RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #1 (LeBron James)

[Doctor MJ]

I believe the system is:

Vote #1: Player A (from nominees)
Vote #2: Player B (from nominees)

Nominate: Player C (from all players)

Yup, that's the template - along with the reasons you're making those choices.

I'd encourage people to see the B & C as optional if thinking those through is adding unneeded stress to your life.

[Doctor MJ]

[b][color=#0000FF]

As specified before we will now move to a 2-step Induction system where a set of Nominees are now chosen based on the votes with the 2020 project order as the tiebreaker. The 5 nominees will be:

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Wilt Chamberlain
Tim Duncan
Michael Jordan
Bill Russell

Just so I'm clear:

Is it advised that we state an alternate or nominee for the next round, along with our primary vote (e.g. "Vote: Player A; Nomination: Player B")? Or does any potential "nomination" listed have no bearing on the nominees of the next round? Thanks.....

I think eminence's post along with my response gives the expectation but to answer your specific question:

Only the 5 players listed have a chance to be #2 on our list. You choose among them for your Induction vote.

The Nomination vote will be about other players with the one getting most votes being added to the Nomination pool along with whoever the 4 current Nominees are who don't get voted in.

[-Luke-]

Who's comin' in second?

#1 was fun to watch. Kudos to everybody who participated!

[rk2023]

Hi Doc,

Thanks for putting the tallies in and carrying the project forward. Hope you have been enjoying the holiday week/weekend as well!

Quick ? I have: on top of the individual votes for each nominee, do you have a total of #2 votes received across the board documented as well (no worries either way)? Just am curious to see what the speculation looks like right now, not that it’ll hold too much weight on my soon placed vote for 2.

[Tim Lehrbach]

I have to say it is shocking to see LeBron has left everybody behind in this debate. I know this forum has a "pro-LeBron" reputation, but I still expected more votes for Jordan. The mystique of MJ really does seem to be losing its hold on at least a subset of fans. Not saying this is the avant-garde here, necessarily, and definitely not a representative sample, but it will be interesting to track this in the wider public over time. A clear alternative is available to people now in LeBron James, and while he'll never be Mike in sheer peak popularity, fans can compare their careers in a variety of lights, and a significant number prefer James.

There's also the generational thing, but again, with this subset of fansat least, that doesn't appear to be a factor. A growing number of people just prefer or value LeBron higher.

[MyUniBroDavis]

I have to say it is shocking to see LeBron has left everybody behind in this debate. I know this forum has a "pro-LeBron" reputation, but I still expected more votes for Jordan. The mystique of MJ really does seem to be losing its hold on at least a subset of fans. Not saying this is the avant-garde here, necessarily, and definitely not a representative sample, but it will be interesting to track this in the wider public over time. A clear alternative is available to people now in LeBron James, and while he'll never be Mike in sheer peak popularity, fans can compare their careers in a variety of lights, and a significant number prefer James.

There's also the generational thing, but again, with this subset of fansat least, that doesn't appear to be a factor. A growing number of people just prefer or value LeBron higher.

I prefer bron but generally even among people 20s it’s probably still jordan

Probably changes if he wins another title or two

[Doctor MJ]

Hi Doc,

Thanks for putting the tallies in and carrying the project forward. Hope you have been enjoying the holiday week/weekend as well!

Quick ? I have: on top of the individual votes for each nominee, do you have a total of #2 votes received across the board documented as well (no worries either way)? Just am curious to see what the speculation looks like right now, not that it’ll hold too much weight on my soon placed vote for 2.

I deleted the count after I had the answer, but I'll tell you that what stood out to me as interesting was that Kareem, who got no 1st votes, definitely got the most 2nd votes. I wonder if we'll see him rise up above Jordan.

[Doctor MJ]

I have to say it is shocking to see LeBron has left everybody behind in this debate. I know this forum has a "pro-LeBron" reputation, but I still expected more votes for Jordan. The mystique of MJ really does seem to be losing its hold on at least a subset of fans. Not saying this is the avant-garde here, necessarily, and definitely not a representative sample, but it will be interesting to track this in the wider public over time. A clear alternative is available to people now in LeBron James, and while he'll never be Mike in sheer peak popularity, fans can compare their careers in a variety of lights, and a significant number prefer James.

There's also the generational thing, but again, with this subset of fansat least, that doesn't appear to be a factor. A growing number of people just prefer or value LeBron higher.

Agree. Interesting to see LeBron win it so easily, and I wonder how things will go in the future.

One thing I see is that a lot of LeBron votes had Kareem second, and it makes sense. Kareem always had the longevity argument over Jordan, but this always ended up pushed to the side. With longevity being central to LeBron's case over Jordan, it might be a boon to big longevity guys down the list.

[penbeast0]

I have Russell, Jordan, and Wilt above Kareem still.

[ShaqAttac]

for the port peeps

on-court per 48:
1. 1991 Jordan (+13.5)
2. 1996 Jordan (+13)
. 2016 and 2017 Lebron (+12.5)
5. 2020 Lebron (+10.5)
6. 2009 Lebron (+10)
7. 2012 Lebron (+9.5)
8. 1998 Jordan (+9)
9. 1997 Jordan (+8.5)
10. 1993 Jordan (+7.5)
11 1990/92 Jordan (+7)
13. 2013 Lebron (+6.5)
14. 2008 Lebron (+5.5)

Thanks for the share, may I ask where you're getting some of the Jordan #s from - and I take it these are playoffs solely?

i
some bt videeo

[One_and_Done]

I'm sure I counted 17 votes for Lebron.

[zimpy27]

I have to say it is shocking to see LeBron has left everybody behind in this debate. I know this forum has a "pro-LeBron" reputation, but I still expected more votes for Jordan. The mystique of MJ really does seem to be losing its hold on at least a subset of fans. Not saying this is the avant-garde here, necessarily, and definitely not a representative sample, but it will be interesting to track this in the wider public over time. A clear alternative is available to people now in LeBron James, and while he'll never be Mike in sheer peak popularity, fans can compare their careers in a variety of lights, and a significant number prefer James.

There's also the generational thing, but again, with this subset of fansat least, that doesn't appear to be a factor. A growing number of people just prefer or value LeBron higher.

The trend is that the more thoughtful posters have LeBron as number 1.

On formats where you get one sentence reasoning (or no reasoning at all) of why someone is the GOAT, you will get Jordan as the main response. I'd wager that they don't even know why they think this, more likely parroting or a feeling from narratives they've heard. Jordan is top 3 for most so it's not a terribly bad one to have as the GOAT but the reasoning is usually poor. Obviously some exceptions you can read through here. Funnily I haven't been more convinced of Jordan being GOAT than in reading peoples reasoning here even though he didn't win out overall.

LeBron isn't the only player that gets a bump up in the thoughtful consumer ranking.

[Taj FTW]

I have to say it is shocking to see LeBron has left everybody behind in this debate. I know this forum has a "pro-LeBron" reputation, but I still expected more votes for Jordan. The mystique of MJ really does seem to be losing its hold on at least a subset of fans. Not saying this is the avant-garde here, necessarily, and definitely not a representative sample, but it will be interesting to track this in the wider public over time. A clear alternative is available to people now in LeBron James, and while he'll never be Mike in sheer peak popularity, fans can compare their careers in a variety of lights, and a significant number prefer James.

There's also the generational thing, but again, with this subset of fansat least, that doesn't appear to be a factor. A growing number of people just prefer or value LeBron higher.

The trend is that the more thoughtful posters have LeBron as number 1.

On formats where you get one sentence reasoning (or no reasoning at all) of why someone is the GOAT, you will get Jordan as the main response. I'd wager that they don't even know why they think this, more likely parroting or a feeling from narratives they've heard. Jordan is top 3 for most so it's not a terribly bad one to have as the GOAT but the reasoning is usually poor. Obviously some exceptions you can read through here. Funnily I haven't been more convinced of Jordan being GOAT than in reading peoples reasoning here even though he didn't win out overall.

LeBron isn't the only player that gets a bump up in the thoughtful consumer ranking.

The Bulls forum is unhappy about MJs rank on this forum, and generally think longevity is the only thing LeBron has above MJ.

[homecourtloss]

I have to say it is shocking to see LeBron has left everybody behind in this debate. I know this forum has a "pro-LeBron" reputation, but I still expected more votes for Jordan. The mystique of MJ really does seem to be losing its hold on at least a subset of fans. Not saying this is the avant-garde here, necessarily, and definitely not a representative sample, but it will be interesting to track this in the wider public over time. A clear alternative is available to people now in LeBron James, and while he'll never be Mike in sheer peak popularity, fans can compare their careers in a variety of lights, and a significant number prefer James.

There's also the generational thing, but again, with this subset of fansat least, that doesn't appear to be a factor. A growing number of people just prefer or value LeBron higher.

I’m not sure how much his mystique is dissipating, but what I do think we have seen over the course of especially the last six or seven years is a shift in mentality and how things are evaluated, especially as the workforce itself in all capacities and in all fields gravitates towards statistical analysis.

There are posters here who were part of the first wave of statistical analyzers that chipped away at the unimpeachable, unassailable aura around Jordan that his hagiographers had built and put evaluations under the light of statistical analysis. With the popularity of Ben and Thinking basketball, and a plethora of other numbers-based approaches to evaluating players, along with the most access ever to footage and data that we have ever had access to, we’ve seen discourse change.

This isn’t to say that Michael Jordan fares poorly under statistical analysis, as it’s actually quite the opposite, but what we do get is a quantifying of his impact and his “goodness,“ and we see that there is no outsized, outlier difference between him and others, and this is a key delineation in the analytics era, one that makes it possible to discuss in detail the “goodness” the players, without being dismissed offhand as a Heretic for not having Jordan at the top, something that would still happen on the general board.

[homecourtloss]

Hi Doc,

Thanks for putting the tallies in and carrying the project forward. Hope you have been enjoying the holiday week/weekend as well!

Quick ? I have: on top of the individual votes for each nominee, do you have a total of #2 votes received across the board documented as well (no worries either way)? Just am curious to see what the speculation looks like right now, not that it’ll hold too much weight on my soon placed vote for 2.

I deleted the count after I had the answer, but I'll tell you that what stood out to me as interesting was that Kareem, who got no 1st votes, definitely got the most 2nd votes. I wonder if we'll see him rise up above Jordan.

Edited: just saw the final tally

[Taj FTW]

Guess it was fun while it lasted?

Edit: to be clear, with ShaqAttac's unprompted combative reply being fine but my response telling him to piss off being the thing that crosses the line this isn't really something I can work on/take into account, I simply fundamentally disagree with it. I tried easing back into the forum by participating in the great projects that are organized but if this is the stance taken by the moderating team I'll take my own advice and won't (further) derail the discussion and remove myself from the forum again, probably permanently this time.

I hope the project goes well though!

It's a shame to see a good poster leave this place. Tbh, I was surprised ShaqAttac was even allowed to participate. The guy clearly seems like a troll. Just look at his threads that regularly get locked on the GB.

search.php?keywords=&terms=all&author=Shaqattac&fid%5B%5D=6&sc=1&sf=titleonly&sr=topics&sk=t&sd=d&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search

There's having poor grammar and spelling, and then there's going out of your way to post awful threads with poor spelling + grammar. He seems to clearly be the latter. Look at his early threads, and he's obviously able to use correct spelling in the titles... He's just going out of his way to type in an annoying way.

I'll leave it at that though. Hopefully you keep participating.

[rk2023]

Hi Doc,

Thanks for putting the tallies in and carrying the project forward. Hope you have been enjoying the holiday week/weekend as well!

Quick ? I have: on top of the individual votes for each nominee, do you have a total of #2 votes received across the board documented as well (no worries either way)? Just am curious to see what the speculation looks like right now, not that it’ll hold too much weight on my soon placed vote for 2.

I deleted the count after I had the answer, but I'll tell you that what stood out to me as interesting was that Kareem, who got no 1st votes, definitely got the most 2nd votes. I wonder if we'll see him rise up above Jordan.

You’re not going to post the counts at the end of each slot?

Doc posted the # of votes for each 1st place selection a page or so back, if you haven't seen. Think having a total slate of 1st / 2nd place votes (share) as well as nomination shares moving forward would be cool! As i mentioned, it's not a problem wither way due to the huge responsibility already taken leading such a project. Would be happy to help in this regard

[lessthanjake]

Spoiler:

Well I'm glad we're not contesting that "you're using box-score weighting to discredit Micheal Jordan,--a guy who literally has no non-box metric placing him at #1 over merely the last 40-years--", was a wild misrepresentation...

-_-

Or maybe the bottom line is you read as selectively you choose data to focus on:

The first thing mentioned is a purely "winning" based upper-bound derived by taking an 82-game sample and then giving Jordan every bit of credit for the Bulls improvement over 4 years.

I mean I could spend time responding to the rest, but when you literally whiff on the first thing in my post...

I’m trying to understand the point but I can’t really figure it out. You say the Bulls won 28 games before Jordan got there (which is slightly wrong—they won 27) and were a 30-win team without Jordan in 1986 (which is actually wrong since he played 18 games and they went 9-9 in those games, including 5-2 in the games he started), and that pre-triangle they peaked at a 52-53 win pace.

They were 28-win and 53-win at full strength(52-win if you do not filter for games after a mid-season trade). But since you hate that sort of adjustment(even when it is directly relevant to what you are trying to argue) we can just go with 28 without and 50-win with(corroborated by 86 where the Bulls were 27 without by record and 31 win without by srs, 40 win in games Mj played more than 20 minutes). Mind you, this sort of reflexive dismissal of context just makes things worse for Mike...

And then you’re saying that if you attribute all that improvement to Jordan, that leaves Jordan at +8? I’m very confused by the conclusion and where it comes from. Is it +8 because you are saying that a 22-23-win improvement would correspond to a +8 improvement to net rating???

Correct, though to be specific it is a 22-23 win improvement on a bad team(taking a 40 win team to 65-wins for example would be harder). Furthermore, with an eye to future threads, this is especially disappointing in comparison with Kareem and Russell once you account for srs tresholds(assuming you are still worried about championships, how you compare to the best opposition matters alot more than how you compare by raw-score):

((1988), Bulls were +3.8 at full strength)

((1977), Lakers were +4.9 at full strength)

(1969, no clue what the Celtics were at full-strength)

In terms of positional replacements Jordan replaced a bad shooting guard in 84. Russell was replaced by a bad center in 1969. For the purposes of what we're using for Kareem(pretending the Lakers didn't lose anything in the trade including their starting center), Kareem's signal should actually be suppressed if we looked at "positional replacement".

retiree-player-coach russell, on a team that would run a tougher gauntlet than any of Jordan's Bulls, saw the celtics drop by 7 points with an otherwise near identical roster(sam jones was a 28 mpg chucker on an average offense) despite hondo improving and a 2-point offensive improvement. (key to note is that this 7-point drop was from a much better league-best lvl team even if u just go by the regular-season)

Kareem, assuming the Lakers lost nothing when they traded for him in 1975(actually lost 2nd and 5th mpg guys) saw the Lakers jump from -3.95 to .500 to +4.9 with the addition of 29 mpgDon Chaney and one-off head-coach Jerry West. That is a bigger jump in a league on a team that posted a higher srs in a league where the best teams were +4 to +6.

Simply put, having inflated Jordan's mark beyond reason, retiree-player coach russell looks like an outright peer, and Kareem having given him a lower mark than is reasonable, looks outright better. And with Kareem it is hardly a one-off(will get into that on the next thread). And for Russell while we have much, what we do have all corroborates beyond a 20-game stretch on a much better team as a rookie. Also beyond the numbers Russell won 5 rings with a completely different core than he won his first 6. Jordan only ever won with a specific infrastructure and co-star, Bill only ever lost when hurt.

If you’re comfortable comparing improvement between two essentially completely different rosters

They are different rosters in that the 88 Bulls were better. I am comfortable giving Jordan an unfair amount of credit, yes. You quite literally just threw out 3-variants of WOWYR, a metric which uses 89 Pippen to assess 91 Pippen as a teammate. This is what "impact" comparisons pre-97 is. You look at the with, you look at the without, and you use your understanding of the game to try and adjust for context and isolate variables. The difference here is I'm using 82-games while WOWYR is using either a handful(overall) or 8 games a season(it is not at all clear what is counted and Ben explicitly makes a distinction between 1994 and "wowy") for one guy and 2.2 games for another(that's bill russell) and THEN decides to make "corrections" based on the 3 games a teammate missed 5 years back or the 70 games another teammate missed 10 years forward. This is why Ben explcitly outlines using "shorter-time periods" as a solution and then uses "shorter-time periods" as the backbone of his impact write-ups.

If you are not willing to deal with uncertainty, you are not going to be able to derive anything beyond the box-score and "intuition" for guys pre-97(with the partial exception of MJ). You pointing to Jordan going 27-2(Russell went 27-1-incomplete) over a 7-year stretch as opposed to 27-1-incomplete over his whole career is an example of something I'd say holds "no emperical value". An 82-game sample is pre-data ball is about as valuable as it gets. Even if you don't like what it would suggest.

I am also starting to suspect you don't actually understand the data you've been throwing around despite your insistence that you do. Let me be very clear here, the metric Jordan scores best relative to Lebron is "AUPM", a box-on/off hybrid, which combines "BPM" with "on/off"(raw impact). This is what BPM assumes:

This box score information is also weighted according to what position or role the player has on the team. For instance, a block by a center is good, but a block by a guard is great. Similarly, scoring by a low usage player has to be very efficient to mean much to the team, since they aren't putting pressure on the defense.

IOW, Jordan still looks generally worse in a stat which assumes his blocks are more valuable than Duncan's. BPM also thinks Jordan is a DPOY-candidate.

If you think that is representative of what Jordan is as a defender, then I'm curious how you explain the following points:
-> The Bulls were unaffected by Jordan's departure defensively in 1994
-> The Bulls defense was average before Jordan came, got good with Oakley, and became average with Oakley
-> The Bulls defense got better when Pippen gained primacy, going from below average from 89 and the start of 90 to -0.9 for the season, -3 for the playoffs, and -5 against the Pistons
-> The Bulls defense got better when Jordan's own defensive activity dropped per the tracking of falco, 70's, ben, blocked
-> In nearly 30-years of databall, guards have consistently been the least valuable defenders

"Box-score weightings" as they are commonly done do not hurt Micheal. If anything they inflate him, and as we just saw with JE did, if anyone wanted to compose a metric which tanked jordan to "not even bitw candidate when all his competition fell off", it would be easy enough to do. PER literally used Jordan as an acid-test. RAPTOR(which is just a box-metric for the time period in question tbf) was designed by someone who thought Kawhi Leonard was the best player in the 2019 playoffs.

Free of those sorts of priors, Jordan's emperical portfolio dramatically weakens. By the unbiased "winning" you were seeking, Jordan does not actually get to definitively claim himself as the best player of his era. Even with WOWYR, Magic is advantaged, as he is in wowy. So is David Robinson. Hakeem, Magic, and Drob are all advantaged with extended(small sample) wowy. Concentrated samples also still favor his his contemporaries.

That is what the least "limited' data says. And any claim that starts with "the data in totality" should account for that.

then you could just as easily talk about the Bulls improving from a 27 win team before he showed up to a 72 win team

"Why didn't you give Jordan an even more unfair advantage?"
Jordan was there in 89 and 90. The triangle was not. By looking at 88, we can isolate Jordan from the team-wide shift that saw the Bulls skyrocket overnight. Jordan is already operating with an unreasonable advantage in this comparison. Why would I make it more unreasonsable?

Obviously, Scottie Pippen is not actually the perfect player to fill a gap in rim protection!

Not if you want to produce the best team-level defensive outcomes, no. But that is not the same as "situational impact". Jordan offers value as a weakside helper. How often does he get to do that with Bill Russell on the court? Your argument centers on the concept of diminishing returns. Where did the returns diminish?

No star player really fit very well with LeBron. It never happened. Is that because LeBron just never found his Scottie Pippen? Maybe. But no one has been able to articulate what his Scottie Pippen would be, he had a lot of chances to try to find it, and there’s good reason to think he’d have a hard time finding it (the ball dominance stuff).

I would love to hear the rationale for Anthony Davis not fitting "really well" with Lebron when both posted crazy situational impact as they led the best(by your approach of evenly weighting the rs and playoffs) team of the last 5 years and the only team to follow up a 60-win pace rs with a dominant ass postseason(higher if for common sense purposes look at games with lebron or lebron and davis) since the 2017 Warriors. They did that with outlier-low spacing for a modern champion(Lebron as a shooter makes that look better than it was), and a playoff rotation that featured the likes of Dwight Howard and Rojon Rondo.

Lebron has had 3 chances to pick teams to win championships, he has won with all those picks. He was not calculating which teammates would give him the best situational impact, but which off the available choices gave him good prospects of winning. If you think he should have picked differently based on the knowledge available at the time, then we can cover that, but that is not 1:1 with his ability to "synergize" with co-stars which he did phenomanally the 1-year he and his "Pippen" were healthy in year 17.

He also did quite good with a similar player in Wade. So good in fact, that you've resorted to throwing in minutes without Lebron and/or without Lebron's co-stars to show Lebron can't fit with co-stars. That" is what I would call a "bad use of statistics."

Fwiw, I believe by ty/70's analysis Kareem put up the best scoring vs elite defenses though I forgot the exact thresholds. I think both have a decent case for "best scorer ever" just going off peak/prime.

I would really like to see those arguments! It's very hard for me to see Kareem as a playoff scorer on the level of MJ given the huge gap in their usage and offensive load but I would absolutely love to hear counterarguments in that regard

Or any argument against Jordan's scoring / the importance of ATG-level playoff scoring in general since I think that is such an important point underpinning pro-Jordan positions

https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=1836300&hilit=greats+vs+playoff+defenses
Jordan's still a better offensive player thanks to the ball-handling I think(though Kareem fared extremely well in 77 with limited help there), but Kareem is a much better defender and that would not be reflected in the "crazy statistical dominance" you reference. It may be reflected in the "stats" above.

I'd also say that I think the difference between Kareem and Jordan on offense was more of one of extent than of kind while the defensive discrepancy is more fundamental but I'll save that for thread #2 I guess.

Not sure it makes sense to bother replying now after the vote has already been tallied (and if we are supposed to put a hard stop on all discussion after that, someone certainly please let me know), but I’ll just say a few very quick things:

1. This method of looking at two really different rosters and comparing win totals and then deriving some sort of SRS impact is all just obviously nonsense. Once you’re comparing a team’s results to an almost entirely different roster’s results with a star player, it’s so useless that you might as well just take a completely random team and say how many games they won and compare it to a star’s wins on a different team. It’s completely lost the thread of measuring impact of an individual player. Like, the Knicks won 37 games two seasons ago, and the Nuggets only won 53 games this year, so Jokic’s impact was whatever the SRS equivalent of a 16-game increase from 37 wins is, and that’s the highest possible impact because Jokic actually has better a better team than the 2021-2022 Knicks. It’s really about as ridiculous as that.

2. And it’s hard to see what the point of that ridiculous method is. In 2009-2010, the Miami Heat won 47 games, and then LeBron showed up (along with Bosh) and they only won 58 games, and only improved their SRS by 4.77. By your logic, we could say that that 11-game, 4.77 SRS lift was the very highest possible impact LeBron could’ve had and it’s really even less because they also added Bosh. We could also say that the 20-game, 7.96 SRS improvement the Cavaliers had between 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 was the highest possible impact LeBron could’ve had and that it’s really even less because they also added Kevin Love. But of course you’d say that that’s all completely nonsense. And you’d be right. Indeed, we actually know that that logic would underestimate LeBron’s on/off in both those seasons. But your argument is absolutely equally nonsensical and seems to be trying to make some inference about Jordan’s impact using logic that you plainly wouldn’t apply to LeBron and that we know would be incorrect if we did apply it to LeBron. It’s just silly.

3. Okay, so Anthony Davis is the great fit now? In the 2019-2020 season, the Lakers had a +8.3 net rating with LeBron and Anthony Davis on the court together. It was +10.7 in 2020-2021, -2.1 in 2021-2022 (!!!), and +6.1 this past season. Even if we decided to completely discount the last couple seasons because LeBron is old, that’s still just not the kind of dominance we’d expect from LeBron playing with a really great player (which Anthony Davis is) that he fits super well with. We did see them do very well together in one playoffs (+14.4 in the 2019-2020 playoffs, though only +5.2 and +6.1 in the other playoffs), but the overall picture is not one where we could say with any degree of confidence that Anthony Davis is a great fit with LeBron or that he could’ve (or ever did) achieve sustained Jordan-Bulls-level dominance with Anthony Davis. And it’s still just never been articulated to me what a “great fit” with LeBron would look like. If Jordan’s Bulls were just so dominant because Pippen was such a great fit with Jordan, but we can’t figure out what would be such a great fit with LeBron and LeBron spent his entire career unsuccessfully trying to find it, then maybe Jordan is just able to fit with great players better and thereby be a better ceiling raiser.

[OldSchoolNoBull]

The trend is that the more thoughtful posters have LeBron as number 1.

I’m not sure how much his mystique is dissipating, but what I do think we have seen over the course of especially the last six or seven years is a shift in mentality and how things are evaluated, especially as the workforce itself in all capacities and in all fields gravitates towards statistical analysis.

There are posters here who were part of the first wave of statistical analyzers that chipped away at the unimpeachable, unassailable aura around Jordan that his hagiographers had built and put evaluations under the light of statistical analysis. With the popularity of Ben and Thinking basketball, and a plethora of other numbers-based approaches to evaluating players, along with the most access ever to footage and data that we have ever had access to, we’ve seen discourse change.

These types of sentiments are a good example of why MJ supporters are made to feel increasingly unwelcome on the PC board. The MJ-as-GOAT supporter is made out to be some rube caught up in a haze of nostalgia and marketing, and if only they'd open their eyes they'd see the truth.

Insinuating that only un-thoughtful posters could have MJ as their GOAT, using phrases like "his hagiographers" or, as someone else said yesterday, "the Jordan myth" makes this board's bias very obvious, almost as if to overcompensate for the general public's bias in the other direction.

That's not to discount the time and effort and work so many of you guys put into this stuff - it's often quite impressive and thought-provoking. But there can also be a clear bias at work. Both things can be true. Every single one of us has a bias, it's human nature.

Also, this project is like twenty or thirty people. I wouldn't be so convinced that it represents the way any significant demographic is thinking.

[f4p]

I have to say it is shocking to see LeBron has left everybody behind in this debate. I know this forum has a "pro-LeBron" reputation, but I still expected more votes for Jordan. The mystique of MJ really does seem to be losing its hold on at least a subset of fans. Not saying this is the avant-garde here, necessarily, and definitely not a representative sample, but it will be interesting to track this in the wider public over time. A clear alternative is available to people now in LeBron James, and while he'll never be Mike in sheer peak popularity, fans can compare their careers in a variety of lights, and a significant number prefer James.

There's also the generational thing, but again, with this subset of fansat least, that doesn't appear to be a factor. A growing number of people just prefer or value LeBron higher.

well, this is a heavily longevity-based vote based on the way this board does it, so that's going to give a huge advantage to lebron that a project based on "best 12 years" would not (and one lebron didn't have 5 or 6 years ago when his career was 5 or 6 years shorter). i suspect a purely prime based argument would still go to lebron but be significantly closer. also, i don't really understand the nominee/induction thing. are we giving our #2 vote in this thread but then having an actual #2 thread from the people that get picked in this thread?

if so, i guess i'm saying:
1. jordan
2. kareem
3. russell