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
Postseason:
Jordan: 1.000
Jokic: 0.905
Lebron: 0.896
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.
