Verticality wrote:I must say I think this goes too far. While I understand what may motivate a Lebron vote I think we rely too much on something like With-or-Without or Adjusted On/Off if we insist he was even better at 35 than Jordan at his ultimate.
I also say this conversation disrespects greats like Magic Johnson who had himself great seasons leading great teams with less. Lebron was certainly incredible but I think to put even this version ahead may overrate him.
Hey Verticality -- haven't seen you post around here before (may have just missed it!) -- but I appreciate the Magic call out!
One thing re: WOWY and On/off -- I’ve heard this sentiment before, that LeBron has better impact metrics than Jordan. I think it comes out of the coordinated and indeed conspiratorial campaign of certain posters (Ohayo and Enigma etc., who were recently banned) to tear down Jordan.
Now I generally agree that Jordan’s deification as some untouchable GOAT is reductive and disrespectful to the legitimate and even favorable cases of other GOAT candidates — LeBron most prominently, but also Kareem, Russell, and potentially others — depending on one’s criteria, preferences, and the inherent uncertainty in a ranking exercise like this. At the same time, the willingness of some to selectively ignore certain data, inconsistently portray the state of the data or film or context, and generally insult and belittle the opinions of those who disagree with them is is pretty pathetic, hurts the quality of discussion, and leads us further from the truth.
To be clear, there are impact metrics — plus minus and WOWY based metrics — that favor Jordan over LeBron. Plenty. Indeed, at least in current multi-year studies, the majority of plus minus metrics and adjusted WOWY metrics actually favor peak Jordan over peak LeBron (see e.g. my post here:
https://forums.realgm.com/boards/viewtopic.php?p=119288894#p119288894). And while 20 LeBron is a great season, it's a clear drop-off from LeBron's best seasons.
Of course, no player is considered the GOAT across every stat, you can get plenty of variation as you change the timespan to be shorter or longer, the stats that do prefer Jordan don’t prefer him beyond uncertainty range (and vice versa), and every stat is imperfect so one should also watch games and evaluate the context and skills of each player to their heart’s content.
But for this thread, there’s basically no plus minus metric in existence that favors 20 LeBron over 91 Jordan. Not plus minus, not on-off, not augmented plus minus, not RAPM league rank (there’s no single RAPM with both of them so we can't compare the values one to one), not in the regular season, post season, or full season. There’s no box metric that favors 20 LeBron over 91 Jordan. There’s no team stat that favors 20 LeBron over 91 Jordan. And the adjusted WOWY metrics we have for these specific years (Moonbeam’s RWOWY) clearly favor 91 Jordan over 20 LeBron. I'm sure one could cherry pick a raw WOWY sample that prefers 20 LeBron to 91 Jordan, but raw WOWY is possibly the noisiest stat in the nba, and Jordan has basically no real 'without' WOWY sample in 91 or any of the adjacent years... so not exactly a fair comparison.
LeBron’s a great player. He may well have the GOAT peak or prime or career. I personally think he has the strongest case for having the GOAT career value (although there are other criteria for all-time rankings). But I would question the objectivity of any era-relative approach that said the mean evaluation of 20 LeBron surpasses 91 Jordan. Like you say, arguing that 20 LeBron in his age 35 season is the GOAT guard season not only overrates LeBron (which does a disservice to the legitimate GOAT case LeBron does have), but also disrespects the other legendary guard seasons we’ve had in NBA history.
