When would you generally say LeBron surpassed MJ all-time?

[AEnigma]

Nonsense. I predate Jordan and am neutral in this. I was from a generation that did not want Jordan to be better than Magic and Bird.

I think you don’t want Jordan to be better than LeBron. Tough luck. Jordan was better than LeBron and the situation for efficient scoring favored LeBron. Kobe fans where fighting like hell to deny LeBron’s superiority to Kobe when I joined RealGM but It was clear that LeBron was better than Kobe. I am accusing you of bias. I am accusing you of having your own facts like the facts of Trump haters and the facts of Trump supporters.

Deliciously ironic considering the demographic overlap in play and the declaration of Reagan-era “truths” divorced from anything that actually happens. Shades of “facts don’t care about your feelings, also please do not fact check me ever.”

Basketball, like life, progresses. Feel free to join the world of 2023 sometime.

[SinceGatlingWasARookie]

Nonsense. I predate Jordan and am neutral in this. I was from a generation that did not want Jordan to be better than Magic and Bird.

I think you don’t want Jordan to be better than LeBron. Tough luck. Jordan was better than LeBron and the situation for efficient scoring favored LeBron. Kobe fans where fighting like hell to deny LeBron’s superiority to Kobe when I joined RealGM but It was clear that LeBron was better than Kobe. I am accusing you of bias. I am accusing you of having your own facts like the facts of Trump haters and the facts of Trump supporters.

Deliciously ironic considering the demographic overlap in play and the declaration of Reagan-era “truths” divorced from anything that actually happens. Shades of “facts don’t care about your feelings, also please do not fact check me ever.”

Basketball, like life, progresses. Feel free to join the world of 2023 sometime.

I am not joining your delusion just because a lot of people share your delusion.
I understand the NBA that Jordan played in but I don’t think you understand that NBA. I think you are probably too young.
I think you are a biassed hero worshipping LeBron fan.

Why do the kids want to believe that they know how to have sex and their parents did not know how to have sex?

[OhayoKD]

If you disregard the context in which LeBron and Jordan played the scoring efficiency stats and rebounds and assusts would suggest that LeBron surpassed Jordan but LeBron has not surpassed Jordans.

The 3 point shooting in the current league and during LeBron’s career gas made it easier to drive to the hoop and score. Jordan would score more efficiently in the modern NBA than he scored in his own time. LeBron had the ball in his hands more and is getting Pipin’s assists and Jordans assists. LeBron is bigger and does rebound better.

LeBron is not as good as Jordan.

Bulls Jordan played in a higher paced league with a higher offensive rating on a team funnelling as many shots to him as possible, but you have seen a bunch of big numbers recently so you assume every advantage goes to Lebron.

Jordan played against worse defenders and schematically worse defences with rules and a team structure which allowed him to wholly dominate his team’s scoring load every year of his career. The way Jordan is treated as some disadvantaged scorer compared to a guy who came into the league in the mid-2000s perfectly encapsulates how many basketball “fans” lack an ability to separate nostalgic memories from reality.

Players from LeBron’s era would not score as efficiently if they played in Jordan’s era.

Lebron is a better defender, better athlete, better creator/passer/playmaker, better finisher, better driver, and smarter player, playing in a better league against better competition, for a longer period of time. Any other sport, the obvious conclusion would be that he is better. Not when it comes to Michael Jordan’s basketball though!

Nonsense. I predate Jordan and am neutral in this. I was from a generation that did not want Jordan to be better than Magic and Bird.

I think you don’t want Jordan to be better than LeBron. Tough luck. Jordan was better than LeBron and the situation for efficient scoring favored LeBron. Kobe fans where fighting like hell to deny LeBron’s superiority to Kobe when I joined RealGM but It was clear that LeBron was better than Kobe. I am accusing you of bias. I am accusing you of having your own facts like the facts of Trump haters and the facts of Trump supporters.

Thank god that LeBron fans and Jordan fans are not as biassed and crazed as Trump haters and Trump supporters.

This was already covered in the 93 thread...,

Where is the crowd of help defenders in the paint today? We have a legal zone now but the quality of the 3 point shooting today more than offsets the zone in taking away help defenders. You have to defend the screen setters now to stop the guys using the screens from getting open 3s.

Jordan would dominate in the current game more than he dominated in his own time where he had to deal with multiple help defenders. Jordan was a good but not great passer but he woukd find the open 3 point shooters if help defenders left 3 point shooters to help defend Jordan.

Yeah so uh...this isn't how era-translation works. I'm going to quote myself here to save time:

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)

More spacing does not automatically determine that a player will get more valuable offensively. Jordan's a relatively undersized interior threat and has limitations as a passer. What makes you think he gets more valuable in an era where the field has gotten much better at his unique strengths (shooting/off-ball movement)? Scarcity dictates value. This also isn't helped by Jordan's own self-proclaimed reluctancy to shoot threes in the first place, weakening one of his strengths.

I think Doc and BLOCKED make decent cases for Jordan getting worse, even without "era-strength" as a consideration:

1. (mj's shooting) is less valiuable in a league where shooting has skyrocketed
2. (mj off-ball) less valuable in a league where off-ball movement has skyrocketed


obviously less skilled at passing(completes half as many good passers per 100 per ben)than kobe and illegal d isn't gonna save him from the limitations of being a smol boi in the interior

however, I do still believe that the rise of the 3 means that the value of 2-point scorers goes down. Not hard for me to see him leading a championship team today, but I don't expect he'd stand out the same way today he did back then.

Forced to zero in on the best of Jordan, to me that's when the Big Chief Triangle acid trip gets in full swing before wear and tear start to take hold, so for me that's possibly '89-90, '90-91 or '91-92. Going with the middle year which is also the big breakthrough year.
.

And if we are going to project a player into the modern-league, the general talent-level of the competition is probably relevant:

Where would he rank?

There are 120 international players from 40 different countries spread across 6 continents today.





The league also hasn't expanded in almost 20 years. It added 6 (truly awful) teams from 1988-1989 through 1995-1996, expanding to 29 teams by 1997, the year in question.

Jordan would and could not dominate like he did in his actual career, today. The league is SO much deeper, broader, and more sophisticated today.

I think we need to get a bit deeper into this than "more ppg = better"

You didn't reply to this the first time IIRC, but as it constitutes a multi-sourced rebuttal to what you're claiming here, I figure i'll let it speak for itself.

[AEnigma]

Nonsense. I predate Jordan and am neutral in this. I was from a generation that did not want Jordan to be better than Magic and Bird.

I think you don’t want Jordan to be better than LeBron. Tough luck. Jordan was better than LeBron and the situation for efficient scoring favored LeBron. Kobe fans where fighting like hell to deny LeBron’s superiority to Kobe when I joined RealGM but It was clear that LeBron was better than Kobe. I am accusing you of bias. I am accusing you of having your own facts like the facts of Trump haters and the facts of Trump supporters.

Deliciously ironic considering the demographic overlap in play and the declaration of Reagan-era “truths” divorced from anything that actually happens. Shades of “facts don’t care about your feelings, also please do not fact check me ever.”

Basketball, like life, progresses. Feel free to join the world of 2023 sometime.

I am not joining your delusion just because a lot of people share your delusion.
I understand the NBA that Jordan played in but I don’t think you understand that NBA. I think you are probably too young.
I think you are a biassed hero worshipping LeBron fan.

Why do the kids want to believe that they know how to have sex and their parents did not know how to have sex?

If you want someone to agree with the sentiment that, “Everybody I perceive as younger than me is wrong and clearly does not know better and cannot see how obviously everything was at its best in 1990,” you are probably not as removed from the Fox News mentality as you think.

[SinceGatlingWasARookie]

Deliciously ironic considering the demographic overlap in play and the declaration of Reagan-era “truths” divorced from anything that actually happens. Shades of “facts don’t care about your feelings, also please do not fact check me ever.”

Basketball, like life, progresses. Feel free to join the world of 2023 sometime.

I am not joining your delusion just because a lot of people share your delusion.
I understand the NBA that Jordan played in but I don’t think you understand that NBA. I think you are probably too young.
I think you are a biassed hero worshipping LeBron fan.

Why do the kids want to believe that they know how to have sex and their parents did not know how to have sex?

If you want someone to agree with the sentiment that, “Everybody I perceive as younger than me is wrong and clearly does not know better and cannot see how obviously everything was at its best in 1990,” you are probably not as removed from the Fox News mentality as you think.

1981 and 1982 76ers vs Celtics Eastern conference finals was beautiful basketball but very different from the Mid season 2916 Warriors Ball which may have been the most beautiful basket ball of all time. 1982 Lakers, the showiest of Show time waa very beautiful but the 1987 Lakers were a better team but less beautiful. Harlem Globe Trotters were beautiful but they played a team who’s job was to lose to the Globe Trotters.

The game has changed. Modern teams would beat the 1981 Celtics that barely shot 3s even though they were 1sr or 2nd in the league arpt 3 point shooting.

3 point shooting is the biggest change between 1982 and now. 2nd biggest change is probably the change in the definition of traveling which the NBA denies that it happened.

1982 was not handchecking the way 1996 waa. From 1996 to niw getting rid of handchecking was probably the 2nd biggest change.

The legalized zone defense did not matter much because teams of the 1989s and 1990s were getting away with playing illegal defense most of the time. People sagged to the point that they were not guarding anybody. You can’t sag like that now because you will get killed by 3 point shooters.

Does life really progress? Computer chips progress but I am not so sure about life. Median income young adults in 1980 could afford a much better home than median income young adults can afford now. We are probably closer to nuclear war now than we were in 1961 or 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis.

We have global warming and a few extra billion people that make the earth feel crowded now compared to what it was in 1970.
Spanish Flue in 1918 was much worse than Covid but Covid was worse than any virus since the Spanish flu. There will be a viral outbreak much worse than the Spanish flu sometime in the future.

Basketball could decline. Some new sport might be more entertaining than all the current sports and the Basketball would probably decline. Progress goes up and down like the weather. The idea that we always have progress isn’t true.and is not that relevant to whether LeBron or Jordan is the better player.

I don’t think you know 1990s basketball well enough to be able to predict what LeBron could do in the 1990s or what Jordan could do in the 2010s-

[AEnigma]

If you thought that monologue would represented any sort of counter to the suggestion that — like most people — you have in fact not been able to assess an evolving world well past what you thought you knew and were accustomed to in your memories, then you are again sorely mistaken.

The only people who think the past is tougher to understand with hindsight than the present is in the moment are those who remain stuck in the period they felt most at home with their sense of “the present”. And as always, those trapped in the past assume hindsight has offered no new insights over what had been their present sense impressions.

Especially funny in a scenario where your primary basis for assessing age is “do they share my blind nostalgia”.

[70sFan]

I would only like to remind everyone that evolution is not always a progression. Maybe not about basketball, but about everything in general.

[OhayoKD]

I would only like to remind everyone that evolution is not always a progression. Maybe not about basketball, but about everything in general.

That is fair, though I think there's a very strong era-relative case(even if you disregard longevity) anyway, so

[falcolombardi]

I would only like to remind everyone that evolution is not always a progression. Maybe not about basketball, but about everything in general.

This is kinda semantics. Evolution just means adaptation, somethinfg like changing 2's for 3's is just an adaptation to be more likely to win

Applied to basketball eveolution would be adapting to win, so if being better at winning is the definition of progression. Basketball definetely has progressed (as today you couldnt complete playing 00's, let alone 60's style basketball)

[migya]

Nonsense. I predate Jordan and am neutral in this. I was from a generation that did not want Jordan to be better than Magic and Bird.

I think you don’t want Jordan to be better than LeBron. Tough luck. Jordan was better than LeBron and the situation for efficient scoring favored LeBron. Kobe fans where fighting like hell to deny LeBron’s superiority to Kobe when I joined RealGM but It was clear that LeBron was better than Kobe. I am accusing you of bias. I am accusing you of having your own facts like the facts of Trump haters and the facts of Trump supporters.

Deliciously ironic considering the demographic overlap in play and the declaration of Reagan-era “truths” divorced from anything that actually happens. Shades of “facts don’t care about your feelings, also please do not fact check me ever.”

Basketball, like life, progresses. Feel free to join the world of 2023 sometime.

I am not joining your delusion just because a lot of people share your delusion.
I understand the NBA that Jordan played in but I don’t think you understand that NBA. I think you are probably too young.
I think you are a biassed hero worshipping LeBron fan.

Why do the kids want to believe that they know how to have sex and their parents did not know how to have sex?

It really is a realisation when you get older and have your own children how much your parents were right. Most of the fashions and fads nowadays are degradation of morals and standards. It's passed off as development and expression but realistically divides and erodes.

[SinceGatlingWasARookie]

I would only like to remind everyone that evolution is not always a progression. Maybe not about basketball, but about everything in general.

This is kinda semantics. Evolution just means adaptation, somethinfg like changing 2's for 3's is just an adaptation to be more likely to win

Applied to basketball eveolution would be adapting to win, so if being better at winning is the definition of progression. Basketball definetely has progressed (as today you couldnt complete playing 00's, let alone 60's style basketball)

Harden got used to having the refs give him bogus calls on defenders. Then the playoffs come along and Harden is still huting foul calls instead of avoiding the contact and being the great shooter that he is. When the refs won’t blow their whistle Harden ends up looking like poor playoff performer.


In everything but 3 point shooting modern players won’t look so good if you insert them into a 1996 team.
If you inser a modern player onto a 1966 team the modern players can’t dribble. I wonder how long it would take a modern player to adjust and dribble legally by 1966 rules.

The increase in shooting efficiency is as much about the floor spacing created by 3 point shooters as it is about improved shooting. Yes the players are better shooters now. But any 1990s player that relied primarily on his drive would gain a few oertange points if inserted into this current league where he is surrounded by 3 point shooters leaving the paint with very few help defenders and defenders can’t habd check.