lessthanjake wrote:OhayoKD wrote: At full-strength(Ben-wallace injury a significant hit), the 09 Cavs played at a +9.7 pace. I'd say It is unreasonable to argue that Lebron could not lead any team to +10 me thinks given he basically did in his first year as an MVP. Lebron has a bunch of regular season teams that are 60+ with him and, again, Lebron played more minutes than Mike over their first 13-years in a league where the competition played less.
I’m not much moved by comparisons about what a player’s team did in portions of seasons where the team was fully healthy.
Unless you think Jordan was the reason his teammates were healthier, then what they did when healthy, or at least, what they did
with the player in question is obviously relevant when comparing the players
individually.
I don’t actually think Jordan’s teams were abnormally healthy for their era or that LeBron’s teams were abnormally unhealthy for their era,
And yet, when we compare their teams at full-health, or even just
with Lebron/Jordan on the court, the gap is signficantly bridged. Yet again, your assumptions contradict reality.
It also is and
was abnormal to have your stars play every game in Lebron's era so if you're really concerned about in-era dominance, ignoring full-strength adjustments is rather odd. Especially when it is Lebron who played more minutes, and Lebron who was a bigger outlier for his era in terms of minutes-load.
Moreover, your original argument was that this greater rs dominance was indicative that Jordan was more likely to win titles. If that team-level advantage drops when both are in the game, that directly affects what you are arguing. As has been covered, "ball-dominance = weaker bench" does not really hold water. Harden is a substantially more ball-dominant player yet his benches have put up strong ratings with Harden off the court:
bad gatorade wrote:So when this was happening, I looked into this. Part of it was that Harden is... not a great defensive player, lol. But the bigger part of it all was that the bench lineups featuring Eric Gordon and/or Patrick Beverley were producing at a +6.1 level per 100 possessions. Both players played far more alongside Harden than without him. Did they forget how to play without Harden? Nope - Patrick Beverley went from 3.5 assists per 100 to 12 (!) per 100. Eric Gordon went from 20.6 points per 100 to 33.9 (!) whilst having his TS% drop by... less than a percent.
Ditto with Luka.
Here's the issue. The Celtics aren't padding their record vs 1st and 2nd round fodder as the Bulls would be with a bigger playoff-field.
I don’t think that’s at all the case. As I pointed out in that thread (longer explanation there), the semifinals in a league of 8 or 9 teams is actually conceptually equivalent to the 1st or 2nd round now. The semifinals in an 8-team league includes the top 50% of teams, which is basically what the first round is now. In terms of the percentile of opponent they were facing, the semifinals that Boston played were essentially equivalent to the first or second round now (closer to conference semis as the league expanded late in the Celtics’ run), and the finals were essentially equivalent to the finals or conference finals now.
Additionally, the "2" is rather questionable considering that the Celtics lost their first series
when Russell was completely out of the lineup. The second L off course was Russell's first year as a player-coach in what should have been the back-end of his career(nursing a significant injury mind you) facing what was that point maybe the greatest team ever. Regardless of # of series, time does not stop marching. You are comparing 7-years of Jordan to
13 for Russell. That is not a like for like comparison and usually when you compare a longer stretch to shorter one, the shorter stretch is generally advantaged. Over his best 7-year stretch, Russell was a whopping 100% facing stiffer competition.
Take 94(which is fair if we are counting losses where Russell was absent when the Celtics fell behind), and that becomes 27-3. Questionable selections, weaker comp, and a the comparison of one player's
career to another player's prime all are required to give Jordan a case for mere equality. That does not mark a comparable winner, and in terms of "statistics" when it comes to "Indvidual" dominance the evidence favors Bill, not Mike.
It is conceptually equivalent if you ignore that expansion sides are weaker and that talent is less concentrated with a bigger field. These new teams are not going to be evenly distributed between "contender" and not.
Steph’s Warriors were as dominant but only briefly. And I think both of those guys had more talented teams at the height of their teams’ runs (though I don’t think the pre-Durant Warriors were). But they do both get a lot of credit from me and will be ranked highly by me.
The gap in brevity for the Warriors is smaller than what is there with the Celtics and with Chicago. Perhaps the Bulls were less talented than the Magic on paper, but in reality, it was the Bulls who demonstrated they didn't need Jordan to contend for a championship, not LA.
In this case the standard is "all 5 of the highest mpg players are playing". I do not think that is unfair in a comparison where I am only including games and minutes with both of the cavs co-stars(statmuse does not offer "full-lineup wowy"). As is we do have a large "full-strength" sample for the team that was playing near +10 with Lebron. In 21-games with the same rotation minus Lebron, 2011 Cleveland played like a 18-win team.
Notice that first-stint Cleveland is expressly not what I’m talking about when I said LeBron had really talented teams, and indeed, the lack of talent on those teams was the primary reason I gave for why I think LeBron was a superior floor raiser.
That said, I’m not sure how you can define the 2011 Cavaliers as having “the same rotation minus LeBron” as the 2010 Cavaliers. Among other things, they were missing Shaq and Ilgauskas.
It means the starters were the same. Ilguaskas was not a significant piece on the 2010 Cavs and Shaq was quite literally a negative both on the Cavaliers and on the Celtics. Neither cracked the top 6 in minutes played.
You literally brought up WOWYR yesterday. But sure, the samples aren't particularly big. The problem is
A. Big samples only corroborate these small-signals(2003, 2018 and 2011 Cavs, 13-game sample from 2015, career-wide rapm, 5-year rapm, ect)
B. Lebron has unrivalled replication, when something happens over and over again in a variety of contexts...it's probably not noise.
Miami is actually the "least" valuable Lebron looks and the best-looking cast he's played with. It is also the outlier here and given the context(playing pf tends to suppress a wings defensive impact, staggering lineups with a similar player, ec), the Miami stuff probably underrates Lebron. That Lebron still looks more valuable is rather damning for Mike.
Yes, I brought up WOWYR yesterday, and you’ll find that, in that very thread, I also specifically identified low sample size as making it an arguably meaningless measure for Hakeem.
The low-sample size is one thing(and not something that can be escaped across extended comparisons), but the problematic component are the "corrections"(cough Pippen cough) which is why Ben mostly just uses plain WOWY in his writeups.
And LeBron looking “least valuable” with the “best-looking cast he’s played with” is actually a good part of my point! That’s suggestive of more of a floor raiser than a ceiling raiser.
The issue is that
A. It does not logically lead to Jordan being advantaged as a "ceiling raisier"
B. It did not prevent Lebron from beating better opponents for championships
C. Lebron was also able to lead later casts to similar playoff-domination without a drop in value
As outlined, there are various factors independent of "good team" that may contribute here, and ultimately of the 3 approaches to dealing with an unexpected result...
I think 09 has a very clear advantage in terms of man-d/shot-contests but sure. There are a bunch of explanations for the impact-drop(playing pf instead of sf, overlap with a similar player, staggered lineups with co-stars), but an important part of scaling is looking the evidence for the year you're scaling a player above, no? There are three-ways to scale internally with an assumed peak:
-> Assume all evidence outside said peak is noise and curve everything down below aforementioned peak(this is what Ben does)
-> Assume the peak is noise and curve it up above everything else with the better evidence
-> Assume both can be noise and have your assessments meet somewhere in between
...you chose the first.
What we have is Lebron providing more value. You chose to frame it as "floor-raising" on the basis Lebron is disadvantaged of working well with co-stars yet you
also want to disregard what happens when we isolate for when Lebron and those aforementioned co-stars share the floor. That's not how this works. If you want to assess how Lebron at his best functions with co-stars, then you need to acknowledge how his teams look with said co-stars.
As for RAPM, unless I’m missing something, I think we need to recognize that there’s not really any such thing as RAPM for the vast majority of Jordan’s career. I think all we have are either (1) relatively small data sets; or (2) “augmented” measures that go a bit
Sure, which is why I'm not using it as a lynchpin to any sort of case. Nonetheless what is there favors Lebron. Even in that squared-circle's stuff, Lebron is the bigger outlier(bigger gaps and if you want to be really crude his raw marks over multi-year stretches are much higher than jordan's best 1-year stuff). And working off large samples(like the 82-game full-season stuff we have in 84 and 94), Jordan is not advantaged over the likes of Hakeem, Magic, Duncan(frankly, with 04/05 looking comparable to the inflated mj signal and Duncan's better production and weaker help in 2003, my "intuition" would be that Duncan peaked significantly higher, something which is also corroborated with AUPM and certainly plausible with his advantage over the field from 99-2003). Even as early as 99, Duncan goes and wins a dominant title with(at going by minutes played, volume and effeciency) a diminished version of the same D-rob that never led a team demonstrably better than the 94 Bulls.
since it is 5-year RAPM in a time period where Michael Jordan does not have a 5-year span.
Which should advantage Jordan yes. Averages tend to go down over larger samples. I would agree it is not definitive proof, which is why I haven't tried to make it a lynchpin. But it is not an isolated piece of evidence and when everything points in the same direction, certainity is not required to make a probabalistic claim. We can also directly compare players Lebron consistently wins out against(typically by large margins) with Jordan using raw analysis. And there again, Jordan fails to generate seperation.
That is WOWYR
Jordan does not do nearly as well without "corrections" like the Bulls not being greatly affected without Pippen in his first and second year in the league:
https://www.backpicks.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Top-10-WOWY-Scores-All-Time-1.pngHere Jordan ranks 28th, and that bit is using a much "stricter" wowy definition than I am(so no 84 or 94). If we go for the biggest possible samples we find that the Bulls do not experience a dramatic drop-off even if we replace their 93 rs srs with their full-strength three-peat rs srs and we also find that a very generous appraisal of Jordan's "lift"(give all the credit for 88 to 84) finds him well behind what we can derive for the likes of Lebron and Kareem and on par with(or even disadvantaged) vs the likes of Duncan and Shaq. Whether you use 94, 95, 84, or 86, the large samples do not paint Jordan as a goat-tier floor raiser
or ceiling raiser. Those partial rapm samples are probably the best stuff he has.
These are all just your subjective views on what Jordan’s weaknesses are, and having those views magically map on to Pippen’s strengths. There’s truth to some of it, but it strikes me as mostly motivated reasoning.
If it's "motivated reasoning" then let's hear where you disagree. Did the frequency of double-teams not plummet for Jordan between the 89 and 90 playoffs? Would you dispute Ben's tracking that Jordan only hit 70% of the high leverage reads a Lebron or Magic did? Do you think his passer-rating assessments are off? Do you think there is some hidden context behind Drexler shooting significantly vs Jordan than he did vs the rest of Chicago(colts19)? Would you disagree with Blocked, Falco, and Ben that Jordan was a less active defender by the time the Bulls defense went from average to elite? Not saying any of these eye-assessments are infallible, but they at least are not actively contradicted(Cough, Lebron didn't work well with Wade, cough), and there is general holistic support(Jordan's offenses were not notable pre-triangle, and the Bulls were not affected by Jordan's departure defensively, the best playoff offenses generally come from "lebron-style" ball-dominance, ect)
I could just as easily come up with a different list of Jordan’s weaknesses that Pippen didn’t really fit around. Indeed, you even listed one of them: Obviously as a SG, Jordan was not a big rim protector, but Pippen wasn’t some rim protecting big man either. So maybe Jordan would’ve been a better fit with an elite center than with Pippen?
How would Jordan as an individual force benefit from having a player who had less need of his services as a weak-side helper? By this logic the 09 cavs were actually a bad defensive fit because they lacked elite rim-protection outside of Lebron(especially with Wallace injured). We're one bullet-point in and your list looks shaky.
A very similar player (Kobe) certainly worked great with an elite center (Shaq, and to a lesser extent Gasol) while in the same exact offensive system.
Worked great as in winning alot? Sure. Worked great as in Kobe generated excellent situational impact? No. Kobe's "Impact" is notoriously low for someone of his stature. That may just be a matter of isolating a lot in the triangle without illegal defense rules, but if Kobe is the analog you're set on, then no actually, that would not indicate Jordan would do great "cieling raising" next to an excellent big. Kobe's "impact" with both gasol and shaq was rather disappointing. Again, assumptions meet reality.
So, discounting Jordan’s team’s dominance based on the idea that he was just lucky to have the uniquely perfect running mate strikes me as very odd.
I'm not really sure what there is to "discount". Currently your argument for Jordan only functions if we
assume Miami was equal to Chicago in terms of help. I'm also still keen on seeing what "statistical dominance" you see for Jordan over Russell who has literally beaten a tougher gauntlet of opponents as a retiree player-coach with a team that was outright bad without him.
This also all raises the question of whether there’s *any* great player that would fit great with LeBron.
Questions answered several times over even in situations where Lebron had "bad fit" like Miami. Again, Lebron has proof of concept across different teams in different roles, with different sorts of help, Jordan does not. What Jordan has is you assuming his cast was equal at a certain point based on little else but whims regarding two teammates on either roster(which even if were correct, lose pretty much all relevance when Wade is breaking down by year two). There is positive evidence in one direction, and a perceived absence of evidence in the other. Favoring the latter is just a bad application of logic. One does not need to use an absence of evidence to argue for an advantage over multiple players(including Lebron) against Mike. That is the difference between a strong case and a weak one.
Your assertion appears to be that MJ had weaknesses and another great player could slot in to plug those weaknesses. Is that the case with LeBron?
Davis, Reggie Miller, Rashard Wallace, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, ect. As is Lebron, in year 17(we are past the wizards for Jordan) needing exactly 1 healthy year to win a dominant championship with one of those players(and limited depth
and spacing). And even without that optimally fitting(or healthy) second banana, the Heatles were dominant in the parts relevant to championship winning in 2012. And if we lower are threshold for what is "valid" evidence for a player's ability to contribute to a championship thus increasing the sample of data, we can throw in surprising results from 2006, 2015, 2019, 2023, ect.
The only real "evidence" for Lebron having an issue with other great players is your assumptions regarding ball-dominance. But as I outlined at the top of my initial reply to you, there are a bunch of other potentially scalable skillsets which you have ignored that actually can be tied to observable outcomes. Lebron does not lose his ability to to organize teammates simply because he gives up the ball. He does he lose his defensive influence which everything points to being much larger than Micheal's. Nor does he lose his ability to spot and make adjustments(personally and for the team) to opposing schemes, be it a mere adjustment or actual substitutions/play-calling(2015 vs Chicago, 2006 vs Washington). He is also an excellent off-ball cutter, a strong lob-threat, and good at quick bird esque-reads. But of course, none of that seems to factor into your analysis, even when the results(note, not the same as "absence') repeatedly suggest they should.
You are cherrypicking the "skills" you want to consider for "portability", finding an excuse to disregard every piece of evidence of Lebron succeeding in spite of this perceived overlap, and then somehow with some 5d-chess that cannot be articulated beyond "intuitions" concluding this means a player who is generally more valuable is actually less valuable when it comes to winning championships. That is just not good reasoning.
You are
claiming you have identified an issue, but the results do not bear out it as an actual issue, nor are you actually offering any sort of specifics. Lebron has played in systems, those systems worked out extremely well given health. Again you are arguing from absence while ignoring there isn't actually "absence". What "weakness" is so debilitating that Lebron cannot lead a +10 srs team. What weakness prevents Lebron from winning championships against strong opponents as he repeatedly has. How does "ball-dominance" neccesitate a weak bench? There are no real specifcs and there is no real evidence. Just you setting an arbitrary threshold which a player must reach to prove they are capable (one that is notably not merely "winning a chip"). Even if Lebron was a bad-shooter(post 2012 he's pretty good), that did not prevent Lebron from achieving great results(with very high individual influence) given his presence on the court and the presence of the co-stars you allege he could not dominate with.
Put another way:
uberhikari wrote:Heej wrote:f4p wrote:
yeah, somehow lebron, who has played on many different teams for many different coaches with many different teammates, who has played on heavy offensive teams, has played off-ball more than normal, has played on heavy defensive teams, and has given his teams exactly what they need at every step, is not portable because he doesn't have a great outside shot and likes to have the ball.
but guys like jordan and steph, who basically spent their primes with one coach, one system, and one set of main teammates (i.e. the non-role players), some of the most stable situations you could possibly hope for, with teammates who already seemed destined to fit them very well based on those teammates' strengths/weaknesses and not some amazing adaptability of the main star, are just given the trait of being portable because it sounds good in theory and they do the things that are aesthetically pleasing like being off-ball.
What makes any theory or concept useful is explanatory adequacy. In other words, does this theory help us gain a better understanding of some phenomenon by explaining it? Ben Taylor's ideas of scalability and portability have explanatory adequacy because they help us explain why some players are more impactful in various contexts. And we can sometimes see this in the data.
However, in any fact-based discussion, empirical evidence trumps all. And when the theory and empirical evidence conflict, the empirical evidence takes precedence. The problem Ben Taylor has when it comes to LeBron James is that Ben has a predetermined set of skills that he thinks makes a player more scalable or portable. He doesn't think LeBron excels at those skills, therefore, he concludes that LeBron has lower scalability and portability than other players who excel at those skills.
Except we have a decade of empirical evidence suggesting that LeBron's portability and scalability are apparently not
necessarily contingent upon the predetermined skills that Ben Taylor has identified. But instead of changing his theory to fit the evidence, Taylor simply ignores the evidence in favor of his theory. So, he concludes that LeBron is less scalable or portable than other players.
But the evidence is on the side of LeBron being scalable and portable. Therefore, either LeBron has some skills that Taylor is unable to identify that make LeBron more portable and scalable than Taylor is assuming or Taylor's theory of scalability and portability is wrong. I'm pretty sure it's the former.
[/quote][/quote]
In fact, there is an attribute that Lebron has which should be super-scalable(and was also shared by the guy who won twice as much as Mike):
Now, what's interesting is that I don't think I've ever heard Ben Taylor talk about IQ being a scalable or portable skill. And LeBron has tons of that.
Just to give an example, not all on-ball creators are created equally. In Miami, from 2012-2014 LeBron was an on-ball creator as a passing hub out of the mid-post. That allowed him to optimize Miami's offense.
In Cleveland, from 2015-2018 LeBron was an on-ball creator but operated from the perimeter which allowed him to manufacture skip passes and attack the paint from the perimeter.
In LA in 2020 LeBron was an on-ball creator but operated as a "do-everything" point guard.
We have 3 completely different contexts where LeBron is an on-ball creator but in each context, LeBron has uniquely modified his game to maximize his effectiveness and the team around him.
But apparently Ben Taylor sees this and just concludes that LeBron is taking up on-ball possessions.
Is that only good for "floor-raising"?
you think LeBron is a better all-around basketball player than Jordan. And perhaps that’s right. But when it comes to ceiling raising, it can be better to be a more specialized player—who hyper-excels at a few things, while having great teammates take responsibility for other things that they really excel at—than it is to excel at a broader range of things such that you’re crowding out your teammates but maybe not hyper-excelling at anything (i.e. not in the same way Jordan did at scoring).
And yet, it is more versatile players who dominate both in terms of "impact" and team-success historically, not specialists. The main issue with your abstraction is that teams are very rarely in the running to have "9's" and "10's in just the right-spots if they are in the running to get 9's and 10's at all. These abstract possibilities do not actually manifest in reality, hence why we're "assuming" team a was actually as good as team b because you intuit that player 1 and 2 on the first roster were consistently offering what player 1 and 2 offered on the second even when injuries made that impossible. Keep in mind, for Jordan to be a better chip-winner than Lebron, these possibilities need to be
frequent. They are not. Teams do not typically compete for championships without MVP's. And the small selection of teams that do compete for championships typically do not fit whatever all-time great is added like a glove. That is not how the NBA works. Maybe it's different by 2300 where there are somehow five 70-win teams every year.
I am aware the abstract theory. But abstractions are just that, abstractions. Now would be a good time to back one up.
I think the history of the NBA tells us that it does not make sense to assume that doing really well in one playoffs series means a team will do well in another. Doing well with Bosh in certain series’ doesn’t mean they’d have done similarly well with Bosh in other series’
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And doing well in one season does not mean you would do well in another season. We have to pick and choose a treshold where the sample is "acceptable". One consideration would be the relevance of the data and to that end...
. The burden isn’t on me here, since you’re trying to prove that, despite the numbers and results, the Heat were actually a dominant team because of a specific subset of games.
The numbers and results lead to the conclusion you want if and only if one can extrapolate that the lack of dominance is a result of how Lebron(at his peak) fits with great players. So no, results without Lebron or without said great players are not particularly relevant here. Is it Jordan vs Lebron, or the Bulls vs the Heat? Pick one and stay the course.
I'd also like to hear why your chosen threshold of dominance(as you have filtered out everything below said treshold as "floor-raising") is useful when trying to ascertain championship probability. You only need to make the playoffs and win 16 games to secure a title. The conclusion that only a three-peat, 70 wins, or 16-4, is acceptable for "floor-raising" to turn into "ceiling raising" is arbitrary and at the moment has nothing to do with "who is more likely to win championships". Lebron has led(while on the floor) a slew of 60-win regular season teams that elevated in the postseason and either won or lost to better competition than anyone the Bulls faced. Those teams not being "great" seems to be more tied to preference than they are to actual "ability to increase championship odds".
As I am taking a more general view that isn't trying to filter evidence into different sub-sets, I've freed myself from this sort of filter-setting. But your argument hinges on everything that is not on a team that reaches "great" not being as relevant as that which is on teams that do. Here too, the burden is yours.
Because we know that the Bulls were +16.8 with Jordan, Pippen, and Rodman on the floor in 1996-1997, for instance—which is above what Lebron/Wade/Bosh or LeBron/Kyrie/Love ever were. And that wasn’t even the Bulls’ best year.
Crazy. Now you have to do the hard part which is showing
a. That gap is relevant to winning championships in most situations
b. That gap is a result of Jordan the indvidual, not Jordan's help
Neither you(or ben) have really bothered with that bit which is why I'd have to grade this line of reasoning an "incomplete".
Saying LeBron “proved by be better offensively” than Steph in 2023 is a pretty wild take. The Lakers scored 118.5 points per 100 possessions with LeBron on the floor, and the Warriors scored 119.9 points per 100 possessions with Curry on the floor.
Adjusted for opposition they were an outright a better playoff offense and were also better post-trade. The Lakers also experienced a bigger drop-off in the regular season without Lebron and state-of-the-art metrics and "raw" analysis favors Lebron as the more valuable regular season player on a similar team despite playing most of the season with terrible-spacing. As Anenigma noted, Lebron also changed his game to be more scoring-centric for Westbrook and consequently was pushing for a scoring-title at the age Jordan was pushing out potential franchise-pieces so he could shoot more.
And of course you can say "that isn't peak Jordan", but this gets us back to "replication". Lebron has shared certain advantages(size, vision, and iq) throughout his basketball career and consequently looks better wire to wire(I imagine even you'd agree this is only really a debate for their mid 20's and maaaybe early 30's). Lebron's "baseline" both seems higher and is more proven. He has replicated his craziness over and over again. Purely talking probabilities, a player who hits certain mark more often is also more likely to have truly "peaked" higher when they fluctuate up. Lebron looks like an outlier from almost any angle. Jordan merely looks like someone who "might" have been the best in the league(or of his draft-class) if you choose the right approach and the right time-frame(notably it is the smaller samples, or stats which are less tied to winning(if at all) where he does best).
You can always find one potential excuse or another, but at some-point when you have to come up with elaborate explanations for a million different things, maybe it's just time to stop. Otherwise we're left trying really, really hard to turn "erneh 72 wins" into some sort of individual comparison...
The Bulls main advantage on defense where of course it was Pippen whose ascension correlated with their improvement, and Jordan's departure was not followed by any significant decline. Aged 30-32, regular season Lebron saw a 30-win team(average offense, bad defense) play like a 60-win team(great offense, average defense). Then with Lebron-lineups specifically improving(with and without his co-stars) those average offenses became great postseason defenses(-5 in 2015, -3 in 2016) that were disproportionately good facing better offenses:
The Bulls advantage was actually both offense *and* defense. And they literally put up below-average offensive efficiency in the year Jordan was gone.
Not in the playoffs no. Lebron led better offenses with the 16 Cavs only falling short because of a defensive advantage. The Bulls with Pippen and no Grant were a better offense than the loves with just kyrie or lebron using net-rating(fairly large sample) or WOWY(substantial for 2015, smaller if you extend for 15-17). And, keeping in mind your argument was that Lebron does not fit well with great players, the 94 Bulls were a Much better offense with Pippen and Grant then the Cavs with Kyrie and Kevin.
Jordan took a good offense to higher regular season highs and lower playoff highs and had did not have a significant influence on the defensive end(as one would expect if they paid attention to what generally happens to defenses in the absence of guards who accumulate a lot of blocks and steals). I do think Jordan, like any elite defensive guard can offer situational value game to game or series-to-series, but Jordan was no exception when it came to the sort of consistent season to multi-season effect we see with players like Pippen and Lebron who can actually anchor good to very good defenses in the rs and/or the playoffs even with lineup negatives(kyrie, love), or when their best defensive teammates atrophy or depart(ben-wallace, mozgov, ect)
As a result while Jordan's best teams were still a bit better in the postseason, Jordan's impact was not, whether we use larger rs samples to derive an off or we go with playoff data:
(
playoff on/off)
Using the "consecutive year average" method(For you Dray)
1-year - Tie
2-year - Jordan(Lebron has two comparable stretches)
3-year - Jordan(Lebron has two comparable stretches)
4-year - Lebron
5-year - Lebron(big-gap)
6-year - Lebron(bigger-gap, 2 separate samples score higher than any of MJ's)
7-year - Lebron(better than even a 6-year Jordan sample)
8-year - Tie
9-year - Lebron(better than even a 6-year Jordan sample)
Using the "average the best years" method(For you Bidolfo)
1-year - tie
2-year - Lebron
3-year - Lebron
4-year - Lebron
5-year - Lebron
6-year - Lebron
7-year - Lebron
8-year - Lebron
9-year - Lebron
TLDR:
https://youtu.be/_MBgz9h7GGM?t=23
Also, since you're concerned about team-context, here's 2 caveats to consider.
1. Lebron is, generally, playing significantly more minutes and games over the stretches we're comparing. Averages tend to go down, the longer someone plays.
2. Lebron generally staggered more with his co-stars than Jordan did. Typically this would depress a player's on/off. All things considered, "team context" probably juices Jordan, not Lebron.
This is also probably a good time to point out that the assumption Jordan peaked higher earlier in his career does not necessitate he was actually more situationally valuable, or his numbers were better. There is an idea floating around that Jordan would have way better data if we had his stuff for the first-three-peat. However the winning-based stuff we do have does not really support this(including playoff on-off). And it's worth considering that, probably aided by expansion, the Bulls posted their 2nd and 5th best regular seasons when Jordan was supposedly "post-peak".
I still consider 88-90 MJ his best version and would take 91 over 96-98. That is however "intuitive" and even if correct is a separate matter from "empirical" impact.
Come playoff-time the 16-17 cavs elevated from merely title-worthy with lebron to bulls-esque. In 2015 they were Bulls-esque with everyone healthy in the rs and were merely title-worthy with Kyrie and Love missing half or more of the playoffs. Jordan has never demonstrated similar influence on either end of the floor. There is not much of anything to support Jordan being comparably valuable, be it as a floor-raiser or as a ceiling-raiser. Just theories working off assumptions with little or no support. The simpler interpretation is that Lebron, largely as byproduct of being a much better defender, is better at generating wins.
As for the 2016-2017 Cavs being “bulls-esque” I’m not sure what you mean. They didn’t win the title. I know they played an unbelievably good team in the finals, so it can be excused. But there’s only so much credit that a team can get for dominating through the weak eastern conference teams they went through that season.
I meant the 16 and 17 Cavs as separate entities. And the 16 Cavs did beat a better opponent than any Jordan team did while the 15 Cavs did rather well deprived of 2 of their big-three after looking top-tier with everyone healthy. Again, for the specific argument you're making(lebron vs jordan, fitting with co-stars), that is significant.
You’re constantly wanting to ignore the overall picture for LeBron’s ceiling raising
I am ignoring data minutes/games which do not feature Lebron and/or minutes/games which do not feature his co-stars. That is not "artificial", that is common sense when the argument is "Lebron is a worse ceiling raiser because he doesn't fit with great players". If you don't like me focusing on the evidence relevant to what you're arguing, then adjust your claim.
And you would be wrong. The methodology is to scale off the full-season ratings as a starting point, the twist is 3/4ths weight is derived from the postseason. Surrounding years play no part. That is playoff-heavy, but it reflects the priorities of most contenders. Not that shifting rs and po weighting helps MJ much against the guy who beat a 73-win team. The 2012 Thunder took out a spurs team that was going ballistic in the playoffs after a very strong rs. The mavs torched a bunch of 55-win teams. The 13/14 Spurs like the 89/90 Pistons benefited from similar injury scaling(89 cavs, 13 okc, ect), but they were playing their key pieces limited minutes in the rs. The Warriors had 3/4ths weight put on a partially curry-less sample but were still good without their unanimous MVP thanks to Draymond.
I think such an approach is especially useful with the advent of load-management, but regardless, Lebron has beaten better teams than Jordan. If Jordan is a better ceiling raiser, it would seem to be more relevant to a hypothetical all-time league than an actual one such as the National Basketball Association.
Okay, if a measure if basing its assessment of how good a team is primarily on the results of a super small number of playoff games they’ve already played in those particular playoffs, then it’s just a trash measure.
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Well okay, then that leaves us with the regular season where the 12 heat trashed a better version of the Knicks team that the Bulls struggled with, the 13 heat beat a better version of the Pistons team Jordan(with strong support) lost to, and the 16 Cavs beat an opponent that as good as any of Jordan's Bulls.
Explain to me why that isn't ceiling raising?
