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

[MavsDirk41]

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.

That is just realGM, noone in the outside world buys this. Its like a certain bubble in twitter where black is white, right is wrong. And just like twitter i can easily imagine a lot of the accounts being fake, and some being paid to do that

This above is what I was referring to by the way.

Thoughtful posts and discussion is very much encouraged for those who are pro-Jordan and I love what I usually read on the PC board. Please feel welcome to write here.

Championships
Jordan 6
James 4

FMVPs
Jordan 6
James 4

All defensive team
Jordan 9
James 6

Defensive player of the year
Jordan 1
James 0

Regular season winning percentage
Jordan 66%
James 65%

Playoff career winning percentage
Jordan 66.5%
James 64.5%

This above is what I was referring to by the way.

Thoughtful posts and discussion is very much encouraged for those who are pro-Jordan and I love what I usually read on the PC board. Please feel welcome to write here.

I think this makes your point perfectly, even though your post and my post were much more nuanced than what this poster is describing them as.

Cause maybe some people are old enough to have watched both players and they can say Jordan was/is better than James

I’m in my mid 40s and I watched both of them and I believe LeBron is better — now what?

And some more proof that you were on to something, Zimpy.

Hey homecourtloss you talk alot but i dont see anything substantial on here from you….

[MavsDirk41]

This above is what I was referring to by the way.

Thoughtful posts and discussion is very much encouraged for those who are pro-Jordan and I love what I usually read on the PC board. Please feel welcome to write here.

Championships
Jordan 6
James 4

FMVPs
Jordan 6
James 4

All defensive team
Jordan 9
James 6

Defensive player of the year
Jordan 1
James 0

Regular season winning percentage
Jordan 66%
James 65%

Playoff career winning percentage
Jordan 66.5%
James 64.5%

So here's a thing to ask yourself:

Given that you can know all of these things without knowing anything about how basketball is played, how can it be definitive proof that the one player must be better at basketball than the other?

I'd encourage you to focus less on who deserves to be #1, and focus more on just deepening your understanding of basketball by actually talking about the basketball play of the players rather than tallies such as these.

Lol its my opinion that Jordan is better than James brother thats it. Im 47. I started watching the nba after watching Bird light up the Celtics on CBS on a Sunday afternoon game. You want me to talk about these players abilities?

Offense - Jordan, 10 scoring titles, post game, mid range, could attack the rim, career .84% free throw shooter, great in the half court/attacking in transition

Defense - 9 time all defense, led the league in steals 3 years, great defensive instincts, even a good defender when he was old

Leadership - Jordan, he was never passive aggressive, always was accountable for his actions on the court, never tried to trade his teammates midseason

Clutch - Jordan all day

Passing - James

Rebounding - James

What else do you want?

[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.

So you chopped my quote to cut out the part where I said the best Jordan arguments are made by people on the PC board.

Maybe you didn't even read my post? Or maybe you did but it didn't suit your argument? I don't know which is worse.

In any case, the idea isn't to try come up with arguments for the player you feel emotionally connected to. The idea is to have an objective and consistent thought process to how you rank the best players. Objective means you need some data points to discuss independent of narrative or marketing.

People are very welcome to rank Jordan higher, but this project is about ranking 100 players. If your purpose is to just put Jordan as GOAT then your heart isn't going to be in the other 99 rankings

I wasn't trying to misrepresent you. I had been having these frustrations for a while, and that line jumped out at me(and FWIW, only one sentence of my post was directed at anything you said). The rest of your post does offer necessary context so, my apologies. I should have read it more thoroughly.

Regarding your last paragraph here - I guess I am just skeptical that a purely objective ranking of players is possible. I think everyone has biases, for this player or that player, this era or that era, this set of criteria or that set of criteria, the value of this stat over the value of that stat, etc, and I think those biases will always color each person's assessments.

I appreciate your post NoBull and I'd hate to think that Jordan supporters are being driven out by LeBron supporters.

I agree with you that this project does not represent anything like the entirety of the basketball population.

I do think age is an inevitable factor here - not for me mind you, because I'm one of the old folks, but in the sense that:

1. Not only is there a good chance that the birth year of participants on average is getting further into the AD every time, but that's actually what we should expect if things are going well.

2. There's a natural Longevity argument for the new challenger (LeBron), and I believe that people have a tendency to factor in Longevity based on what's being talked about as they come of age. Bird, Magic & Jordan, if you were talking about longevity, you couldn't but be advocating for players from the past. So as these new guys came along with their greatness being trumpeted, there was an aversion to talking about longevity.

That's not to say that longevity didn't matter at all, but that it wasn't the focal point in that era...and it wasn't the first era like this. Let's note that when voting happened for the Basketball Player of the Half Century happened in 1950, the top two guys were guys (George Mikan & Hank Luisetti) who didn't have stellar longevity. People's natural tendency at that time was to focus on Peak, as it would in any situation where actually tallying longevity was problematic.

This then to say that those coming of age in LeBron's era are probably going to lean more into longevity not out of any explicit affection for LeBron, but just because that's what's in the water.

I'll note something analogous in my other favorite sport tennis in the men's GOAT conversation. There was a time when John McEnroe was considered by many to be the GOAT. Nowadays he'd typically get ranked not just below guys who came later, but by those who were his contemporaries and those who came before. Why? Because now much of the GOAT debate centers on counting Slams, and so guys weren't able to maintain their body and mind - for whatever reasons - tend to get downgraded.

Wrapping up, I've long said that I think we need to allow for significant variance in how longevity is treated. Running this project, I just care that everyone is thinking for themselves what it means to them. So I'm not bothered when I see stuff like this ebb and flow.

I do hope that people can do the whole be-curious-not-judgmental thing though when they encounter someone who disagrees with them.

There's an expression "steelmanning", opposite of strawmanning, where you look to find the most compelling part of another person's message rather than trying to find its weakest. When you do this sincerely, one of the beauties of it is that you just can't help but learn. And so whenever someone has a perspective being most impressed by X, if you don't understand what would lead a person to come to this conclusion, that means you have a target for learning, which is productive thing to have.

I appreciate your efforts to reach out.

I hear everything you're saying, but I guess the one I thing I disagree with is the underlined. I think if everyone participating had to adhere to the same set of criteria, regardless of what that criteria ends up being, then the end result would be much easier to decipher and, frankly, less arguable. If everyone, as a rule, had to factor longevity heavily into their equations, then who could really argue against Kareem or LBJ? I may not agree with that criteria, but at least the result would be pretty objectively correct based on that criteria.

It's supposed to be an objective ranking but by allowing everyone to craft their own criteria, you're allowing all kinds of subjectivity in, and the end ranking ends up telling you more about the participants' criteria than anything else imo.

That said, I understand that while that might make the rankings more free of bias, it would probably also make the conversation duller, and I guess the conversation is the real point.

[lessthanjake]

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.

Ooh "obviously", nice.

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.

If you could somehow ascertain that the Nuggets who(by record) went at a 31-win pace(13 games) in the regular season were actually secretly better than the 37-win knicks, then yes you could establish an "upper-bound" looking at the Nuggets record with him(which is 57-wins). If you want to argue the Bulls actually regressed, by all means. If not then Jordan's "impact" is overshot with this method which is why we can say it's an upper-bound.

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.

If you ignore that Miami lost significant pieces, I guess? As is 2011 is a general nadir for Lebron from an impact perspective. Similar shift for 1993 Mike when he leaves fwiw. The "point" is obvious, so we can extrapolate from a large sample. Since we are adjusting how we are interpreting that data point with the nature of the roster shift, this works fine. It's a much cleaner type of adjustment than what is at play with say...WOWYR

“If you ignore that Miami lost significant pieces”??? The whole exercise you’re going down here is to ignore that two rosters are almost completely different. It’s not an impact measure at all. It’s just trying to draw a spurious connection between plainly unrelated data points.

It’s just silly.

It doesn't favor the player you prefer, but no, not really. It's a simple logical extrapolation that allows us to use an 82-game set. If you want to argue getting rid of defensive negatives, and getting oakley, and pippen/grant off the bench actually made the Bulls worse(though the Bulls would drop-off when he left), by all means. Otherwise, you don't really have anything to complain about.

It’s logical extrapolation using basically completely unrelated data points and trying to draw a meaningful conclusion from them. You might as well pick a completely random team that you happen to think is similarly or less talented than the Bulls without Jordan and look at their wins/SRS and say that the difference is the upper bound of Jordan’s impact.

I actually genuinely don’t see how this is a good faith argument. The actual reality—whether you want to admit it or not—is that there’s very little impact data on Jordan. The data that does exist is either limited (i.e. actual RAPM for limited time periods of his career) or suffers from significant potential methodological flaws (things like that fake RAPM using quarter-by-quarter scores). But in that limited data, Michael Jordan comes out looking really good overall. We shouldn’t really draw much of a concrete conclusion from that, since the data is limited/flawed, but that is the honest assessment of where we’re at (i.e. limited data that looks good for Jordan), and using back-of-the-napkin nonsense to try to refute that is just silly. It’s also not even clear why you feel the need to dig deep into the bag of nonsense to try to refute it, when what you’re trying to refute is such an unremarkable and neutral assessment (i.e. mostly just that we have limited data so can’t draw a strong conclusion).

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.

Which is more than sufficient for winning championships, especially today.

Even if we decided to completely discount the last couple seasons because LeBron is old,

Yes, lest we consider Jordan's Wizards tenure when evaluating 1998...

that’s still just not the kind of dominance we’d expect from LeBron playing

I'm not sure I care much for what "you" would expect. The Lakers easily won a title with one year of health and were comfortably the best team in 2021 before health broke down. If clearly the best team in the league by a margin is not "ceiling raising" then your tresholds have little or nothing to do with championship-winning

“Comfortably the best team in 2021 before health broke down”??? They did not even have the NBA’s best record when Anthony Davis got injured, so it’s very odd to say they were comfortably the best team. It was also less than 30 games into the season. Are we at the point where a request to identify who would be a good enough fit for LeBron such that he could have a team as consistently dominant as the Jordan Bulls leads to an assertion that LeBron’s team was consistently dominant because they had the 2nd best record in the league like 28 games into the season? It’s silly.

Also, as for +8.3 or +10.7 with the best players on the court being sufficient to win a title, that may sometimes be true*, but it’s also very often insufficient because it’s not particularly extraordinary. And we aren’t comparing to the average title winner, but rather a dominant buzzsaw (i.e. Jordan’s Bulls). The argument you’re making is essentially that LeBron could be just as consistently dominant as that if he had someone that fit him as well as Pippen fit Jordan. I asked you to identify who would fit LeBron that well. You tried to assert Anthony Davis would, and then when confronted with the fact that, factually speaking, LeBron and AD together were not nearly as dominant as the Bulls were, you then just say that they were sufficiently good together to win a title. No one disputes that LeBron has managed to at least fit okay enough with great teammates that they can win a title together. He’s won 4 titles that way! The question is whether he could fit well enough with great teammates to be as dominant as Jordan’s Bulls were. He spent his entire career trying to find that fit, and he was never able to get it despite playing with a bunch of great players, and there’s been no explanation from anyone as to what that fit would look like.

* Note that the 2023 Nuggets were +11.6 with Jokic and Murray on the court. The 2022 Warriors were +13.4 with Steph and Draymond on the floor. The 2021 Bucks were +10.2 with Giannis and Holiday on the floor (and +8.5 with Giannis and Middleton if you think Middleton > Holiday). The 2019 Raptors were +11.7 with Kawhi and Siakam. And of course those previous Warriors teams were all miles ahead with their two best players on the floor. That +8.3 in 2019-2020 with LeBron and AD on the floor was the lowest for the best players on a championship duo since LeBron and Kyrie in 2015-2016. So actually, it’s not really “more than sufficient.”

[OhayoKD]

Ooh "obviously", nice.

If you could somehow ascertain that the Nuggets who(by record) went at a 31-win pace(13 games) in the regular season were actually secretly better than the 37-win knicks, then yes you could establish an "upper-bound" looking at the Nuggets record with him(which is 57-wins). If you want to argue the Bulls actually regressed, by all means. If not then Jordan's "impact" is overshot with this method which is why we can say it's an upper-bound.


If you ignore that Miami lost significant pieces, I guess? As is 2011 is a general nadir for Lebron from an impact perspective. Similar shift for 1993 Mike when he leaves fwiw. The "point" is obvious, so we can extrapolate from a large sample. Since we are adjusting how we are interpreting that data point with the nature of the roster shift, this works fine. It's a much cleaner type of adjustment than what is at play with say...WOWYR

“If you ignore that Miami lost significant pieces”??? The whole exercise you’re going down here is to ignore that two rosters are almost completely different.

No. I did not "ignore it", that is why it is an "upper-bound". The point is "ignoring the differences" benefits Jordan. Hence "upper-bound". Unless the Bulls didn't improve, it is more likely Jordan's impact is lower than the mark I'm setting than higher. Good job repeating yourself though

It doesn't favor the player you prefer, but no, not really. It's a simple logical extrapolation that allows us to use an 82-game set. If you want to argue getting rid of defensive negatives, and getting oakley, and pippen/grant off the bench actually made the Bulls worse(though the Bulls would drop-off when he left), by all means. Otherwise, you don't really have anything to complain about.

It’s logical extrapolation using basically completely unrelated data points

"unrelated", it is the same team making changes we can track.

I actually genuinely don’t see how this is a good faith argument.

From someone who started this exchange saying I was mostly citing box-aggregates? Just because "you" do not like it does not change that we are looking at how a team does without a player, and how a team does with a player. If you want an emperical basis, we can point to Chicago's defense regressing back to average(as well as a team-wide regression) after Oakley's depature

The actual reality—whether you want to admit it or not—is that there’s very little impact data on Jordan.

There is very little of what "you" consider impact data but of course you are rather inconsistent with what is "good-faith" running with WOWYR while complaining about much more straightforward "adjustments". As it so happens, "WOWYR" is the one and only type of metric Jordan actually looks "good" in relative to Lebron. Using your standard of what counts as an impact metric we have:

-> Playoff on/off
(Lebron looks better)
-> On/off
(Lebron looks better, 97/98 rank below 17 and 18 lebron years respectively)
-> On+ON/off
(Lebron looks better, 2nd and 5th best regular season teams rank 8th and 11th respectively)
-> WOWY
(Lebron looks better, and Jordan ranks 4th amongst his contemporaries, literally does not matter what you use)
-> Indirect samples(what eminece outlined in the #2), Lebron looks much better
-> AUPM
(Lebron looks better with the exception of 3-year consecutive where MJ is a bit behind Duncan)
-> Squared RAPM
(Lebron looks better in the same set)
-> Full RAPM
(Lebron looks better with the potential for Jordan to close in if his early years score better)

You chose to ignore all of the above while claiming that I was "using box-weightings". That is bad-faith.

Your opinion was not "nuetral", it was that Jordan looks comparable to Lebron in what we have. He does not. If you want to appeal to uncertainity, fine. But the data we have consistently leans in one direction. Unless you consider ranking 4th among his own contemporaries "good", your conclusion is nonsensical, probably a result of you wanting Jordan to look like a peer, when really he just looks worse.

This is why you are trying to push "cieling-raising" in the first-place, even though you cannot be bothered to establish a link between what you consider cieling raising and what is relevant for championship-winning.

Which is more than sufficient for winning championships, especially today.
Yes, lest we consider Jordan's Wizards tenure when evaluating 1998...

I'm not sure I care much for what "you" would expect. The Lakers easily won a title with one year of health and were comfortably the best team in 2021 before health broke down. If clearly the best team in the league by a margin is not "ceiling raising" then your tresholds have little or nothing to do with championship-winning

“Comfortably the best team in 2021 before health broke down”??? They did not even have the NBA’s best record when Anthony Davis got injured, so it’s very odd to say they were comfortably the best team. It was also less than 30 games into the season. Are we at the point where a request to identify who would be a good enough fit for LeBron such that he could have a team as consistently dominant as the Jordan Bulls leads to an assertion that LeBron’s team was consistently dominant because they had the 2nd best record in the league like 28 games into the season? It’s silly.

stop trying to shift the burden of proof. It is you who argued that Lebron is limited as a cieling raisier and thus this inhibits his ability to win championships. You do not get to cry about samples when you cannot provide any evidence to support your conclusion. You are arguing from absence.

Just like it is hilarious to accuse me of bad-faith when you chucked out just about everything except for WOWYR and then complain about me using samples multiple years removed(again, do you actually understand what you're using?).

The lakers comfortably won a title. Now you need to explain why that is not indicative of cieling raising.

[rk2023]

Could this thread be locked? Feel like the conversation is being derailed : showing diminishing returns at this point in time.

[ShaqAttac]

Could this thread be locked? Feel like the conversation is being derailed : showing diminishing returns at this point in time.

nah let em cook.

if bro is just gonna lie bout what ppl sayin, let em see. ppl ignorinn everythin they dont like so they can say mj's "impaact" is the same is always funny

[JimmyFromNz]

I genuinely don't know where some find the personal time nor energy to go back and forth on these tit-tat arguments, especially where the source information being debated is incredibly detailed, fragmented, esoteric and somewhat unreliable.

Kudos generating debate, and maybe I'm just a tired 'old man' having read these different iterations many times over the years

[homecourtloss]

That is just realGM, noone in the outside world buys this. Its like a certain bubble in twitter where black is white, right is wrong. And just like twitter i can easily imagine a lot of the accounts being fake, and some being paid to do that

Championships
Jordan 6
James 4

FMVPs
Jordan 6
James 4

All defensive team
Jordan 9
James 6

Defensive player of the year
Jordan 1
James 0

Regular season winning percentage
Jordan 66%
James 65%

Playoff career winning percentage
Jordan 66.5%
James 64.5%

I think this makes your point perfectly, even though your post and my post were much more nuanced than what this poster is describing them as.



I’m in my mid 40s and I watched both of them and I believe LeBron is better — now what?

And some more proof that you were on to something, Zimpy.

Hey homecourtloss you talk alot but i dont see anything substantial on here from you….

Lol par for the course, and no surprise here. Will not engage further as I don’t want this thread locked.

[OhayoKD]

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.

Those threads do seem to get a fair amount of engagement though. If they're really misspelling for fun, the dedication is almost impressive.

"2" threads being locked is an interesting interpretation of "regularly"

[OldSchoolNoBull]

Could this thread be locked? Feel like the conversation is being derailed : showing diminishing returns at this point in time.

nah let em cook.

if bro is just gonna lie bout what ppl sayin, let em see. ppl ignorinn everythin they dont like so they can say mj's "impaact" is the same is always funny

I am not sure which bro you are referring to, but in any case I certainly didn't mean to derail anything with my earlier post. I felt compelled to say something, I said it(and subsequently apologized for the out-of-context quote therein), and now I'm done with that.

[lessthanjake]

There is very little of what "you" consider impact data but of course you are rather inconsistent with what is "good-faith" running with WOWYR while complaining about much more straightforward "adjustments". As it so happens, "WOWYR" is the one and only type of metric Jordan actually looks "good" in relative to Lebron. Using your standard of what counts as an impact metric we have:

-> Playoff on/off
(Lebron looks better)
-> On/off
(Lebron looks better, 97/98 rank below 17 and 18 lebron years respectively)
-> On+ON/off
(Lebron looks better, 2nd and 5th best regular season teams rank 8th and 11th respectively)
-> WOWY
(Lebron looks better, and Jordan ranks 4th amongst his contemporaries, literally does not matter what you use)
-> Indirect samples(what eminece outlined in the #2), Lebron looks much better
-> AUPM
(Lebron looks better with the exception of 3-year consecutive where MJ is a bit behind Duncan)
-> Squared RAPM
(Lebron looks better in the same set)
-> Full RAPM
(Lebron looks better with the potential for Jordan to close in if his early years score better)

You chose to ignore all of the above while claiming that I was "using box-weightings". That is bad-faith.

That’s all either (1) stuff that layers on box-score components to approximate on-off data, (2) data that we only have for very limited portions of Jordan’s career (and in which he typically graded out at or near the top of the league); or (3) WOWY stuff that was amongst what I already reported in the initial post on this that you disputed. I’m not sure why you think any of that refutes the idea that we have very limited pure impact data on Jordan and that he looks good overall in what we do have. He’s at or near the top of the league each year in the limited RAPM data we have, and he’s ranked quite highly all-time in all but one of the WOWY stuff we have. The RAPM data is very limited and WOWY is a pretty flawed measure, so we don’t have to put a high degree of confidence in this information, but we shouldn’t act like Jordan doesn’t look good overall in the pure advanced impact metric info we have.

I'm not sure I care much for what "you" would expect. The Lakers easily won a title with one year of health and were comfortably the best team in 2021 before health broke down. If clearly the best team in the league by a margin is not "ceiling raising" then your tresholds have little or nothing to do with championship-winning

“Comfortably the best team in 2021 before health broke down”??? They did not even have the NBA’s best record when Anthony Davis got injured, so it’s very odd to say they were comfortably the best team. It was also less than 30 games into the season. Are we at the point where a request to identify who would be a good enough fit for LeBron such that he could have a team as consistently dominant as the Jordan Bulls leads to an assertion that LeBron’s team was consistently dominant because they had the 2nd best record in the league like 28 games into the season? It’s silly.

stop trying to shift the burden of proof. It is you who argued that Lebron is limited as a cieling raisier and thus this inhibits his ability to win championships. You do not get to cry about samples when you cannot provide any evidence to support your conclusion. You are arguing from absence.

Just like it is hilarious to accuse me of bad-faith when you chucked out just about everything except for WOWYR and then complain about me using samples multiple years removed(again, do you actually understand what you're using?).

The lakers comfortably won a title. Now you need to explain why that is not indicative of cieling raising.

Huh? My evidence is that in reality LeBron never had a truly dominant team. There’s tons of empirical data backing that up, which I provided way at the beginning of this thread. It’s you that has tried to parry away that point in part by saying that Jordan simply had a more dominant team because he had a team that he had a better fit with—the implication being that LeBron could’ve hypothetically done the same thing with a better fit. I’ve repeatedly asked you to tell me what star(s) would fit well with LeBron such that it’d result in a team being as dominant as the Jordan Bulls. You eventually responded with Anthony Davis. I pointed out data that shows that LeBron and AD were not particularly dominant together in any sustained manner. And now your response is to say that there’s a burden on me and that I somehow haven’t met it??? Your whole argument is literally that LeBron could hypothetically have done something he never did (i.e. have a super dominant team) if only he had had something that you cannot identify (i.e. star(s) that fit well with him).

____________

Anyways, others are right that this has run its course, so I won’t be responding further to this discussion.

[OhayoKD]

There is very little of what "you" consider impact data but of course you are rather inconsistent with what is "good-faith" running with WOWYR while complaining about much more straightforward "adjustments". As it so happens, "WOWYR" is the one and only type of metric Jordan actually looks "good" in relative to Lebron. Using your standard of what counts as an impact metric we have:

-> Playoff on/off
(Lebron looks better)
-> On/off
(Lebron looks better, 97/98 rank below 17 and 18 lebron years respectively)
-> On+ON/off
(Lebron looks better, 2nd and 5th best regular season teams rank 8th and 11th respectively)
-> WOWY
(Lebron looks better, and Jordan ranks 4th amongst his contemporaries, literally does not matter what you use)
-> Indirect samples(what eminece outlined in the #2), Lebron looks much better
-> AUPM
(Lebron looks better with the exception of 3-year consecutive where MJ is a bit behind Duncan)
-> Squared RAPM
(Lebron looks better in the same set)
-> Full RAPM
(Lebron looks better with the potential for Jordan to close in if his early years score better)

You chose to ignore all of the above while claiming that I was "using box-weightings". That is bad-faith.

That’s all either (1) stuff that layers on box-score components to approximate on-off data, (2) data that we only have for very limited portions of Jordan’s career (and in which he typically graded out at or near the top of the league); or (3) WOWY stuff that was amongst what I already reported in the initial post on this that you disputed.

What you reported was WOWY(heavily favors Lebron) and three variants of WOWYR, an adjustment to WOWY that is made by taking much smaller samples of per/season "off" than the 82-game set I used for Mike, and applying it to an "on" multiple years removed on "completely different rosters" with "completely different versions" of teammates. You literally cited three versions of a statistic that does the same thing you called "nonsensical" except the samples are way smaller and all the adjustments are in a "blackbox". If you are going to call me bad-faith for doing a much less contrived version of what WOWYR does for a much larger sample, then it is "bad-faith" of you to repeatedly cite WOWYR.

I’m not sure why you think any of that refutes the idea that we have very limited pure impact data on Jordan and that he looks good overall in what we do have.

I'm sorry, did anyone argue that "Lebron is certainly more valuable than Jordan?". What is refuted is "jordan looks as good". When all the stuff we have puts Lebron ahead, "we don't know" or "lebron looks better" are logical extrapolations. "jordan looks as good" is not. You keep talking about rapm "rankings" but those rankings are in comparison to the likes of Malone(he is not clear of d-rob). Not prime Magic, Hakeem and Bird. If you want to look at the ranking(instead of the gaps, the scores, or how the players compare indirectly when we use like for like impact signals(kg, curry, and duncan all favorably compare to rs MJ), then you cannot just assume that Jordan would look better or as good relative to the "top" competition as he does during second-three peat data.

If you consider "maaaaaybe better than his contemporaries(probably not magic at least)" to be good, cool. But that is rather disappointing for a player in consideration for spots 1 and 2.

stop trying to shift the burden of proof. It is you who argued that Lebron is limited as a cieling raisier and thus this inhibits his ability to win championships. You do not get to cry about samples when you cannot provide any evidence to support your conclusion. You are arguing from absence.

Just like it is hilarious to accuse me of bad-faith when you chucked out just about everything except for WOWYR and then complain about me using samples multiple years removed(again, do you actually understand what you're using?).

The lakers comfortably won a title. Now you need to explain why that is not indicative of cieling raising.

Huh? My evidence is that in reality LeBron never had a truly dominant team. There’s tons of empirical data backing that up, which I provided way at the beginning of this thread. It’s you that has tried to parry away that point in part by saying that Jordan simply had a more dominant team because he had a team that he had a better fit with—the implication being that LeBron could’ve hypothetically done the same thing with a better fit. I’ve repeatedly asked you to tell me what star(s) would fit well with LeBron such that it’d result in a team being as dominant as the Jordan Bulls. You eventually responded with Anthony Davis. I pointed out data that shows that LeBron and AD were not particularly dominant together in any sustained manner. And now your response is to say that there’s a burden on me and that I somehow haven’t met it??? Your whole argument is literally that LeBron could hypothetically have done something he never did (i.e. have a super dominant team) if only he had had something that you cannot identify (i.e. star(s) that fit well with him).

____________

Anyways, others are right that this has run its course, so I won’t be responding further to this discussion.

[/quote]
What? The argument for Lebron is simple. He looks more valuable by what is available. I am looking at everything as "evidence". You are saying that all "impact" on teams that do not meet a certain treshold is merely "floor-raising" and that a hypothetical advantage Jordan has on that treshold of team manifests, somehow, into Jordan being easier to win chamionships despite the data(rs or playoffs) suggesting Lebron has beaten better opponents than anyone Jordan has beat. As of now, your choice of treshold does not actually have any tie to winning championships beyond Jordan's teams happening to have hit them.

The "parry" is equally simple. What "we have" suggests

A. Lebron never played with Jordan's level of help
B. Despite that, when the co-stars who Lebron supposedly was too ball-dominant to fit with were healthy and shared the floor with Lebron, the team was "dominant" and beat multiple teams better than anyone Jordan beat whether you go by the regular season(73-win warriors) or playoff-focused ratings(2012 thunder, 2013 spurs, 2016 warriors),

Your argument is not even close to logically leading where you want it to go, and you are also trying to chuck contradictory evidence because of sample-size while using data that is entirely irrelevant to what you are arguing("lebron cannot fit with co-stars").

Lebron's argument does not require a claim or assumption about how he fits with co-stars. Jordan's does. You are adding complications without any justification to.

[One_and_Done]

If Jordan fans are this annoyed about him losing to Lebron again, they're really going to lose it when Kareem beats him out for #2.

[uberhikari]

I just want to give my thoughts on the LeBron James vs Michael Jordan comparison.

Although I didn't participate, I read most of the comments in this thread. As I was reading, I realized that in this discussion Jordan is going to be at a decided disadvantage vs LeBron going forward because we simply don't have the empirical evidence required to properly evaluate the comparison.

Here is the problem:

Jordan's case requires box-focus or hypotheticals and theoretical excuses. Lebron's does not

LeBron played his entire career in the "data" era. And when we look at the data we see something that honestly looks like it shouldn't be possible. Somehow, LeBron has a peak that looks statistically untouchable. That peak is sustained over a 5-year window ('09-'13). When you widen the aperture the surrounding prime years ('06-'08 and '14-'20) place him at the top or very nearly at the top.

Then you take a bird's eye view and realize that LeBron's career spans 20 years (which is 26% of the entire existence of the NBA). Usually when a guy plays that long you'd expect his latter prime years to drag him down. But this is not what we see. Even from '21-'23 LeBron is not being dragged down because even though he misses a lot of time due to injury, when he plays the data is still telling us that he's a top 7 or 8 guy in the league.

So, LeBron has an argument for the best peak. LeBron has an argument for the best prime. And LeBron has an argument for the best longevity. And because his entire career took place in the "data" era we have the empirical evidence to prove it.

To sum it up, here's what I wrote in the 25-year RAPM thread:

The fact that he's [LeBron] #1 in both the RS & PS AND has 25k more possessions than the next closest player when it comes to longevity (Kobe Bryant) is downright crazy.

Now, the people, through no fault of their own, who want to argue that Jordan should be ranked above LeBron have a problem. As long as the empirical evidence we take to be dispositive in this comparison is predicated on data, Jordan cannot win going forward. Why? Because we don't have data for the overwhelming majority of Jordan's career. Therefore, the people who want to argue in favor of Jordan either need to change the terms of the debate or remain at a disadvantage.

In any debate that we think can be resolved by recourse to empirical evidence, all of the discussants need to be capable of being persuaded. Otherwise, there's no point to the debate. In other words, we all need to think about what hypothetical evidence would need to exist in order to persuade us that we're wrong and, therefore, need to change our minds.

Personally, I find myself in a paradox. It seems unreasonable to believe that there's no way someone can have Russell, Kareem, or Jordan ranked above LeBron. But when I think about what kind of evidence would be needed to convince me that Jordan should be ranked above LeBron, I'm at a loss because the kind of evidence that would convince me is precisely the kind of evidence that we don't have.

Based on all the statistical evidence that I've seen, LeBron's argument is too damn strong. If he'd retired after 2016 I would be less sure. But then:

After that point, LeBron from 18-23 has 6 years that on their own would have him as a borderline HOFer lol (6x All-Star, runner-up MVP twice, 2 Finals appearances, 1 championship with a FMVP, averages of 27/8/8). Meanwhile, Jordan doesn't add ANYTHING significant to his career value after 98.

So, I find myself at an empirical impasse that I don't know how to overcome.

[penbeast0]

ShaqAttack warned for posting negative comments about other posters. Particularly in this project, we have to stay on topic as it runs for close to a year.

[MavsDirk41]

And some more proof that you were on to something, Zimpy.

Hey homecourtloss you talk alot but i dont see anything substantial on here from you….

Lol par for the course, and no surprise here. Will not engage further as I don’t want this thread locked.

Par for the course meaning absolutely nothing but im not surprised. This is exactly why i dont come to this site. This is like showing up to the court and saying, “nah i would destroy you” and leaving lol! Have a blessed day sir and better luck next time.

[Franco]

Championships
Jordan 6
James 4

FMVPs
Jordan 6
James 4

All defensive team
Jordan 9
James 6

Defensive player of the year
Jordan 1
James 0

Regular season winning percentage
Jordan 66%
James 65%

Playoff career winning percentage
Jordan 66.5%
James 64.5%

So here's a thing to ask yourself:

Given that you can know all of these things without knowing anything about how basketball is played, how can it be definitive proof that the one player must be better at basketball than the other?

I'd encourage you to focus less on who deserves to be #1, and focus more on just deepening your understanding of basketball by actually talking about the basketball play of the players rather than tallies such as these.

Lol its my opinion that Jordan is better than James brother thats it. Im 47. I started watching the nba after watching Bird light up the Celtics on CBS on a Sunday afternoon game. You want me to talk about these players abilities?


Leadership - Jordan, he was never passive aggressive, always was accountable for his actions on the court, never tried to trade his teammates midseason

I know I'm not a part of the project, as I don't have as much time on my hands as I'd like, but I want to remind everyone that this is the same Jordan who reportedly tried to keep Horace Grant from eating and gave Steve Kerr a black eye.

[ShaqAttac]

Could this thread be locked? Feel like the conversation is being derailed : showing diminishing returns at this point in time.

nah let em cook.

if bro is just gonna lie bout what ppl sayin, let em see. ppl ignorinn everythin they dont like so they can say mj's "impaact" is the same is always funny

I am not sure which bro you are referring to, but in any case I certainly didn't mean to derail anything with my earlier post. I felt compelled to say something, I said it(and subsequently apologized for the out-of-context quote therein), and now I'm done with that.

letkiss

[ShaqAttac]

So here's a thing to ask yourself:

Given that you can know all of these things without knowing anything about how basketball is played, how can it be definitive proof that the one player must be better at basketball than the other?

I'd encourage you to focus less on who deserves to be #1, and focus more on just deepening your understanding of basketball by actually talking about the basketball play of the players rather than tallies such as these.

Lol its my opinion that Jordan is better than James brother thats it. Im 47. I started watching the nba after watching Bird light up the Celtics on CBS on a Sunday afternoon game. You want me to talk about these players abilities?


Leadership - Jordan, he was never passive aggressive, always was accountable for his actions on the court, never tried to trade his teammates midseason

I know I'm not a part of the project, as I don't have as much time on my hands as I'd like, but I want to remind everyone that this is the same Jordan who reportedly tried to keep Horace Grant from eating and gave Steve Kerr a black eye.

yo wut