Baller2014 wrote:I get the Lebron love, I do. But even if his peak was a little better than Duncan, he's still got only 11 total seasons, only 7 of which can really really be called prime years. I don't see how that can stand up to the comparable peak of Duncan, who has a 10 year prime, and a consistent 17 year career. I mean, even in his non-prime years he's still an amazing, all-nba franchise big. Even if Lebron's 7 prime years were twice as valuable as Duncan's best 14 seasons, he'd still be coming up short because Duncan's remaining 3 seasons had him playing at a higher level than non-prime Lebron's 4 other seasons... and of course, Lebron's 7 prime years were nowhere close to being twice as valuable as Duncan's best 14 years.
I'm assuming the 7 prime years you're referring to are 08-14. I totally get discounting his rookie year; 20-5-5 his nice, but .488 TS% takes away from that, and Cleveland didn't even really know what position to put him at yet. The other three years may not be at the level of his 08-14, but I don't want to punish him for setting unreasonable standards later in his career, as LeBron's 05-07 years would be valued prime years for most players. Just because they look bad compared to the rarefied air he's occupied later in his career doesn't mean they can't still knock the pants off the 8th-10th best years of most other players.
05-06 is probably the best of the bunch. He averaged 31.4 ppg, 7.0 rpg, and 6.6 apg on .568 TS% with a +10.4 on/off split, good for a 28.1 PER and 16.3 Win Shares. For comparison, Duncan's career-high PER is 27.1, and he's exceeded that amount of Win Shares twice in his career, with his third-best total being 13.2. He led Cleveland to 50 wins, with his second-best player being Ilgauskas, and Eric Snow ranking second on the team in minutes played (.444 TS%, 10.9 USG, 98 ORTG, 8.1 PER). LeBron finished #2 in the MVP race that year (Duncan was 8th), and earned an all-NBA first-team nod, relegating Duncan to 2nd team. In the playoffs, he had some turnover problems, but was still very strong. He led his team past Washington in the first round, averaging 35.7-7.5-5.7 on .599 TS%, hitting a game-winning shot down 1 in game 3 with 5 seconds left, and another game-winner down 1 in game 5 with 0.9 seconds left, with both shots giving his team the series lead. He struggled more against the #1 seed Pistons, but still averaged 26.6-8.6-6.0 on .516 TS% and took them to 7 games. Overall, this doesn't look that different from, say, prime Kobe, and remember: this is his 8th-best season.
06-07 was a small step down from that year, but averages of 27.3-6.7-6.0 on .552 TS% are nothing to sneeze at. He led Cleveland to 50 wins again, had a 24.5 PER and 13.7 WS, finishing 2nd in RAPM and 5th in MVP voting. What really stood out was his playoff performance, though, where he led Cleveland to the finals and led the league in WS. Most memorable, of course, was the upset of Detroit where he scored 29 of his team's last 30 points to win game 5 of a tied series on the road in overtime.
04-05 stands up to scrutiny pretty well, too. He averaged 27.2-7.4-7.2 on .554 TS%, good for a 25.7 PER and 14.3 Win Shares, with a +8.8 on/off split. Believe it or not, the guard corps of Jeff McInnis, Ira Newble, and Eric Snow didn't work out, and the team only won 42 games, which somehow wasn't enough for a playoff spot (who says the East was weak? :p), but he finished 6th in the MVP race and made 2nd-team all-NBA. Nothing groundbreaking or anything, but this is his 10th-best season, and his top 5 or so are all best-player-in-the-world level. Duncan only has two seasons with more Win Shares; Hakeem's has one that beats it and one that ties; Shaq has three that beat it; and Bird and Magic have four each, but they've got no longevity edge, nor did they peak as high as LeBron did for 4 or 5 seasons.
Maybe you don't believe Win Shares 100%; in fact, I'd be worried if you did. They do mean something, though, and I can't ignore a gap that huge. Considering that some of the things we know from +/- statistics and from clutch statistics indicate that LeBron is even better than the box score tells us, I have a hard time believing that we would instead go the other way and try to shrink the massive statistical gap between LeBron and others. We've seen his dominance first-hand; don't let his current greatness blind you to the fact that he's been putting up seasons that many greats would be proud of for a decade now.
