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

[TheLand13]

Nahh it would be fairly easy to poke holes in many of these arguments for Lebron.

So do it then.

Half the general board can barely poke holes through paper lol

True.

[ShaqAttac]

Peaks

VOTE BILL RUSSELL 1969
this is p easy. He won 11 rings as the best player by faar and was so good ppl been strugglin hard to come up with any kinda arg against the season when he was bout to retire. Man literally crusshes superteams with bad help n was also the coach. He also was facin craazy comp

ut this doesn't mean anything of itself. For the KD parallel to work, the Celtics need to be great(relative to the comp) without Russell. Nothing suggests this is true beyond the Celtics first few titles(i listed the different stuff in my previous post). Crucially everything we have suggests the opposite was true in 1969, and here the competition is far better than "not weak".

Assuming you are not trying to break era-relativity, here are 3-ways we can look at opposition strength
1. Look at how the teams look relative to the league for the era(bullets and knicks are outliers by srs, Lakers are close)
2. Look at how the comp was relative to the league that season(Celtics beat the best, 2nd best and 4th best opponent they could have had by SRS)
3. Look at how the comp was in surrounding seasons(Knicks SRS doubles en-route to a championship the following year, Bullets and Lakers srs drops but they take the Knicks to 7 and LA win a championship and make 3 finals)

By any of these approaches the Celtics faced an all-time difficult gauntlet and there is absolutely nothing to suggest the Celtics were some stacked super-squad. "Competition" is not a serious argument here. Bill went through just about the hardest possible route, with weak support, in a year where the best teams were unusually good. Not sure how that doesn't get him to a tier 1(era-relative) peak unless you arbitrarily decide to curve 1969 down to what feels reasonable without scaling the other title-winning years up.

Idrg how u can arg against a guy who won way more than every1 and also won with less help. Team went bitw to bad without him when he was supposed to be waashed. If you got him low coz the league sucked i get you. But ppl sayin they era-relative and not havin russ 1 is cap. He only ever lost when hurt and he stay winnin even when his teammates sucked facin the death-star. Ez 1 for me.

I'm gonna vote 49 MIKAN for 2

This is also p simple. He was waay better than everyone else in a waay no one else was, was the best on o and d, and won 7 rings.

George Mikan (1924) "Mr. Basketball", 6'10" center, the first true big man, 7 total pro titles with Chicago Gears & Lakers

Image
Origin: Illinois
College: DePaul
Series Wins: 23
All-League 1st Team: 8 times
Star-Prime: 8 seasons
POY wins: 8, POY shares: 8.0
OPOY wins: 3, OPOY shares: 3.8
DPOY wins: 6, DPOY shares: 6.2


The obvious top player from the era so maybe not a ton to be gleaned from going into further detail, but some observations:

- Mikan appears to have been the best offensive player in pro basketball basically from the time he turned pro. Eventually others arrive in the league to top him, but he remains elite until the rule change of 1951 that widened the key from 6 to 12 feet specifically to stop him. From that point onward, while Mikan likely remained the best rebounder in the world, it seems that the rule change did have the desired effect.

- Mikan almost certainly would have been an even more impactful defender from the jump if not for the banning of goaltending. As it was, it seems like it took Mikan some time to re-optimize his defensive play. He had a recurring issue of foul trouble that was often the Achilles heel for his teams win the lost.

- So far as I can tell, Mikan's defensive dominance in the NBA was less about shotblocking and more about rebounding. Certainly the shotblocking threat was there to a degree, but in a league with such weak shooting percentage, rebounding was arguably king.

ik we dont got data, but he won the 2nd most and he was way better than every1 else. Seems like a simple 2 to me.

Hope that was good![/quote]

3 is 2016 Lebron. Beating 73 win teams with weak help is GOAT stuff. Best Impact after Russ.