Doctor MJ wrote:OhayoKD wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:
Okay now let's compare this adaptability with the other goat candidates.
Jordan played with one team and was only able to get past 50 wins with the implementation of a system which
immediately had the bulls srs skyrocket(as jordan's own holistic impact (on/off, apm, ect) waned).
Kareem's won 55 after joining a similar team(identical in terms of record), matched the best of the bulls in year 2 with a co-star, was able to anchor another atg team, even without his co-star) in year 3, and had a team that went 3-14 without him in 75 operating like the pre-triangle bulls with him(with the 2nd and 3rd best players falling off). Then he was posting 40 win lift on a team that just made the playoffs.
Lebron has shown jordan or jordan+ impact on four different teams, including, notably the 2012 heat, the 2020 lakers, and the kyrie/love-less 2015 cavs, two teams that had horrible era-relative spacing.
I don't know what specifically you're referring to as dominance here(individual impact is not tree you'd want to climb), but i don't see what mj's "adaptability" case here is. Were the bulls a vastly different type of team in 96 as opposed to 91?
To be clear what I mean:
Jordan went from dominating by having the highest motor/explosion we've arguably we've ever seen to relying on an ability to hit fadeaway jumpshots at absurd angle at extremely high percentage. As we watch Westbrook fall off a cliff as he uses youthful explosion it's all the more telling that Jordan didn't fall off the same sort of cliff.
By contrast if we look at LeBron, while I don't want to act as if he hasn't adapted, has largely worked as a helio relying on his overwhelming strength compared to most ballhandlers. LeBron lasting a long time is a great accomplishment, but it's not really a surprise. Yes, there were people who didn't think LeBron would age well, but that's because those people were imagining LeBron as an explosion-reliant star which he really never was the way young Jordan was. LeBron had a game that more naturally aged than Jordan's, and yet Jordan found a way to create new methods of attack that very, very few explosive-types do.
None of this means that Jordan is more impressive than LeBron necessarily - I really am not trying to make an argument in this thread so much as just present the guys who seem to have arguments - but I'm talking about a thing with Jordan that really makes it hard for me to bet against him.
Re: LeBron had Jordan-impact on 4 teams. Yes, but in general it was his team's adapting to him rather than the other way around. The biggest exception is probably the Heatle team where he had more star talent around him than anywhere else but failed to reach the same top-tier levels of offense that were produced on other teams. LeBron deserves all sorts of "achievement points" for his time in Miami, but in terms of a lesson to take away offensively, that lesson was that you shouldn't try to pair LeBron with high usage stars who can't shoot from outside...and it would have been nice if LeBron had actually learned that lesson himself as it would have prevented things like the current Westbrook quagmire.
So I offered three specific counter examples(2012, 2015, and 2020).
Here's what they have in common. All three are examples of Lebron demonstrating mj or mj+ impact
without good era-relative spacing. 2015 in paticular was a down year for lebron on offense. And yet, the 15 cavs, without love or kyrie, swept a 60 win team(55 win srs), and took the 2015 warriors. I feel your analysis here is tunnel-visioning to
offense. None of the teams I listed were atg offenses, but they were able to achieve similar relative to prime jordan analogs(88-90 for 2015, 2012, most title years for 2012 and 2020 (heat were +13 when wade/bosh were in the lineup)) with poor era-relative spacing. All three did this on the back of
defense.
Your theory works fine if we assume that Lebron cannot ramp up his defensive impact to compensate for diminishing offensive influence, but all three stand as strong counter-examples for this. With the exception of 2020(where he still matched 88 mj in dpipm before playoff elevation), lebron was the primary paint protector and defensive anchor for those teams, And both the cavs, and the heat collapsed defensively in games he didn't play. Mj does not have a similar track-record, and this is probably why he compares very negatively to lebron(and various primay paint protectors) in non-box dominated comps. Both the 2020 lakers and the 2012 heat are era outliers in terms of spacing for title-winners. But lebron can impact the other side of the court more than jordan can, and that is a pretty useful advantage. Jordan only has ever anchored one good regular season defense, and to what extent he anchored that defense is questionable considering the immediate collapse that ensued in 89 when their primary front court presense departed.
It's not that lebron "switched teams", it's that lebron was able to out-value jordan via defense in situations where cieling raiser theory predicts he should be less valuable. I will also add that the non-regularized stuff is games where lebron is not playing whatsoever which should in theory minimize the "lebron-helio effect" on a team as they know they're not going to have lebron beforehand. And lebron's non-regularized stuff is
better than his regularized stuff(where he still mantains a clear and consistent advantage across his prime)
Re: Kareem. Here you really don't seem focused on adaptability at all, but let me emphasize: In my experience reading Kareem he's pretty explicit about the fact that he didn't have great basketball instincts, but when he found the hook shot, he found something that nobody could stop him from doing, and so he practiced it with an obsessiveness very, very few NBA players are capable of - just like most NBA players are incapable of doing serious historical research and writing books by their own hand the way he is - beginning in middle school. That was his ticket to great success for a very, very long time more so than him finding a new approach to scoring after his first way stopped working so well.
My point was really that he maintained jordan+ impact signals on teams of various quality(floor vs cieling) with various teammates. But if you aren't talking era-relative adaptability, I don't have a strong enough opinion to contest it. I will, however, offer a caution: for modern era translation, box-production going up does not mean a player has become more valuable. Scoring 30 ppg where the field is scoring 20 pgg isn't necessarily worse than scoring 40 ppg in a where the field scores 30 ppg. Crude example but it should illustrate the point. If you are going to argue Jordan gets better thanks to spacing, it can't just be a matter of numbers. You need to argue that he will be better relative to his peers in 2022 than 1991. According to ben, jordan was a limited pure passer even relative to kobe(found half as many good passes per 100 iirc), so i'm not sure having him helio vs more sophisticated and talented defenses produces better results(as far as winning goes).
"he translates well" needs a little more support than "ah, spacing -> numbers go brr"
and series
[quote}
Eh...
https://youtu.be/wDViQIwOtY8?t=395What makes jordan's series adaptability special relative to other top 10 all-timers?
Once again, not looking to make strident arguments, just pointing out that I can see reasonable people thinking these things, but the core of the answer here has its roots in something simple that can admittedly be over-emphasized:
Jordan's Bulls always seemed to get better in the playoffs, with him scaling up his usage as needed. While I wouldn't want to knock LeBron or Kareem here as if they were particularly bad on this front, there have been times with each of them where their teams underperformed. In the case of Kareem, I'd tend to attribute to him really only being amazing at certain things and thus unable to "fill in the gaps" that opponents were exploiting. In the case of LeBron, we literally have cases where he doesn't know how to counter what the opponent is doing and gets passive.
In fairness: I'd tend to call Jordan's game simpler and more individualistic than LeBron's - he know he was going to attack, he just had to figure out how.
I'll try to keep things broad since you aren't looking to get in the weeds.
We don't have enough stuff for Kareem for me to take a position on his postseason translation, but with lebron, I'd offer two additional cautions:
1.compare apples to apples (down years should generally be compared to down years, and the amount of seasons whether you take the "best" or "consecutive" approach should probably be the same)
2. distinguish between underperformance relative to expectation and underperformance relative to supporting cast
A drawback of immense longevity (and immense regular season impact) is that there are more down years(and the bar for a down is lower) as well as up years. Earlier in the thread we did a 10-12 year postseason comparison and, at least in box-related stuff, lebron bridges the gap in MJ coming out ahead in two of the three common metrics that generally favor mj in the regular season(its dead split or lebron nets the majority depending on method). If you go by "best years" instead of taking a consensuctive sample, the gap widens considerably in lebron's favor. On the defensive side, at least with the second cavs stint, the teams defense consistently improved in the playoffs, and I think we'd agree lebron's defense scales up in the postseason at least when he makes his return to ohio.
I don't actually know that jordan, if you compare similar seasons(in terms of time frame and/or in terms of how they rank relative to all of the seasons of their career) is a better playoff elevator. I'd also be somewhat confident he isn't as good a playoff elevator than 2015-2018 lebron, and Lebron looks like the more impactful regular season player outside of box-stuff. 2011 finals are bad, but you can just move to 2012 and get a favorable prime comp for lebron. Without expectations as a prior, even 2011 isn't really worse than mj's weakest seasons(95, wizards).
I know kareem's teams didn't necessarily replicate that effect so I can't dismiss the idea that mj was able to bridge whatever regular season gap was present in the rs.
OhayoKD wrote:
What i'm trying to understand is how you arrive at the conclusion that Jordan's prime is so much better than the field that even a massive longevity edge doesn't necessarily grant a culmulative advantage. MJ's impact signals are sub-duncan(on/off, aupm, apm), and he only gets within touching distance of "best ever" if you go with box-stuff, box-aggregates, and box-plus minus(conevenient for a player with relatively little discernable defensive influence).
The vast majority of evidence(non-regularized impact, regularized impact, apm, ect) does not put him within range of "best prime". And the evidence which does(aggregates) does not grade his claim as uncontested. Yet he's still "arguably the best culmnatative career" against candidates with several mvp years worth of longetvity?
Just how much better was jordan at his best? And if he was this good, why did he need a massive schematic boost just to cross the threshold of 50.
Again, I'm literally not trying to make an argument so much as just present things I could see as arguments, so arguing "Jordan's prime is so much better!" isn't something I'm looking to do.
How someone values longevity is something where there's a big difference between people on, and while we don't have to believe all view points are equally valid, if what you're looking for is to understand how someone could come to the conclusion they did, then differences in longevity philosophy are often a key thing.
If someone goes purely by the rings argument than Jordan has a bigger cume than LeBron obviously. There's a lot of luck in rings clearly, but I certainly can't see folks as insane to think that Jordan showed a greater capacity for dynasty-making than LeBron, and if they also don't see much point in favoring one player over another based on his 11th best year, it makes sense why they'd consider Jordan the more accomplished player.
Well, the issue with the rings approach is Russell (Mind you, focusing on the "individual impact" side does MJ no favors), but I'll acknowledge that modern-translation does offer some leeway here, if you can make a compelling case for jordan being able to translate his success to lebron's era better than russell could have managed in MJ's.
It does seem the philosophy you're describing is that "longevity matters less" which I guess is fine, but if you're downplaying it to that large of an extent, why even distinguish between prime and accumulative value in the first place? Like either mj's prime years just have a massive value edge or longevity doesn't matter.
Re: why did he need a massive schematic boost just to cross 50 wins. 2 big things I'd feel a pull to say in response here:
1. The heliocentric approach LeBron made normal is a great way to raise your team's floor in many circumstances. That doesn't mean LeBron cannot also be better at raising ceiling than Jordan, but you're talking about floor-raising, and we're talking about a situation where basically as much of the offense as possible is played through LeBron which you might say leaves less to chance. With Jordan's killer edge being less about decision making and more about scoring ability, it makes sense that the team needs a smarter architecture for him to reach elite status.
2. As we've seen though for 3 out of LeBron's 5 years with the Lakers though, it's not the case that LeBron can make any group of players good. It's easy to think that a guy who thrives with role players is "doing more with less", but LeBron's killer decision making edge is dependent on having guys who can space the floor on offense. His stints in Cleveland in particular gave us the impression that these things are essentially trivial to build, and to be honest, I don't think they are that hard to build, and that's a feather in LeBron's cap theoretically...but that only brings up the way LeBron has now shown repeatedly in LA that he never understood the value in these players. He bought into the narrative he could make anyone a shooter, got burned by it in '18-19, got saved by the once-in-a-lifetime shooting in the Bubble, and then doubled down on it in the pursuit of Westbrook.
1. I think you are tunneling on offense here. The drop for lebron casts in lebron's prime years comes also comes from defense. The biggest difference between the 89 and 91(90 saw the bulls leap towards their 91 selves with the triangle), and 93/94 was the defense getting vastly better. Anyone positing that helio is producing the drop-off needs to account for the defensive stuff. Via regularized impact, lebron vs jordan is generally a tie on offense, and anything but on defense.
This also extends, obviously, to duncan, but in the absence of good pure signals(healthy thoughout his best years) the support for a holistic advantage is weaker(if unopposed)
2. I will reiterate that apples should be compared to apples. These last two years are more anaglous to mj with the wizards. And whatever you think of lebron off-the-court, it's hard to argue it was worse rhan what MJ did(when he should be at his most experienced) with washington. Jordan also insisted on not shooting threes, started beef with his gm over potentially getting a lotto pick, punched a teammate, ect, ect. Are you sure off-court intangibles is a good tree to climb? LeGM also should proably get some credit for getting davis in the first place if we're knocking him for the westbrook decision.
2019 may not be the best evidence here, as, prior to a plethora of injuries, the lakers were looking alright despite a bunch of spacing concerns. How indicative do we think Lebron's drop in performance with his first major injury(and the rest of the cast hurt) is of his best years?
I'll end by talking more personally here about my GOAT list because I think it's probably annoying me not doing that:
I felt that LeBron first had a good argument to be ranked higher by career after 2016.
I elevated LeBron ahead of Jordan for the 2020 Top 100 project.
I'm still considering what I'll do for the (presumed) 2023 project, but I have no qualms about moving LeBron back below LeBron out of fear of some logical contradiction. I am someone who factors in off-court impact to the list I use for the Top 100, and that includes things like pushing your team to pursue a bad strategy.
What is the case for MJ as less of an off-court trouble-maker than Lebron? His Wizards stint is probably the worst look for either, no?
This would also be one of the instances where team loyalty doesn't really work as Mj was willing to join the knicks
