitrary blend. He — without doing any further contextual analysis — won more than everyone but Russell. But we want it to be Jordan, so obviously we need to blend individual dominance relative to their own league, and a lot of people still think Wilt was better than Russell, so it cannot be Russell, so therefore Jordan is the best!and the Bulls dominance is something Kareem and LeBron didn't come close to at their respective peaks despite changing teams to try and search out better situations.
Because their teams were less healthy, worse without then, and faced tougher opposition.
This is one of the most annoying aspects to this approach. Rookie Kareem sees a 27-win team jump up to a 56-win team. Then they add an old Oscar Robertson and have a 12-SRS team with a 12-2 title run, and the following year they are nearly at the same level despite Oscar missing a quarter of the season. However, in the playoffs they go on the road against another 12-SRS team, blow them out twice, then lose three close games, the last of which Oscar could only play part of a quarter.
At this point, if Kareem experienced a Walton-type breakdown, people taking your approach would probably have his peak even higher! Instead, he made the mistake of continuing on. Nate Thurmond exposes him, retroactively making everyone value his prior two years less. Oscar continues to decline and ultimately retires after a game 7 Finals loss. 1975, the Bucks go 3-14 without Kareem. And so he jumps ship to the Lakers, where he shapes up and improves upon those Milwaukee weaknesses, but still loses against an 8+SRS-when-healthy Blazers team. This is basically an inversed Jordan arc, but we reward Jordan for aging into one of the league’s top coaches and supporting casts, while penalising Kareem and Lebron for either not having those casts or seeing those casts age away.
Instead we need to rigidly adhere to arbitrary narrative standards. The player must win in dominant fashion, without considering competition or health of the team. The player must maintain their scoring, again regardless of their competition or how their own team is performing, or indeed what their league environment even looks like in its ability to hone in on any singular lead scorer. It does not matter that someone like Lebron has a season that would win straight up against any non-1991 Jordan season, or that no one really has an ability to articulate how exactly 1991 Jordan elevated past anything we see from him in any surrounding years. No, all that matters is the narrative. Strong regular season record, 15-2 postseason run, best regular season player, scoring maintained from the regular season, threepeated so it was not a fluke, never looked better in any other season… Framed like that, yeah, it is Jordan, but why are we framing it like that, and how is any of that qualifying as actual analysis of what was happening on the court?In the end every argument is going to be somewhat subjective and not straight-forward though. For me Jordan was the best individual player in both the regular season and play-offs for all his championships but I know that for someone like 70sFan who rates 93 Hakeem higher (iirc) an argument like that isn't going to hold up.
Even if we take that as a given — strong agree that 1993 Hakeem was better but whatever — why again does that matter? Oh, Curry was better in the 2016 regular season than Lebron, and Giannis was better in the 2020 regular season. Do you think all of Jordan’s title regular seasons would have topped them either? Okay, maybe Bill Russell was not necessarily the best regular season player every year — although that is even tougher to quantify in that era — but his competition would have been peak Wilt, Oscar, and West, and he still should have more than six titles where he was the best in both anyway.
I do not really mean to gun for you specifically when this is a common view of the sport, but you are the acting representative of that view in this thread, and to me it looks like just a half step off JordansBulls reasoning.
I do not mean to wave you off here but pretty much my entire point is that you have to respect people's personal criteria. I get you don't find my arguments for Jordan convincing enough but I'm not trying to convince you, I have Jordan as my GOAT currently but I don't have problems with other people going in a different direction. Probably feels like a cop out but I'm not really interested in becoming the resident Jordan defender on this board.
