SpreeS wrote:How many of the voters have seen Jordan play a live? It seems that this voting is one way trafic (Lebron/Jordan). We have here a lot of numbers and yes Lebron is goddamn good about it, but I want say two things
A) One was bored to play in NBA b/c of lack of competitiveness B) Other had a goal to beat Jordan in all time standing
Jordan got “bored” winning one more championship in a row than LeBron did with the Heat. He also got “bored” on a team that was so strong they nearly won the title replacing Jordan with Pete Myers, one of the very worst starters in the history of the NBA. He never played more than 16 MPG outside of the seasons Jordan was retired and he had a career PER of 9.9 and a career BPM of -2.5.
Imagine if LeBron played on a team so strong that he could retire, get replaced with Ben McLemore while still filling out a max salary slot, and the team would still go 55-27 and narrowly lose in 7 to the 2nd best team in the NBA. None of LeBron's “superteams” were remotely close to that strong. Even the Wade/Bosh Heat went 9-9 without LeBron. The Kyrie/K-Love Cavs went 4-23 without him.
If LeBron was playing on the 80s/90s Bulls with Pippen and Grant in a league with very few international players where the other top stars generally played with very weak supporting casts, it’s more likely he’d win more than 3 rings through 1993 than less. Jordan played great in the playoffs through that whole run, but the Bad Boys Pistons from 1988-1990 were very beatable and LeBron’s passing could have taken those Bulls’ teams to a new level.
2010’s one very legitimate black mark on LeBron where he should have won the title if he hadn’t gotten in his own head, but he more than made up for it upsetting the Thunder in 2012 and the Warriors in 2016. Whenever Jordan’s supporting cast was overmatched like that, he lost.
I mean sure, if you come up with enough metrics that are plus-minus only that focuses on RS only, it is possible to get a new leader at the top. As already mentioned, I am pretty sure NBAShotCharts RAPM doesn't include PS numbers so it probably doesn't 100% correlate with championship odds.
Since you are maybe a bit higher on Jordan consider this:
From 91 (often consider Jordan's peak) to 96 (last healthy year before major injury), David Robinson ranks #1 in RAPM. I wouldn't take this 91-96 stretch as meaning Robinson was the absolute plus-minus king over Jordan, but rather just a footnote.
I’m a bit confused by that particular site you link to regarding 1990’s RAPM. How is there RAPM for the early-mid 1990’s when there’s no tracking data? Did whoever made this web-archived website actually manually track every single possession of basketball in the early-mid 1990’s? Or is this some sort of use of WOWY fit with box-score data to try to approximate RAPM? I’m not really sure what I’m looking at.
Also, it seems like the individual year data doesn’t map onto the list for the 1990’s as a whole. You are indeed right that that site has David Robinson #1 a bunch of individual years. But then it also has a ranking that is for the entire 1990’s as a whole, and that has Michael Jordan at #1 by a good margin (with David Robinson at 5th): https://web.archive.org/web/20150226114926/http://stats-for-the-nba.appspot.com/ratings/90s.html. So I’m not really sure what to do with this.
However, we do have several sources of plus-minus data for Lebron, and the overwhelming evidence typically points to him coming out #1. Not always, but most of the time, which increases some of the confidence in the idea of Lebron being the plus-minus King, when several different RAPM methods lead to a certain guy being #1.
The larger the sample, the more confidence we can have in an assertion, and therefore for career measures, that gives more credence to the idea Lebron is an outlier.
The overwhelming evidence suggests in terms of plus-minus, Lebron is indeed an impact metric unicorn.
That’s all good info (though admittedly some it is paywalled for me, so I wasn’t able to look at all of it)! But there’s a couple very quick things I’d note:
1. Ultimately, it’s not really surprising that LeBron would be the top player in something from 1997-2023—he’s pretty clearly the NBA’s greatest player during that time period! Being the top person in RAPM from 1997-2023 is not really particularly responsive to the question of whether he should be above the primary other candidates for #1 (i.e. Jordan, Kareem, and perhaps Russell), since those guys played all or most of their career prior to that time period. Of course, it’s good info to have nonetheless, but part of my point was that I’m not sure the helpfulness of RAPM in a comparison with Jordan given the limited RAPM data for him.
2. I think LeBron being #1 across the entire 1997-2023 time horizon can obscure not being #1 in more specific, but still pretty long, time horizons. For instance, I’d fully expect that Steph Curry’s overall career RAPM would be below LeBron, because Steph genuinely took a while to get going. But I’d also expect that there’s a significant chance Steph’s RAPM was higher than LeBron’s for most of Steph’s prime—and indeed it was in the data I linked to. And that’s potentially true of other people in different timeframes (for instance, maybe Duncan and/or Garnett earlier in LeBron’s career. Not sure.). In any event, that sort of thing is important. Because I think there’s a difference between someone who was just destroying everyone in RAPM all the time, and someone that other players had significant time periods above but who was so consistently good that no one in this era has a higher overall career RAPM. The former would be an impact-metric unicorn, while the latter would obviously be an incredible player with amazing consistency and longevity but not exactly a unicorn.
A few things. As I say in the original post, it is an "estimated RAPM." When I said the box-score wasn't used, I meant it is the typical points, rebounds, and assists that are used in X-RAPM variants like PIPM, RAPTOR, etc. were not used in the making of it. Apologies for not being
Next, as I mention, David Robinson is #1 every year from 91-96, before his injury. My whole point was that if you were to make a 5-year RAPM signal from those RAPM numbers, Robinson would lkely come out ahead of Jordan, similar to how Steph and CP3 at times have come out ahead of Lebron in 5-year RAPM samples. Robinson does not rank #1 for all of the 90s, likely because his impact after the injury was not equal to that prior to the injury, which I tried to highlight in the post. Nonetheless, Jordan coming out as #1 could serve as another lesson, where the bigger the sample size we have, the more likely the true most valuable player is to rise to the top, which is what I attempted to prove with the large RAPM samples.
I don't think it is egregious to think Steph for instance has had more RS impact than Lebron since 2015, over multi-year stints. However, what I am attempting to highlight is that Lebron is seen as an impact unicorn, from the strongest pieces of data we have, which is these large impact signals.
I also think people on this board tend to lean toward PS play when discussing impact and therefore might give Lebron the nod during the time periods you mentioned because he does seemingly lap his pears.
For example, if we take the years you listed, and take a quick look at their PS performance.:
Having trouble accessing Curry's data for the last 2 5-year samples, since he was not apart of the PS.
But yeah, as you mentioned in your post at the possibility of Lebron looking better with more PS focus. It would look as if Lebron has some distance from the pack based on this.
SpreeS wrote:How many of the voters have seen Jordan play a live? It seems that this voting is one way trafic (Lebron/Jordan). We have here a lot of numbers and yes Lebron is goddamn good about it, but I want say two things
A) One was bored to play in NBA b/c of lack of competitiveness B) Other had a goal to beat Jordan in all time standing
Jordan got “bored” winning one more championship in a row than LeBron did with the Heat. He also got “bored” on a team that was so strong they nearly won the title replacing Jordan with Pete Myers, one of the very worst starters in the history of the NBA. He never played more than 16 MPG outside of the season Jordan was retired and he had a career PER of 9.9 and a career BPM of -2.5.
Imagine if LeBron played on a team so strong that he could retire, get replaced with Ben McLemore while still filling out a max salary slot, and the team would still go 55-27 and narrowly lose in 7 to the 2nd best team in the NBA. None of LeBron@ “superteams” were remotely close to that strong. Even the Wade/Bosh Heat went 9-9 without LeBron. The Kyrie/K-Love Cavs went 4-23 without him.
If LeBron was playing on the 80s/90s Bulls with Pippen and Grant in a league with very few international players where the other top stars generally played with very weak supporting casts, it’s more likely he’d win more than 3 rings through 1993 than less. Jordan played great in the playoffs through that whole run, but the Bad Boys Pistons from 1988-1990 were very beatable and LeBron’s passing could have taken those Bulls’ teams to a new level.
2010’s one very legitimate black mark on LeBron where he should have won the title if he hadn’t gotten in his win head, but he more than made up for it upsetting the Thunder in 2012 and the Warriors in 2016. Whenever Jordan’s supporting cast was overmatched like that, he lost.
I am not saying that one better than other b/c of
6 > 4 MJ supporting cast > LJ supporting cast LJ stats > MJ stats and so on
I hated MJ and Lebron was my guy until 2015 season and I was hoping that PHO/SEA/UTA/IND beat Bulls in every Finals or ECF. I remembered well that feeling and aura in the 90s Finals - a confidence and indomitability that never existed with LeBron. If I were asked to describe these two basketball players in one word, what connects them to basketball would be
Jordan - the flow (the best possible sinergy of game and player) Lebron - stats (stats widely speaking - trophies, nominations, stats, all time ranking)
I don't love the idea of "floor-raisers" and "ceiling-raisers" (or of "portability" really) in general. There's probably a little bit of truth to it but I think it's easy to over-emphasize it.
With regard to Lebron and Jordan specifically - the thing with Lebron as floor-raiser is that I do think that Lebron's whole floor-generalship thing does allow him to get more production from somewhat marginal teammates than they would otherwise be able to achieve. He is able to put them in positions to succeed and paper over weaknesses.
That's clearly not a bad thing. It's true that teams that are reliant on Lebron being a floor general to operate are going to have problems when stuff starts getting taken away by playoff defenses, but those problems really aren't created by Lebron as far as I can see.
With Jordan, the only thing I can think really gives Jordan a noticeable edge as a "ceiling raiser" is the scoring. To a great extent, what we mean when we talk about "ceiling" is the resiliency of the team's offensive attack - can they continue to score points efficiently in the face of playoff defenses? So if you buy that Jordan is the #1 playoff scorer and that he has a unique combination of playoff scoring volume and resiliency, it makes sense that he's capable of raising a team's ceiling with that skillset. I don't think it necessarily has any broader bearing on teambuilding or portability around Jordan. But it is a pretty valuable skillset to have.
SpreeS wrote:How many of the voters have seen Jordan play a live? It seems that this voting is one way trafic (Lebron/Jordan). We have here a lot of numbers and yes Lebron is goddamn good about it, but I want say two things
A) One was bored to play in NBA b/c of lack of competitiveness B) Other had a goal to beat Jordan in all time standing
Jordan got “bored” winning one more championship in a row than LeBron did with the Heat. He also got “bored” on a team that was so strong they nearly won the title replacing Jordan with Pete Myers, one of the very worst starters in the history of the NBA. He never played more than 16 MPG outside of the season Jordan was retired and he had a career PER of 9.9 and a career BPM of -2.5.
Imagine if LeBron played on a team so strong that he could retire, get replaced with Ben McLemore while still filling out a max salary slot, and the team would still go 55-27 and narrowly lose in 7 to the 2nd best team in the NBA. None of LeBron@ “superteams” were remotely close to that strong. Even the Wade/Bosh Heat went 9-9 without LeBron. The Kyrie/K-Love Cavs went 4-23 without him.
If LeBron was playing on the 80s/90s Bulls with Pippen and Grant in a league with very few international players where the other top stars generally played with very weak supporting casts, it’s more likely he’d win more than 3 rings through 1993 than less. Jordan played great in the playoffs through that whole run, but the Bad Boys Pistons from 1988-1990 were very beatable and LeBron’s passing could have taken those Bulls’ teams to a new level.
2010’s one very legitimate black mark on LeBron where he should have won the title if he hadn’t gotten in his win head, but he more than made up for it upsetting the Thunder in 2012 and the Warriors in 2016. Whenever Jordan’s supporting cast was overmatched like that, he lost.
I am not saying that one better than other b/c of
6 > 4 MJ supporting cast > LJ supporting cast LJ stats > MJ stats and so on
I hated MJ and Lebron was my guy until 2015 season and I was hoping that PHO/SEA/UTA/IND beat Bulls in every Finals or ECF. I remembered well that feeling and aura in the 90s Finals - a confidence and indomitability that never existed with LeBron. If I were asked to describe these two basketball players in one word, what connects them to basketball would be
Jordan - the flow (the best possible sinergy of game and player) Lebron - stats (stats widely speaking - trophies, nominations, stats, all time ranking)
I mean, Steph's teams had a similar "aura of invincibility" from 2017-2019, but it wasn't because he was better than LeBron. It was because he had a better supporting cast. It's easy to underrate Jordan's supporting cast because in that era, teams built more organically and GMs didn't fight to stack stars the same way, and Jordan's teammates were better at the little things than the flashy stuff, but I do think just comparing team dominance is not going to be very telling considering how much better Jordan's supporting cast was through his prime.
SpreeS wrote:How many of the voters have seen Jordan play a live? It seems that this voting is one way trafic (Lebron/Jordan). We have here a lot of numbers and yes Lebron is goddamn good about it, but I want say two things
A) One was bored to play in NBA b/c of lack of competitiveness B) Other had a goal to beat Jordan in all time standing
What's the most shocking thing is that none of them came either close to beating the best career in NBA history. With that in mind, we should remember that the league didn't start in 1993, Jordan didn't catch Russell even after his second retirement.
Even if we assume that James failed to match Jordan's success, Jordan didn't match Russell's success either and he got "bored" despite that.
iggymcfrack wrote: Jordan got “bored” winning one more championship in a row than LeBron did with the Heat. He also got “bored” on a team that was so strong they nearly won the title replacing Jordan with Pete Myers, one of the very worst starters in the history of the NBA. He never played more than 16 MPG outside of the season Jordan was retired and he had a career PER of 9.9 and a career BPM of -2.5.
Imagine if LeBron played on a team so strong that he could retire, get replaced with Ben McLemore while still filling out a max salary slot, and the team would still go 55-27 and narrowly lose in 7 to the 2nd best team in the NBA. None of LeBron@ “superteams” were remotely close to that strong. Even the Wade/Bosh Heat went 9-9 without LeBron. The Kyrie/K-Love Cavs went 4-23 without him.
If LeBron was playing on the 80s/90s Bulls with Pippen and Grant in a league with very few international players where the other top stars generally played with very weak supporting casts, it’s more likely he’d win more than 3 rings through 1993 than less. Jordan played great in the playoffs through that whole run, but the Bad Boys Pistons from 1988-1990 were very beatable and LeBron’s passing could have taken those Bulls’ teams to a new level.
2010’s one very legitimate black mark on LeBron where he should have won the title if he hadn’t gotten in his win head, but he more than made up for it upsetting the Thunder in 2012 and the Warriors in 2016. Whenever Jordan’s supporting cast was overmatched like that, he lost.
I am not saying that one better than other b/c of
6 > 4 MJ supporting cast > LJ supporting cast LJ stats > MJ stats and so on
I hated MJ and Lebron was my guy until 2015 season and I was hoping that PHO/SEA/UTA/IND beat Bulls in every Finals or ECF. I remembered well that feeling and aura in the 90s Finals - a confidence and indomitability that never existed with LeBron. If I were asked to describe these two basketball players in one word, what connects them to basketball would be
Jordan - the flow (the best possible sinergy of game and player) Lebron - stats (stats widely speaking - trophies, nominations, stats, all time ranking)
I mean, Steph's teams had a similar "aura of invincibility" from 2017-2019, but it wasn't because he was better than LeBron. It was because he had a better supporting cast. It's easy to underrate Jordan's supporting cast because in that era, teams built more organically and GMs didn't fight to stack stars the same way, and Jordan's teammates were better at the little things than the flashy stuff, but I do think just comparing team dominance is not going to be very telling considering how much better Jordan's supporting cast was through his prime.
No, Steph's teams didnt have a similar aura and do not confuse a team with an individual player. I get your point about supporting cast's. Yes, Jordan had better through career than Lebron. It's not rocket science. But here lies the main issue of the last era all around stars. These stars monopolizes ball handling, playmaking and scoring and some of them want puppet coaches. Their teams suffer immediately then they are injured, have a bad day or resting on the bench. Teams lose two key things at the same time - playmaking and scoring. Its way harder to construct well rounded team around these players. Plus Lebron took all GM dutties in the second part of his career. So no one to blame here.
SpreeS wrote:How many of the voters have seen Jordan play a live? It seems that this voting is one way trafic (Lebron/Jordan). We have here a lot of numbers and yes Lebron is goddamn good about it, but I want say two things
A) One was bored to play in NBA b/c of lack of competitiveness B) Other had a goal to beat Jordan in all time standing
What's the most shocking thing is that none of them came either close to beating the best career in NBA history. With that in mind, we should remember that the league didn't start in 1993, Jordan didn't catch Russell even after his second retirement.
Even if we assume that James failed to match Jordan's success, Jordan didn't match Russell's success either and he got "bored" despite that.
I cant imagine what kind of defensive monster must be player to reapeat Russell success in 3P era (1980 - 2023). Basketball evolved in giant steps from Bill era.
I'm voting for Michael Jordan. Is he going to win? No. I accept that the thing that makes me like this place is also why Michael Jordan isn't going to win. And who knows, maybe he shouldn't.
Has Michael Jordan produced more career value than Lebron James? Obviously not. Lebron passed him some time ago.
Does Michael Jordan solve more problems at a high level for a team than Lebron James? Obviously not. There's basically nothing Lebron can't do. Somehow able to drive high-level offenses, guard his own man, and be an unbelievable help defender who can even be a rim protector. A unique combination in NBA history.
If we simulated the careers of Michael Jordan and Lebron James 10,000 times, giving them every possible set of teammates and coaches and opponents, would Jordan win more titles than Lebron? I suspect not. They can both win with good teams, they can both lose with bad teams, and I suspect the Lebron wins/Jordan loses subset of teams is slightly larger than the Jordan wins/Lebron loses subset of teams.
In 5 years, will I still pick Michael Jordan over Lebron James? Perhaps not. Someone may finally pull out that 1001st impact metric that finally wears me down. I'm certainly open to the idea that Lebron James, with his mega-floor raising profile, ability to turn dumpster fire Cleveland teams into 60 win teams, ability to morph his game this way and that through 20 years of NBA changes, ability to decipher everything that is happening on a basketball court, ability to rack up massive playoff runs well into his 30s at a level Jordan really didn't even manage, ability to stay healthy while piling up more NBA mileage than any star in history, ability to hit more playoff game-winners than anyone, ability to win titles with 3 different teams, ability to handle the pressure of being Lebron James from the time he was 16 years old, ability to beat 73 win teams while leading an entire series in every box score stat, just might have a pretty good argument for best player ever. He might even have peak and prime and career over Jordan.
And yet...
I'm not voting for Lebron. Why?
Is career value all there is? After all, Michael Jordan retired under unique circumstances the first time, and as a living god who had no more worlds left to conquer the second time. Everyone who played against him said he was the best. Everyone who coached against him said he was the best. Everyone who watched him said he was the best. He was the biggest star. A global icon. He had more titles as the best player on his team than anyone who anyone had actually seen play (not Bill's fault he started playing in 1957, but doesn't make it untrue). Does one need to ruin the fairytale ending just to win a message board career value battle 25 years in the future? I would say no (though he ruined the fairytale anyway by coming back).
Do you have to solve all of your teams problems if you solve most of them, and solve a few (or at least one, scoring) in ways no one else ever has? And in the biggest moments, and consistently for your whole career?
Do we need to simulate their careers 10,000 random times? After all, GM's don't just randomly put teammates around you (or at least you hope they don't). Maybe some of those circumstances where Lebron would win out are very low probability circumstances, as no one would build around Lebron or Jordan in those ways.
I wrote this in a different thread that I guess was talking about 1998 Game 6 but I think it sums things up:
"I tried to tell myself that Jordan going 15-35 while his teammates went 19-32 in game 6 against the Jazz meant Jordan was just hogging the ball. But I couldn't get there. If my life depended on winning a playoff series, and I got one player to pick to come up big, to play in any era, to make sure nothing went wrong if we had the advantage, to maybe eke it out against a stronger team, to make sure they came up big in the 4th quarter and could even hit the final shot, I just can't pick someone other than Michael Jordan. I can get close with Lebron, but I still want MJ. In that game 6 where his teammates shot 60% from the field and he shot 43% and only had 1 assist, those numbers didn't seem to matter. At age 35, he scored over half of his team's points, with Pippen hobbling and Rodman no longer Rodman. He scored 8 points in something like the last 2:30 of the game. With his legacy of finals perfection on the line, with the highest ratings of any NBA game ever, with the thought it was probably his last game ever and what everyone would remember him for most, his team was down 3 with a minute to go and...? He calmly made a tough layup. Then calmly made a great defensive read and stole the ball from the other team's best player. Then, even though his team was the one trailing, he calmly wound the clock down because he knew. I hoped somehow he would miss and we would have game 7 and someone would finally beat Jordan in a finals. But I knew. And if you were a Jazz fan in the stands, you knew. And if you were one of the millions watching at home, you knew. That shot was going in. Dribble right, stop on a dime, rise up, perfect swish. Inevitable."
Overly dramatic? I think not. Hagiographic, that's for you to decide. But it's how Jordan seemed (and I didn't even like him). Was he truly inevitable? Well, he didn't win a title 9 times in 15 years, so obviously not. But I just can't escape the fact that I trusted Jordan more over the totality of his career. Give me a contending-level team and Jordan is turning it into a champion. Seemingly every time. Lebron reached that level post-2011. Maybe even surpassed it. But he wasn't at that level before 2011. You could shake Lebron. Maybe Lebron would be a force of nature and drop 48 and 9 on you, but you could get him feeling shaky about his jumper. You could even do it a little bit as far out as the first 3 games of the 2013 Finals when the Spurs pulled the 2011 Mavs trick of backing way off of him. But Jordan had it from day 1. Jordan was walking to The Garden and dropping 63 on Larry Bird as a 2nd year player coming off an injury. He was fearless, and feared.
The guy who was the most athletic and dazzling guy in the league, miles ahead of the average player in the league, was also incredibly fundamentally sound. And skilled. And smart. And driven. And cocky. And confident. Confident in ways Lebron wasn't until almost the middle of his career. He could get mad at someone and decide he wanted to drop 45 on them, and then do it. Is scoring all there is? No, but to put it in a different context, one less centered on some "alpha male" ego thing just wanting to score 45. One of the craziest Jordan stats is that he never lost 3 games in a row with the Bulls after some point in 1991. Do you know how easy it is to lose 3 games in a row? An injury here, a lull there, a little team turmoil over there. Not losing 3 in a row, for 6 years, regular season, or playoffs, is basically the team version of deciding you are going to score 45 on someone because they made you mad. Jordan could decide that losing 2 in a row made him mad, and then stop #3 from happening. Lebron has had all sorts of regular season lulls and LeBattical's and chemistry issues that have allowed long stretches of losing to happen.
And in the playoffs? Well, Lebron has been nearly perfect since 2011. If you think beating a 73 win team while leading the series in every stat is the greatest accomplishment ever (I do), maybe he's even exceeded what could be expected of anyone else in history in the playoffs since 2011. But there's 2011. Lebron straight up threw a title away. Jordan never did that. Jordan never even got close to doing that. All Lebron had to do was play halfway acceptable Lebron James basketball and he would have had his 1st title. But he choked. Badly. Blew a 15 point lead with under 8 minutes to go in game 2. Scored 8 points in game 5 in a close loss. These are simply things Jordan would never, ever, ever do. Not in 10,000 simulations, not in 1,000,000. Is it an unforgivable sin? Maybe not in a comparison with anyone else. But against Jordan?
Jordan was 24-0 with homecourt advantage. 25-0 with an SRS advantage. Led both teams in Game Score in 35 out of 37 series and only a few tenths away from being 37 out of 37 (basically no "off" series). Even Lebron the box score stat stuffer was only at leading 85% of his series by 2020. 6 out of 6 in the finals, even if his finals opponents were significantly weaker than Lebron's. Jordan never threw a title away. Rarely even really got close to it. And then there's something someone else brought up early in the thread.
When Lebron had his Heatles reign, it never quite lived up to the 90's Bulls domination. Now maybe I'm double-counting 2011 here, but I don't think so. The Heat were supposed to win "not 5, not 6...", and yet they just barely won 2. They paired up #1, #2, and #4 in PER. Yes, they paired them up with replacement level players in year 1, but outside of the regular season in 2013, they never quite seemed the sum of their parts. Maybe I'm underrating the 90's bulls supporting cast (after all, they won 55 without Jordan) or overrating the Heat until they stocked up with good role players by 2013. And yes, Wade was basically shot by the time the 2013 playoffs rolled around so it was really only 2 playoffs they were healthy. And Bosh missed a big chunk of the 2012 playoffs and the Heat survived. But 58, 58, 66, and 54 wins, with 2 titles, a finals choke, and 2 game 7's to win one of their finals, one of which was after a game 6 they trailed by 5 points with 20 seconds to go. It never felt like Lebron made it as easy as Jordan did. Should it have been as easy? No. Again, I mentioned many of the things holding the Heat back. But do I think Jordan is winning 2011 and at least not getting taken to 7 by the 2013 Pacers? Yes.
The Bulls averaged 65 wins in the 6 full seasons from 91-98. They had 4 or fewer losses in 4 title runs and only faced 2 game 7's total. Yes, Jordan got lucky with stacked teams. But when he had stacked teams, he cruised. In ways even Russell really didn't when you consider the 10 game 7's Russell faced, often against vastly inferior teams. As stacked as the Bulls were, their second best championship odds by SRS was only 58.7% in 1992. Russell had 7 teams with better odds. When the Bulls were good, they were very good. And didn't need to rest up in the regular season to dominate the playoffs. They just dominated both. Much is made of Lebron being better in Games 5-7 of a series than Jordan. But there was no Game 1 Jordan where he felt the series out. He just stomped you from the beginning. And if he got a lead, he didn't lose it. I believe the only lead he ever lost was 1-0. And he was the 6th seed against the #1 seed Pistons. After having already won 2 upset series. In a series where the Bulls gave the Pistons their only 2 losses of the playoffs. So about as forgivable a blown lead as possible (to be fair, Lebron never lost a 2-0 or 3-1 lead).
And that's the thing. Jordan just doesn't have many lowlights. Sure, you can try to theorize that his limited this or lack of that could have been surpassed by Lebron and turned some of those early Bulls teams into conference finalists or maybe Lebron could have gotten the 1990 Bulls to the Finals. But true "Jordan sucked and cost his team" lowlights? He didn't lose as a favorite, rarely if ever got outplayed by an opponent superstar, his bad series are like 28/9/4 with mediocre FG% and there's precious few of even those series. Threw away a championship? Definitely not. Does Lebron win back a lot of that blown championship with 2016? I think so. But all of it? No. It was a gimme putt to win the Masters. You don't get those back. Chasing Jordan is sort of like chasing perfection, even if he wasn't perfect. He had a perfect career arc, perfect narrative, perfect media presence, dominated 4th quarters, dominated Finals, showed up to big moments with swagger and then backed it up.
I don't like impact metrics as much as most here, but it would be good to have more Jordan impact numbers just to see what they say. Lebron certainly dominates the databall era in a way that is hard to refute. But Jordan dominates the stats that are available to a huge degree as well. I haven't gotten to do the other age ranges I wanted to do yet, but in Age 22-31 box numbers (10 year prime), he's:
Regular Season PER: #1 Regular Season WS48: #1 Regular Season BPM: #1 Postseason PER: #1 Postseason WS48: #1 (unless you want to count Mikan) Postseason BPM: #1
And not by a little. If you normalize all of these, with 1.0 being top and #250 being 0 (give or take), and then average them, then you get:
Regular Season Jordan: 1.000 Wilt: 0.913 (no BPM for him) Lebron: 0.892
In other words, by the box score, you have go to almost 10% of the way from the #1 player to #250 before you hit the 2nd place person. In both the regular season and playoffs. Now I suspect if I do Age 24-33 or 26-35, that the gap will close, but 22-31 is a pretty normal prime age range. And Jordan dominates. While never losing as a favorite. While never choking away a championship. While dominating as much as anyone has when he had good teams. While being athletic and playing with flair but also somehow being fundamentally sound and doing simple things over and over to get great results. While going 6 for 6 in Finals. While stealing the ball from the other team...before dribbling the clock down...before taking the biggest jumper...in the biggest moment...in the biggest game...swish.
Will point out this data excludes anything with 09 and 10 attached to it(3 of the 7 stand-out sets in cheema's had those two years, and are also two of the many 1-year chart toppers Lebron has in the top in what other folks like JE came up with). That being said, the 5-year data here is relatively bearish on Lebron(marginal minutes advantage counter-balanced with a marginal per-poss disadvantage v CP3 and 30+ Lebron loses out to Steph per-possession).
Curiously though, 3-year RS data is more bullish(14 and 18 as regular-season nadirs perhaps): http://nbashotcharts.com/rapm3?id=-311378611 2018 beyond sees a drop-off(2020 resergence) though that's not particularly relevant for this conversation(keeping in mind that 2017 and 2018 map with Jordan's wizards years in terms of # of seasons). but Lebron is a clear 1 for 13-16(that is age 28-31, year 10-12) and is a very close 2nd to Steph for 14-16(age 30-32, year 13-16). As for a comparison with Steph...
I think LeBron being #1 across the entire 1997-2023 time horizon can obscure not being #1 in more specific, but still pretty long, time horizons. For instance, I’d fully expect that Steph Curry’s overall career RAPM would be below LeBron, because Steph genuinely took a while to get going. But I’d also expect that there’s a significant chance Steph’s RAPM was higher than LeBron’s for most of Steph’s prime—and indeed it was in the data I linked to.
Yeah but you're not comparing apples to apples here. The years which map to a typical career(never mind prime) are 13-17 and over that frame Lebron scores higher than early steph and then is near-match for "peak steph" right there with 15-17 Curry over a 3-year stretch and close to unanimous MVP 16 steph in 2016 by what is considered(with decent emperical support) the best regular season of his career(this is also corroborated with a look at real-world stuff like WOWY, net-rating, ect).
Additionally while Steph is not seen as a top-tier great based on his playoff-success, as a regular season player, his raw regular-season signals compare well historically to nearly anyone including MJ. Parity with peak Steph in your 30's as you're theoretically "coasting" due the regular season doesn't really contradict Lebron as an outlier in general.
I will also add that when a player is mantaining a per-possession advantage(or parity) over longer periods of time(not relevant here, but this is true regarding the career samples of cheema, je, ect), people should keep in mind that averages tend to drop.
The focus on "length" also gets to a key-point for me:
LeBron’s consistency overall over such a long time horizon is of course remarkable.
In a predictive sense, sustained "consistency" is also relevant when ascertaining someone's "goodness" over shorter periods of time.
Ohayokd wrote:
70sfan wrote:all else being equal, from a predictive lens, a player who has more "goat-lvl" seasons would be more likely to have "the" goat season based on sheer probability. Part of why I think it's better to start by comparing players "in general" looking for positive comparisons to be made across their careers and then applying whatever internal-scaling there is to be applied.
replication/corroboration matters. Russell has never lost when healthy, and all the signals with relevance noisy they may be support what the largest possible sample says. We can acknowledge uncertainty but uncertainty itself is not a good reason for claiming a player is better or worse than another. Ditto with Lebron and Kareem. These are 3 players who from what we have were posting outlier signals relative to the field from teen-aged to their 30's and beyond. They also happen to have a whole collection "goat-lvl" or "outlier" looking prime/peak stuff, even in down-years(2015, 1975). Why would we take their signals to be noise, when it's exactly what we should expect given where they started and ended(or in Lebron's case ending) and they've posted "goat-level" or better impact again and again?
Putting up a bunch of great years simply makes it more likely you peaked higher. Doing it so in a variety of roles and contexts makes it more likely that your best signals aren't noise.
With that in mind I'm going to list my official vote:
1. Lebron
To be honest, it is not obvious at to me he generated more career value than Russell. And when making a comparison who never lost when healthy, I think it's important we keep in mind what we're actually looking for here:
I only weigh raw lifts to that extent when we dont have much else to go off. But I think if someone not named Russell faced similar competition and won, there'd be a lot of people clamoring that it was the best year ever. You can say Russell was clearly worse than he was earlier(though anenigma offers a decent counter-case in the other thread), but that only helps anyone else if you establish a limit for earlier Bill, and it's hard to establish an upper-limit in terms of winning championships for someone who has never lost when healthy.
Uncertainty is one thing, but why place 69 a tier below seasons it compares favorably to in terms of winning because it's possibly misrepresentative?
Without that upper-limit, it's not really clear what mark Lebron would have to hit accumulatively to top Bill. At the same-time, it is also entirely possible that Lebron did pass him playing nearly twice as long.
Thus, as I've mentioned before, I am going to use era-strength/"projected impact across time" as a tie breaker. To that end...
TY 1941 wrote:
The talent pool is much larger. And we look at the "making-of" and skillset of a player like Luka(someone who didn't even finish top 5 in the POY ballot)
Spoiler:
don't think anyone here's suggested every current player would be better in every previous iteration of the league, but unless there's a specific reason to think otherwise, assuming improvement is perfectly reasonable. It's also really odd to get on this hill regarding Luka, someone whose development/presence in the current league would not have happened for any other iteration of the nba.
From what I can tell, the rationale for Luka's offense "not being suited" for the 90's is A. Raw production would go down with 3-point shooters being rare B. Luka's playmaking is limited outside of kickouts to shooters
For A...raw production going up or down does not increase or decrease impact. You need to make the case that Luka's relative production goes down.
For B...Excepting Magic, Luka is far and away the most skilled and dynamic passer/ball-handler of the 90's as well as one of, if not the most dynamic scorer.
That's not a "they didn't allow it before" thing, that's a "I was playing vastly higher level basketball as I was growing up than any of you were".
anenigma wrote:Luka would not be as purely valuable on offence in the 1990s, no… but by that mark, no older player really compares in raw offensive value today, and no defensive player today compares to the raw defensive value of older bigs. Either way, “does he perfectly maintain his absolute offensive value” was not the question. The question was where does he rank. Is there is a better passer in the 1990s? I would say no, while acknowledging some may push for Stockton. Is there a better creator in the 1990s? Even clearer no. How many better scorers? A couple, maybe, but Luka’s scoring game is not anything poorly suited to the 1990s (contrast someone like say Dwight Howard).
Luka is not competing with Jokic, or Steph, or Trae, or Lillard. He is competing with Jordan, Reggie Miller, an often injured Barkley, an often injured KJ… oh, and now he is also easier to hide defensively. Again, I think you can argue some bigs over him still because of the era, but among perimetre players? Relative to the league, you are kind-of taking a Magic level passer and giving him Jordan’s scoring volume. Should not be a “controversial take” to recognise the extent to which that will stand out…
I think the league's just very clearly more talented now.
With that in mind I'll bring up what was a best-case projection me and 70's came up for how he would translate in the 90's:
Spoiler:
This question sort of intrigues me so I figured I'd tackle this. As 70's seems to avoid any sort of "era-strength penalties" I figure, we can offer Bill the same olive branch and project Bill with a best-case and worst-case scenario. I think with Bill the best analog to use here is Hakeem. He's a player with league-best or close to league best rs value throughout his prime, an elite playoff elevator, pulled off arguably the era's most impressive upset(86 lakers), and is one of the handful of players to pull off a "one-star" title. Jordan is of a similar calibre but Bill and Jordan diverge so much stylistically that its difficult to use MJ as a base. This is not rigorous but i'm going to say Hakeem was something like a +3.5 defender and a +3.5 attacker while Bill, in-era was a +1000 defender(not by srs but by championship probability ) and a nuetral attacker. If someone wants to argue he was more of a positive(+1) i'm open to hearing it.
Bill Russell vs Hakeem So taking Russell out of his era I think here are the advantages Hakeem has defensively: -> better at stripping balls -> a bit more agile Russell's advantages: -> straight up better athleticism, jumping, ect -> by extension better rim protection -> smarter, more positionally sound -> Better defensive playmaking
Using the frame we're applying with Jordan, Russell is probably a significantly better rim protector and i see the other aspects cancelling out so I can see giving Russell a +1-+1.5 advantage here to set him at +4.5 or +5.
Now, as unibro posits, you could argue "defense is as good as the attack they face", so maybe its generous of me to assume he doesn't lose out in terms of switchability/help as he's facing better attackers, but we aren't applying that sort of logic to Jordan's offense or defense, so for the sake of this exercise I am going to discount that.
With offense i'm going to apply the precept that scarcity is value and highlight Russell's potential as an offensive rebounder. In the 90's offensive rebounding was a very big deal. Something the Bulls would exploit very well with the likes of cartwright, grant and then... Rodman. Russell is a better jumper than rodman and much taller. Rodman was able to provide a lot of value to the Bulls from what we have, helping elevate them from 50 wins(srs, 42 by record)+rusty mj to 72 wins(fwiw by a 40 game wowy sample he was pulling of "kd on the warriors lift" ) and showing up as a clear clear positive on offense(+1?). My question here is how good Bill's "touch" is. If we assume it's good, then Bill should be able to offer better or similar value to rodman via rebounding(and passing to an extent). If we take him to be a +1 or +2 attacker we get a "best case" range that goes from +5.5 to +7. If his touch isn't good enough and he provides no value whatsoever on that end, we get to +4.5-+5.
Best case then is: +7, argument for for most valuable in the league along-side MJ and Hakeem Worst case then is: +4.5, suped up dikembe, still a superstar if not in the "best player" conversation My guess is something like +6-+6.5, not quite the best, but up there and maybe P O R T gives him a case?
I also think Bill will have an advantage as the most "scalable" player as almost all his value is derived from defense and offensive rebounding which both work extremely well with most superstars. On the other hand, I suspect Hakeem's scoring may make his value fluctuate less on a variety of lower-end casts(and for my money he does have a good case as the best floor-raiser of that era).
Now there are some of favorable assumptions I'm making to establish this range, but as 70's is doing the same with Jordan, and most of the people itt seem to want to give some benefit of the doubt, I think this framework is consistent with the spirit of this discussion.
Put him on the hawks, and maybe they establish a dynasty? Would love to know what you think
70sfan wrote:I think you did a great job overall. I may not agree with Hakeem being more agile than Russell (at least with defensive movement), but it doesn't matter on the bigger scale. I agree that Russell would be a bit better than Hakeem defensively overall.
I think it would be hard to take peak Russell (not 1969 version, take that in mind) to the 1990s and believe he'd be a clear negative on offense. Russell was a very good offensive rebounder (not on Rodman level) which was extremely valuable back then. He was also athletic freak who could run transition offense by himself. He wasn't a liability in terms of his own offense as well - he could play in the post, spot up and beat defenders off the dribble and also shoot open jumpshots. I doubt he was very efficient on most of these shots, but he could do something when he had to. He also drew fouls quite well. Unlike other defensive minded bigs from the 1990s (Mutombo, Mourning, even Ewing), Russell was a fine passer as well and that makes him far more scalable.
I mean, the worst scenario I could see for him is being slightly better than peak Mourning - better defensively, different strengths offensively. At best, I see him as potentially the best player in the league.
Imagine 1962 Russell in more offense friendly environment, he could become a 18 pp75 scorer on decent enough efficiency, while being good passer, elite rebounder and very active off-ball player. Combine that with his GOAT-level defense and you come up with someone competing with Hakeem and Jordan for the MVPs.
Now imagine we put him 30-years further in the 20's when even in a span of 6-years(97-2003) the number of foreign players more than doubled?
Just to make sure he gets nominated I am still going to put Bill Russell #2. Like with anenigma, him and Kareem are very a very clear 2 or 3. I imagine the next thread is going to center around Kareem and Mike, so it'll be a decent opportunity to get into my approach with noisier historical comparisons and how I use "raw" signals and the various sorts of derivations that are possible when we don't have access to nice stuff like RAPM and the such. Bill is pretty likely the best era-relative prime here, so I don't really have any gripes with anyone placing him 1st(in fact I would be rather skeptical of how honestly an alleged era-relativist is taking "era-relativity" if they do not see his prime as the best.
I will probably switch to Kareem using the same tie-break on the next thread, but I would like to see both sides of the discussion for the 70's vs the 60's as Kareem did benefit from a league-split early on.
Ultimately, it’s not really surprising that LeBron would be the top player in something from 1997-2023—he’s pretty clearly the NBA’s greatest player during that time period! Being the top person in RAPM from 1997-2023 is not really particularly responsive to the question of whether he should be above the primary other candidates for #1 (i.e. Jordan, Kareem, and perhaps Russell)
"Particularly" responsive", maybe not, but it makes it a lot difficult to argue Lebron was not the best player of his era as you are assuming was the case with the other 3. As I plan to get into with Bill and Jabbar, the available evidence strongly favors them as similar era-outliers but that evidence is relatively limited so it's tricky to say things definitively. As has been touched upon, Jordan's claim as the best player of the era is closer to an assumption than a definitive likelihood with Magic mantaining a consistent "impact" advantage(even if you really really wanted to use WOWYR) and Hakeem managing rs parity(advantaged over concentrated/larger samples) before seeing the best playoff-elevation(team-level or in terms of individual production) of the 3:
penbeast0 wrote:With that out of the way, let's start with a basic "pure" outline applying a filter of >10 gm/season samples, keeping in mind that the sample of data being referenced is vastly larger than the RAPM set provided:
Hakeem is one of a handful of players(post-russell, we're talking Lebron, Kareem, Robinson) to post 25+-win lift multiple times. Worth noting that this is around where RAPM tends to distribute superstar impact to role players. His peak signals are arguably era-best.
Of course, a common knock on Hakeem is his consistency as an RS performer, but even over longer periods, he looks quite good. IIRC, if you use 10-year samples...
Hakeem takes 33-win teams to 48 wins Jordan takes 38-win teams to 53.5 wins Magic takes 44-win teams to 59 wins
Keeping in mind that it's harder to lift better teams, Hakeem comes marginally behind Jordan, and slightly more behind Magic, but he's right up there with both.
Ben has his own(presumably more sophisticated) approach which likes Hakeem even better; "Prime WOWY" ranks Olajuwon 10th. Magic and Jordan rank 12th and 20th, respectively. Keep in mind the samples here are much, much smaller, but at least there aren't extraneous distortions to worry about as we may with something like WOWYR
Getting back to larger samples(or in this case, the largest possible sample), Drafting Hakeem produces a +5 SRS improvement for the Rockets without significant roster additions(this is top-ten worthys, and better than what Magic or Jordan managed), and they've reached the final(interrupting a dynasty on the way) by year two. That start looks GOAT-worthy. Then, when various catastrophes take place starting in 1987, Hakeem still does an admiral job keeping a shipwreck afloat before capitalizing spectacularly with limited help.
Pollock did some on/off for 94-96 which looks pretty good with 1994 looking like a top 60 signal from the last 30 years. Considering the 92 Rockets were outscored by 10 points in games without Hakeem, it's not hard to see inclusion of 92/93 giving Hakeem a top top 3-year peak.
Looking at BBR, we get a full 2 seasons of "impact" data for Hakeem with his on/off in 97/98(well, well past his peak), but even there, entering his mid 30's, Dream looks pretty impactful on very good teams(that's rarified air for a 13th/14th season player, even among top-tenners).
Considering the immense external adversity at play(coke crisis, incompetent and hostile FO, co-star injured, ect.), the wear-and tear that comes with a decade-plus of continuous high-level play(no retirements here! forced or otherwise), and the absence of a complimentary superstar to tie his minutes to(Magic had Kareem, Jordan had Pippen), I'd say Hakeem has a solid case as the most valuable regular season player of his era.
Playoff riser:
As he was also arguably the nba's greatest playoff-riser(94-95 Rox played 62-win basketball vs playoff opponents, and 86 victory against the Magic is probably the best "david beats goliath" moment of the period), and a longevity giant, I feel pretty confident considering him among the best of the best, even if his resume looks a little lean.
OhayoKD wrote:
tsherkin wrote:
Mostly covered the playoff-stuff in the first post but he's also 1 of 3 MVP-winners to come back from 3-1 down(Lebron and Russell being the others), and like already covered, 2nd best winning% among MVP's as a playoff-underdog, 2nd most wins, needed much less help than Magic to beat a +10psrs opponent(Jordan has never). You can check the box-numbers yourself on BBR if you want.
I would also like to see how exactly that JE experiment tested vs RAPM, but on the surface...
LukaTheGOAT wrote:
eminence wrote:JE got real funky with stuff for a bit. That is a completely box-score stat that he called RAPM for god knows why:
He essentially tried to simulate pbp data from the box-score. Which I'll put lightly is an absolutely insane undertaking. It was an interesting thought exercise, but I put 0 value on the stat he wound up with.
Yeah, I misspoke.
Before 1997 it is kind of a “fake” rapm built up using quarter by quarter scores from the box and distributing minutes to players in quarters based on mpg to build +/-
By box-score you mean it's looking at the quarter to quarter scores?
that seems...fine? Obviously crude, and I'm not really going to let it affect my evaluations too much, but dealing with a virtual absence of data, that seems like a reasonable approach. Might give it teensy bit of weight as I do with the partial RAPM stuff.
In the discussion about the stat JE mentions it has a bias towards players who play less on great teams(bench units then do well in garbage time after blowouts). That shouldn't matter for Jordan and Hakeem who played similarly high-minuites but it might undersell Magic who played less.
JE doesn't make any distinction between the decade sample and the single-year stuff, but I am also confused how Drob isn't #1. Hakeem falls off hard after 1995(a mid-career retirement might have helped), Magic is kicked and then comes back as a shell of himself in 96. But I don't understand how Drob is #1 almost every year and then ends up at 2. I assume I'm missing something?
Also will note, it may well be excluding Jordan's most valuable regular seasons(88-90) and we do have full-rapm stuff that is higher on 97/98 MJ.
OTOH, it is hardly the only thing that calls into question Jordan's success being the product of him being the "best" player of that period which I think is a presequite for GOAT candidacy.
SpreeS wrote:How many of the voters have seen Jordan play a live? It seems that this voting is one way trafic (Lebron/Jordan). We have here a lot of numbers and yes Lebron is goddamn good about it, but I want say two things
A) One was bored to play in NBA b/c of lack of competitiveness B) Other had a goal to beat Jordan in all time standing
What's the most shocking thing is that none of them came either close to beating the best career in NBA history. With that in mind, we should remember that the league didn't start in 1993, Jordan didn't catch Russell even after his second retirement.
Even if we assume that James failed to match Jordan's success, Jordan didn't match Russell's success either and he got "bored" despite that.
I cant imagine what kind of defensive monster must be player to reapeat Russell success in 3P era (1980 - 2023). Basketball evolved in giant steps from Bill era.
I mean, I don't see any reasons to doubt Russell's impact in the early 1980s, especially before the league took illegal defense rules seriously.
f4p wrote:I'm voting for Michael Jordan. Is he going to win? No. I accept that the thing that makes me like this place is also why Michael Jordan isn't going to win. And who knows, maybe he shouldn't.
Has Michael Jordan produced more career value than Lebron James? Obviously not. Lebron passed him some time ago.
Does Michael Jordan solve more problems at a high level for a team than Lebron James? Obviously not. There's basically nothing Lebron can't do. Somehow able to drive high-level offenses, guard his own man, and be an unbelievable help defender who can even be a rim protector. A unique combination in NBA history.
If we simulated the careers of Michael Jordan and Lebron James 10,000 times, giving them every possible set of teammates and coaches and opponents, would Jordan win more titles than Lebron? I suspect not. They can both win with good teams, they can both lose with bad teams, and I suspect the Lebron wins/Jordan loses subset of teams is slightly larger than the Jordan wins/Lebron loses subset of teams.
In 5 years, will I still pick Michael Jordan over Lebron James? Perhaps not. Someone may finally pull out that 1001st impact metric that finally wears me down. I'm certainly open to the idea that Lebron James, with his mega-floor raising profile, ability to turn dumpster fire Cleveland teams into 60 win teams, ability to morph his game this way and that through 20 years of NBA changes, ability to decipher everything that is happening on a basketball court, ability to rack up massive playoff runs well into his 30s at a level Jordan really didn't even manage, ability to stay healthy while piling up more NBA mileage than any star in history, ability to hit more playoff game-winners than anyone, ability to win titles with 3 different teams, ability to handle the pressure of being Lebron James from the time he was 16 years old, ability to beat 73 win teams while leading an entire series in every box score stat, just might have a pretty good argument for best player ever. He might even have peak and prime and career over Jordan.
And yet...
I'm not voting for Lebron. Why?
Is career value all there is? After all, Michael Jordan retired under unique circumstances the first time, and as a living god who had no more worlds left to conquer the second time. Everyone who played against him said he was the best. Everyone who coached against him said he was the best. Everyone who watched him said he was the best. He was the biggest star. A global icon. He had more titles as the best player on his team than anyone who anyone had actually seen play (not Bill's fault he started playing in 1957, but doesn't make it untrue). Does one need to ruin the fairytale ending just to win a message board career value battle 25 years in the future? I would say no (though he ruined the fairytale anyway by coming back).
Do you have to solve all of your teams problems if you solve most of them, and solve a few (or at least one, scoring) in ways no one else ever has? And in the biggest moments, and consistently for your whole career?
Do we need to simulate their careers 10,000 random times? After all, GM's don't just randomly put teammates around you (or at least you hope they don't). Maybe some of those circumstances where Lebron would win out are very low probability circumstances, as no one would build around Lebron or Jordan in those ways.
I wrote this in a different thread that I guess was talking about 1998 Game 6 but I think it sums things up:
"I tried to tell myself that Jordan going 15-35 while his teammates went 19-32 in game 6 against the Jazz meant Jordan was just hogging the ball. But I couldn't get there. If my life depended on winning a playoff series, and I got one player to pick to come up big, to play in any era, to make sure nothing went wrong if we had the advantage, to maybe eke it out against a stronger team, to make sure they came up big in the 4th quarter and could even hit the final shot, I just can't pick someone other than Michael Jordan. I can get close with Lebron, but I still want MJ. In that game 6 where his teammates shot 60% from the field and he shot 43% and only had 1 assist, those numbers didn't seem to matter. At age 35, he scored over half of his team's points, with Pippen hobbling and Rodman no longer Rodman. He scored 8 points in something like the last 2:30 of the game. With his legacy of finals perfection on the line, with the highest ratings of any NBA game ever, with the thought it was probably his last game ever and what everyone would remember him for most, his team was down 3 with a minute to go and...? He calmly made a tough layup. Then calmly made a great defensive read and stole the ball from the other team's best player. Then, even though his team was the one trailing, he calmly wound the clock down because he knew. I hoped somehow he would miss and we would have game 7 and someone would finally beat Jordan in a finals. But I knew. And if you were a Jazz fan in the stands, you knew. And if you were one of the millions watching at home, you knew. That shot was going in. Dribble right, stop on a dime, rise up, perfect swish. Inevitable."
Overly dramatic? I think not. Hagiographic, that's for you to decide. But it's how Jordan seemed (and I didn't even like him). Was he truly inevitable? Well, he didn't win a title 9 times in 15 years, so obviously not. But I just can't escape the fact that I trusted Jordan more over the totality of his career. Give me a contending-level team and Jordan is turning it into a champion. Seemingly every time. Lebron reached that level post-2011. Maybe even surpassed it. But he wasn't at that level before 2011. You could shake Lebron. Maybe Lebron would be a force of nature and drop 48 and 9 on you, but you could get him feeling shaky about his jumper. You could even do it a little bit as far out as the first 3 games of the 2013 Finals when the Spurs pulled the 2011 Mavs trick of backing way off of him. But Jordan had it from day 1. Jordan was walking to The Garden and dropping 63 on Larry Bird as a 2nd year player coming off an injury. He was fearless, and feared.
The guy who was the most athletic and dazzling guy in the league, miles ahead of the average player in the league, was also incredibly fundamentally sound. And skilled. And smart. And driven. And cocky. And confident. Confident in ways Lebron wasn't until almost the middle of his career. He could get mad at someone and decide he wanted to drop 45 on them, and then do it. Is scoring all there is? No, but to put it in a different context, one less centered on some "alpha male" ego thing just wanting to score 45. One of the craziest Jordan stats is that he never lost 3 games in a row with the Bulls after some point in 1991. Do you know how easy it is to lose 3 games in a row? An injury here, a lull there, a little team turmoil over there. Not losing 3 in a row, for 6 years, regular season, or playoffs, is basically the team version of deciding you are going to score 45 on someone because they made you mad. Jordan could decide that losing 2 in a row made him mad, and then stop #3 from happening. Lebron has had all sorts of regular season lulls and LeBattical's and chemistry issues that have allowed long stretches of losing to happen.
And in the playoffs? Well, Lebron has been nearly perfect since 2011. If you think beating a 73 win team while leading the series in every stat is the greatest accomplishment ever (I do), maybe he's even exceeded what could be expected of anyone else in history in the playoffs since 2011. But there's 2011. Lebron straight up threw a title away. Jordan never did that. Jordan never even got close to doing that. All Lebron had to do was play halfway acceptable Lebron James basketball and he would have had his 1st title. But he choked. Badly. Blew a 15 point lead with under 8 minutes to go in game 2. Scored 8 points in game 5 in a close loss. These are simply things Jordan would never, ever, ever do. Not in 10,000 simulations, not in 1,000,000. Is it an unforgivable sin? Maybe not in a comparison with anyone else. But against Jordan?
Jordan was 24-0 with homecourt advantage. 25-0 with an SRS advantage. Led both teams in Game Score in 35 out of 37 series and only a few tenths away from being 37 out of 37 (basically no "off" series). Even Lebron the box score stat stuffer was only at leading 85% of his series by 2020. 6 out of 6 in the finals, even if his finals opponents were significantly weaker than Lebron's. Jordan never threw a title away. Rarely even really got close to it. And then there's something someone else brought up early in the thread.
When Lebron had his Heatles reign, it never quite lived up to the 90's Bulls domination. Now maybe I'm double-counting 2011 here, but I don't think so. The Heat were supposed to win "not 5, not 6...", and yet they just barely won 2. They paired up #1, #2, and #4 in PER. Yes, they paired them up with replacement level players in year 1, but outside of the regular season in 2013, they never quite seemed the sum of their parts. Maybe I'm underrating the 90's bulls supporting cast (after all, they won 55 without Jordan) or overrating the Heat until they stocked up with good role players by 2013. And yes, Wade was basically shot by the time the 2013 playoffs rolled around so it was really only 2 playoffs they were healthy. And Bosh missed a big chunk of the 2012 playoffs and the Heat survived. But 58, 58, 66, and 54 wins, with 2 titles, a finals choke, and 2 game 7's to win one of their finals, one of which was after a game 6 they trailed by 5 points with 20 seconds to go. It never felt like Lebron made it as easy as Jordan did. Should it have been as easy? No. Again, I mentioned many of the things holding the Heat back. But do I think Jordan is winning 2011 and at least not getting taken to 7 by the 2013 Pacers? Yes.
The Bulls averaged 65 wins in the 6 full seasons from 91-98. They had 4 or fewer losses in 4 title runs and only faced 2 game 7's total. Yes, Jordan got lucky with stacked teams. But when he had stacked teams, he cruised. In ways even Russell really didn't when you consider the 10 game 7's Russell faced, often against vastly inferior teams. As stacked as the Bulls were, their second best championship odds by SRS was only 58.7% in 1992. Russell had 7 teams with better odds. When the Bulls were good, they were very good. And didn't need to rest up in the regular season to dominate the playoffs. They just dominated both. Much is made of Lebron being better in Games 5-7 of a series than Jordan. But there was no Game 1 Jordan where he felt the series out. He just stomped you from the beginning. And if he got a lead, he didn't lose it. I believe the only lead he ever lost was 1-0. And he was the 6th seed against the #1 seed Pistons. After having already won 2 upset series. In a series where the Bulls gave the Pistons their only 2 losses of the playoffs. So about as forgivable a blown lead as possible (to be fair, Lebron never lost a 2-0 or 3-1 lead).
And that's the thing. Jordan just doesn't have many lowlights. Sure, you can try to theorize that his limited this or lack of that could have been surpassed by Lebron and turned some of those early Bulls teams into conference finalists or maybe Lebron could have gotten the 1990 Bulls to the Finals. But true "Jordan sucked and cost his team" lowlights? He didn't lose as a favorite, rarely if ever got outplayed by an opponent superstar, his bad series are like 28/9/4 with mediocre FG% and there's precious few of even those series. Threw away a championship? Definitely not. Does Lebron win back a lot of that blown championship with 2016? I think so. But all of it? No. It was a gimme putt to win the Masters. You don't get those back. Chasing Jordan is sort of like chasing perfection, even if he wasn't perfect. He had a perfect career arc, perfect narrative, perfect media presence, dominated 4th quarters, dominated Finals, showed up to big moments with swagger and then backed it up.
I don't like impact metrics as much as most here, but it would be good to have more Jordan impact numbers just to see what they say. Lebron certainly dominates the databall era in a way that is hard to refute. But Jordan dominates the stats that are available to a huge degree as well. I haven't gotten to do the other age ranges I wanted to do yet, but in Age 22-31 box numbers (10 year prime), he's:
Regular Season PER: #1 Regular Season WS48: #1 Regular Season BPM: #1 Postseason PER: #1 Postseason WS48: #1 (unless you want to count Mikan) Postseason BPM: #1
And not by a little. If you normalize all of these, with 1.0 being top and #250 being 0 (give or take), and then average them, then you get:
Regular Season Jordan: 1.000 Wilt: 0.913 (no BPM for him) Lebron: 0.892
In other words, by the box score, you have go to almost 10% of the way from the #1 player to #250 before you hit the 2nd place person. In both the regular season and playoffs. Now I suspect if I do Age 24-33 or 26-35, that the gap will close, but 22-31 is a pretty normal prime age range. And Jordan dominates. While never losing as a favorite. While never choking away a championship. While dominating as much as anyone has when he had good teams. While being athletic and playing with flair but also somehow being fundamentally sound and doing simple things over and over to get great results. While going 6 for 6 in Finals. While stealing the ball from the other team...before dribbling the clock down...before taking the biggest jumper...in the biggest moment...in the biggest game...swish.
Maybe I'm offbase here, but you appear to be using criteria that the rules specifically disallow, like him being 'a global icon', 'a living god', 'a star', with a 'fairy tale ending' and legacy, etc. There weren't many rules imposed on us, but one clear one was that this had to be purely how good they were at basketball.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
One_and_Done wrote: Maybe I'm offbase here, but you appear to be using criteria that the rules specifically disallow, like him being 'a global icon', 'a living god', 'a star', with a 'fairy tale ending' and legacy, etc. There weren't many rules imposed on us, but one clear one was that this had to be purely how good they were at basketball.
a. way to pick out a few words here and there from a long post. b. i'm guessing using the word icon at any point in a post is not illegal. c. those were clearly not my criteria, merely descriptions of what jordan was or the things he did. or is your argument that jordan was not a global icon?
f4p wrote:In other words, by the box score, you have go to almost 10% of the way from the #1 player to #250 before you hit the 2nd place person. In both the regular season and playoffs. Now I suspect if I do Age 24-33 or 26-35, that the gap will close, but 22-31 is a pretty normal prime age range. And Jordan dominates. While never losing as a favorite. While never choking away a championship. While dominating as much as anyone has when he had good teams. While being athletic and playing with flair but also somehow being fundamentally sound and doing simple things over and over to get great results. While going 6 for 6 in Finals. While stealing the ball from the other team...before dribbling the clock down...before taking the biggest jumper...in the biggest moment...in the biggest game...swish.
Maybe I'm offbase here, but you appear to be using criteria that the rules specifically disallow, like him being 'a global icon', 'a living god', 'a star', with a 'fairy tale ending' and legacy, etc. There weren't many rules imposed on us, but one clear one was that this had to be purely how good they were at basketball.
What makes someone "good" at basketball is subjective and I don't see why general perception would be an invalid criteria. Basketball can be argued to be performance art and from that perspective it's not hard to see why Jordan can't be seen as the sport's most riveting performer.
Is Spirited Away the most sophisticated story ever? No. Is it the most coherent or efficient? Not even close. Does it have the most detailed art or sound? Absolutely not. It is however one of the most culturally significant films in history and consequently is rated extremely highly.
On another thread I would maybe point out that Jordan's box-advantage turns into a disadvantage if we set all those defensive components to equal or advantaging Lebron(which and historical precedent say we should)...
But ultimately "who is the most likely to win" is not "objectively" the right way to view basketball. Many people rate players largely based on how their or general emotional experience and I don't see an issue there.
Jordan is still the biggest cultural icon in the history of basketball.
Some of that I think is a result of a backwards approach to spreading and talking about the sport from a 90's centered media and the league. For example, Jordan getting the MVP award named after him when he was neither the most frequent winner(Kareem), vote-getter(Lebron), biggest winner in a short period of time(Bird, Kareem, Russell, Lebron, ect), or the most dominant MVP winner(Lebron generally, Steph Shaq and KG got higher-vote shares for the most comphrehsive win), is entirely a matter of bias. But on the other hand, such a strong machine is a testament to how Jordan changed(or at least was at the head of the change for) a domestic game into a global one.
If goodness is generating cultural impact that is Jordan(okay Mikan and Russell have arguable cases depending on framing but still), and I don't think there's anything invalid about that.
It may be a valid way to assess players in a vacuum, but the rules seem to suggest it is not for this project. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Voting Criteria Guidelines
The RealGM Top 100 is focused on:
1. Career, rather than Peak or Prime. How you weigh Longevity is up to you, but consider the entire Career. 2. Competitive achievement rather cultural innovation/influence. 3. Performance in the NBA and merged leagues (ABA, BAA, NBL). International play and other leagues are not a part of this.
I'm not really sure how Jordan's 'perfect media presence' relates to that.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
One_and_Done wrote:It may be a valid way to assess players in a vacuum, but the rules seem to suggest it is not for this project. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Voting Criteria Guidelines
The RealGM Top 100 is focused on:
1. Career, rather than Peak or Prime. How you weigh Longevity is up to you, but consider the entire Career. 2. Competitive achievement rather cultural innovation/influence. 3. Performance in the NBA and merged leagues (ABA, BAA, NBL). International play and other leagues are not a part of this.
I'm not really sure how Jordan's 'perfect media presence' relates to that.
SpreeS wrote:How many of the voters have seen Jordan play a live? It seems that this voting is one way trafic (Lebron/Jordan). We have here a lot of numbers and yes Lebron is goddamn good about it, but I want say two things
A) One was bored to play in NBA b/c of lack of competitiveness B) Other had a goal to beat Jordan in all time standing
idt u been reading the thread.
its da bron voters who been talkin bout **** like the triangle n how pip fit with mj. da most active mj voter here basically just sayin "bron ball dominant, bad PORT!"
I've been away to a festival this weekend so I've been a bit short on time but I'll make sure to vote later today. It's taking a bit more time because I haven't been able to decide yet who I'll vote for. Of my 4 original candidates the only one who I'm sure I won't be voting as #1 is Kareem because I can't get over the soft middle of his prime. That doesn't mean he doesn't have a case but his late/post-prime years add more value for people using CORP methodologies than they do for me.
Jordan has a string of individual dominance over his competition that I don't think anyone else particularly comes close to. He was our POY 9 times (tied for most POY wins with LeBron) and the only break within this is his first retirement in 94 and 95. Meaning that from 1988 to 1998 there was nobody else who was seen as having a better season than Jordan. His 4 unanimous wins are also the most of any player ever. Then as a cherry on top the Bulls were as dominant as a team as, if not more so than, Jordan as an individual. Like f4p just said, it's just hard to bring up anything on court that wasn't near perfect. That said, while he had a plenty long career, he has a noticeable longevity disadvantage to the other candidates. The most difficult part of this is his retirements as he was a star right away in his early 20s and still the best player in the league in his mid 30s but would he have had as much success in 96-98 without the 1.5 year break after 93? Would he have been able to continue at a similar level as 97 and 98 at the time of his second retirement, would he have fallen off to Wizards level right away or have a gradual decline? We don't know and since Kareem and LeBron's weaker prime years give me pause I'm just not sure how fair it is compared to MJ with his retirements.
Another thing is that the driving force for me here is MJ's relative dominance but how much of that was because of a lack of competition? Russell is obviously hurt the most among my candidates because most of his later prime, Wilt is regarded as the dominant player in the league and for quite a few people it is still even a question whether Russell or Wilt was the better player/had the better career period. If we take a stance that you can't really do much about having another GOAT candidate who plays at the same time eat up some of your dominance then it is fair to say Russell probably was the most dominant. Him still leading the career POY shares over guys like LeBron and Kareem despite playing only 13 seasons goes to show just how incredibly consistently elite Russell was. He was first 7 times, the runner-up another 5 times and one lone third place finish in 67 that still saw him get over .500 in shares. His era wasn't the strongest of course but if era strength isn't enough for me to instantly put LeBron over Jordan, it's not enough for me to instantly put Jordan over Russell either.
Lastly I might also still vote for LeBron as while he doesn't resonate with the ideal of the greatest career for me as much as Russell and Jordan, it's hard to deny just how many boxes LeBron ticks. Whatever your approach, he's going to at least be up there among the best, and with him already getting the #1 spot the last time around I doubt that will be any different now.
In the end I'll have to make up my mind whether I want to prioritize the degree of relative dominance (Jordan), the consistency (Russell) or length (LeBron).
) and a nuetral attacker. If someone wants to argue he was more of a positive(+1) i'm open to hearing it.
) and showing up as a clear clear positive on offense(+1?). My question here is how good Bill's "touch" is. If we assume it's good, then Bill should be able to offer better or similar value to rodman via rebounding(and passing to an extent). If we take him to be a +1 or +2 attacker we get a "best case" range that goes from +5.5 to +7. If his touch isn't good enough and he provides no value whatsoever on that end, we get to +4.5-+5.
