Mikal Bridges says LeBron would get 90 a game against 86' Celtics (Burning Bridges ?)

[JonFromVA]

First, how good a team is or needs to be is always relative to competition. The Cavs were not playing any team the caliber of the Celtics in the first round while having a roster similar to what Jordan had, that could have been the case if they were in the West where their records might not have gotten them as good seeding. The closest thing we can think of would be the 2007 Cavs vs the Spurs, but the Spurs were not Celtics level that season, and we saw how that turned out.

The 85-86 Bulls were 30-52, Jordan missed most of the season, they were 9-9 in the games he played, 21-43 (27 win pace) without him. If he had played the whole season, they would have likely landed around .500, maybe a little over. Their defense was ranked 23rd on the season, out of 23 teams, so they were the league's worst defense. The Cavs when they started making the playoffs had at the minimum an average defense, the Bulls were bad on defense and it was not because of Jordan.

I always want people to be clear about what they are implying when they make posts like this though, because unless there is a clear implication, nothing much is being said. Are you implying that if Jordan had passed more they would have taken a game vs the Celtics? They certainly wouldn't have won or made the series close despite anything he did. This is the same Celtics that swept the 2nd seed 57-25 Bucks in the ECF winning all but game 3 by double digits. The same Celtics that lost just one game on their way to the finals, game 4 vs the Hawks which required them shooting poorly and Nique dropping 37 points. The only other close game in the series had Nique scoring 38 points, they won the others by double digits. Looks like a lot of scoring from the star was the only thing that was even getting them close to losing before the finals. Jordan's 63 point game was the only close game in the series, the Bulls were destroyed in game 3 when Jordan had 19/9.

The only other scorer on the team:
Game 1: Woolridge - 11/20, 25 pts
Game 2: Woolriidge - 9/27, 24 pts
Game 3: Woolridge - 5/15, 14 pts

Jordan missed most of the regular season, and here were the averages of the guys who played the most minutes in the playoffs during the regular season vs playoffs:

Woolridge: 20.7 ppg / 21.0 ppg
Corzine: 9.6 ppg / 12.0 ppg
Oakley: 9.6 ppg / 10.0 ppg
Macy: 8.6 ppg / 4.0 ppg
Paxson: 5.3 ppg / 9.0 ppg
Banks: 10.9 ppg / 7.3 ppg

So Jordan was out most of the season, these guys were not scoring, did not show themselves as any sort of reliable option, their defense was trash, worst in the league, but if Jordan had decided "you know the best way to win more is to get Kyle Macy more shots", the Bulls would have done what exactly?

You might consider doing less inferring and just stick to what was actually said. If you find that inadequate or uninteresting, you can always choose not to reply.

That's fair, and your post made perfect sense until the last part which got a little bit confusing. There's certainly clarification needed on what this is supposed to imply:

"The question is would he even need to bother changing his approach to beat the Celtics? Michael seemed pretty convinced his teammates sucked and him scoring was their only chance to win; but I'm not so sure that team looks much worse than the early Cavs teams that James played on."

This reads like you are aiming to suggest that Jordan would have had a better chance of beating the Celtics or at least taking a game from them if he had changed his approach to be more like Lebron. Maybe you didn't, but that's what it seems like. So let's say you did, pitting two options against each other, winning by using teammates vs winning by going hero. The issue in this situation is that winning vs the Celtics was not likely to happen with either option. Michael didn't simply seem convinced that his teammates sucked and him scoring was their only chance to win, 50+ games without him during the regular season proved that this was true.

The other issue is that when we talk about Jordan not trusting teammates, what is being talked about is not that Jordan didn't pass the ball. Many people seem to incorrectly understand it as such, but what it is talking about is dominating possessions, being the decision maker all the time (obviously "all" is hyperbole), and also about not trusting teammates late in games to make plays and big shots.

Jordan came in passing the ball:
Rookie vs the Bucks in his first playoffs: 29.3 ppg / 8.5 apg | Game 1: 10 assists, Game 2: 12 assists
Rookie year: 7 apg over the last 20 games

He came in knowing how to pass and he was doing it. The focus is 1986 and scoring 63 points in 2OT, but the next season in the 1987 playoffs again vs Boston, he averaged 35.7 points, 6.0 apg in 42.9 mpg. That season was the season with 2nd year Oakley as the second option. The team was so desperate for offensive contribution that Oakley averaged 20 ppg in those 3 games taking 16.7 FGA/G and 8.0 FTA and shooting 39% FG.

Assists/100 possessions:
First post-season: Jordan 9.8 ast / Lebron 7.0 ast
First three post-seasons: Jordan 8.0 ast / Lebron 9.1 ast

This wasn't a situation where Jordan was not passing and using his teammates and Lebron was, but this seems to be how people are describing it. In fact they were more similar than many people realize.

What Phil did for Jordan was not make him less of a scorer or make some drastic change in him. Collins already got him scoring less and passing more. He averaged 33/8/8 in 88-89. In the 89 playoffs he averaged 7.6 apg and the last two losses vs the Pistons, he averaged 11.0 assists. He was willing to pass the ball. What Phil did for Jordan was to convince him to give up being so much of the decision maker with the ball.


There's a dominating of the ball that while it can and does work might not be the best (or easier) way for a specific team to do things. A players ability to adjust from that role even though they are capable of playing it and even winning with it is a good thing. Having a very specific system that forced it also helped, but really the biggest help was simply having better teammates. You can understand part of the difficulty for him because when they lost to the Pistons in 1990, you get to game 7, you had put up 47, 42 and 29 in the 3 wins. Jordan puts up 31/9, and then Grant shoots 3/17, Pippen shoots 1/10, Hodges shoots 3/13, Cartwright 3/9, Armstrong 1/8. So all these guys combine to shoot 19% FG, you won the two games where you dropped 40+, you're not going to come out of that feeling that the problem was you not trusting your teammates enough.

Maybe the bigger issue that happens is that some people also look at trusting teammates as simply just passing them the ball to shoot more often, and even though the idea of Jordan not being a player to do that isn't an accurate depiction of early Jordan, that's not the end of trusting teammates. It also includes trusting them to handle playmaking and decision making, and that can be difficult for players to do, and sure, sometimes they shouldn't do it based on their team. Jordan was not against passing such as the way some people have interpreted his career trajectory, but he was not confident in the playmaking abilities of his teammates (and rightly so in the beginning), and his attitude towards teammates not producing was as we all know, not very good.

Lebron for his career has never actually been truly challenged to give up controlling the ball and the flow of the game to any "weak" teammates. In fact if you look at his critics and even more so his haters, one of their critiques would be that "oh Lebron has has to control everything, he makes players all become role players" or whatever it is people say. There's some truth hidden in there, in that while he will make you win with him controlling the game, his style can limit some other player ability to contribute at their best or have large roles in the offense.

The difference between Lebron and Jordan coming into the league was not that Lebron didn't also dominate possessions, or that he wasn't dominating the decision making or that he trusted not so good teammates to be critical decision makers and playmakers, he didn't. The difference is that he was better at trusting teammates to make shots late in games (and a part of that is that from a scoring skill / confidence aspect, he was not the same as Jordan), and secondly that his reaction to underachieving teammates was not brash like Jordan. He has been more subtle and sure, passive aggressive in saying that his teammates suck/are not good enough or that the team needs more help. Jordan on the other hand was not so subtle.

LeBron's teams were always significantly worse without him including 9-18 by the Lakers in '18/'19.

James' style of play (whether in playoff-mode or just coasting) has always made those teams much better, so I have little doubt that if Jordan had been more willing to sacrifice for his teammates early in his career that the Bulls would have had more success.

Enough to beat the Celtics? Probably not, but that's just another in a string of hypothetical that can never be proven.

What I was actually trying to do was to explore what it would take for James to score 90, and I was agreeing that it would be unusual for James to score like that and would likely take very special circumstances. Given how he reads & reacts, though, it would be up to the Celtics and the defensive approach they ultimately took.

One factor would certainly be an opponent which was able to keep the score close in spite of James going on an early scoring binge and a fast pace would help too ... something that's rarely happened.

[JonFromVA]

I don't understand why people think it would be fair to take someone today - with the advantage of having access to the best trainers, nutritionists, supplements, doctors, etc. (especially with the amount they get paid and the investments teams make now) and just time travel that player back into the past. That's like playing the free version of COD Warzone and coming up against a squad that has their full loadout unlocked from the full game. It's an uneven playing field.

Of course it’s an uneven playing field... but the real curiosity of this thread is that there are people that argue that the greatest player of this era would be stymied and held in check by players from an era of lesser talent, skill, athleticism, training, diet, and health.

It’s like saying Wayne Gretzky would struggle vs players from the 50s or the modern day Yankees would have a difficult time with the 1927 version.

The point is if you time travel them back, you have to think how they would do without the advantages that living today would have. What kind of player would they be? OR when bringing a past player forward, they get the training, nutrition and most importantly scouting and time to adjust their game.

Saying today's players would always win is just a lazy argument

Lazy argument? All arguments on time traveling topics are nothing more and nothing less than preposterous.

There's very few rational ways to even try to test them.

What we do know and can easily demonstrate is that modern athletes do perform much better than their ancestors and they are measurably bigger and stronger. We also know the population and player pool has greatly expanded over time as well.

We can also examine what happens when there's a wide gap in level of competition.

So 90pts in a game? 90 pts on average?

Sure. Why not.

We can play all sorts of mind-games, we could even try to simulate it; but we can never know for sure. So, there is no wrong answer.

Sorry, guys.

[DavidSterned]

Why do you keep running away?

Hard to make it past the bloviation, but I assume the gist of what you're trying to say is that the prospect of having to actually watch pre mid-2000s basketball is kind of scary to you?

Do I really have to spell this out to you? You're in no position to make assumptions about what I have or haven't seen. You doing that instead of addressing my rebuttal is gaslighting. Stop trying to put yourself on a pedestal. If you know ****, demonstrate it.

Considering what you decided to cite as evidence, I'm going to assume you don't understand the nature of what you're arguing.

Relative to era stats will not answer how well a player will do in another era. This is a cross era comparison, you citing **** like o-rating and assists isn't relevant. The question wasn't, who was better relative to era, the question was, if we transport lebron to another era, how well would he do. Things like the three point shooting, more advanced defensive schemes, and the evolution of offensive schemes don't particularly care about anything you've cited.
.

You know why I haven't asked you if you watched the celtics play? Because I don't need to, I'm familiar enough with the subject that I can let my posts do the talking. You on the other hand?

did you ever watch the 1986 Celtics play basketball? Even a Youtubed game? If not, please stop pretending to know what you're talking about. It's actually embarrassing to read.

What part of my post was this a response to? Oh right, nothing, because have zero clue what you're talking about. Hence why you tried to use era-specfic stats for a cross-era comparison.

You actually suggested that a team comprised of Larry Bird, Bill Walton, Dennis Johnson, Danny Ainge, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish was not a prolific passing unit. That tells me everything. Enough of the charlatanism.

[Ambrose]

In a thread where the original quote was dumb, somehow the majority of the people in here managed to look ever more dumb. Absolutely unreal.

[Antinomy]

No he won't, because nobody gave sissy calls in 90s. Two dunks in a row, and the third time in the lane, he'll feel the pain with no call. That's the difference, that era was physical, manly calls... nowadays, every little star feels entitled to be protected by the referees even if somebody breathes close to them.

When you realize refs called way more fouls in the 80's...

Maybe he doesn’t realize that Jordan was the architect of superstar calls. Once the marketing machine started to ramp up for him, you weren’t allowed touch him.

[BigShaq34]

Again, STFU. Bird would smoke you and walk over the ashes without even noticing.

I don't know if Bird would smoke LeBron one-on-one, but he definitely would get his and the Celtics would leave LeBron's team in a heap.

Bird won his third consecutive MVP in 1986 and the Celtics that year were one of the best teams in NBA history. They were unreal.

He's talking about Bird smoking Mikal Bridges. Learn to read

[Klayforspicy]

Of course it’s an uneven playing field... but the real curiosity of this thread is that there are people that argue that the greatest player of this era would be stymied and held in check by players from an era of lesser talent, skill, athleticism, training, diet, and health.

It’s like saying Wayne Gretzky would struggle vs players from the 50s or the modern day Yankees would have a difficult time with the 1927 version.

The point is if you time travel them back, you have to think how they would do without the advantages that living today would have. What kind of player would they be? OR when bringing a past player forward, they get the training, nutrition and most importantly scouting and time to adjust their game.

Saying today's players would always win is just a lazy argument

Lazy argument? All arguments on time traveling topics are nothing more and nothing less than preposterous.

There's very few rational ways to even try to test them.

What we do know and can easily demonstrate is that modern athletes do perform much better than their ancestors and they are measurably bigger and stronger. We also know the population and player pool has greatly expanded over time as well.

We can also examine what happens when there's a wide gap in level of competition.

So 90pts in a game? 90 pts on average?

Sure. Why not.

We can play all sorts of mind-games, we could even try to simulate it; but we can never know for sure. So, there is no wrong answer.

Sorry, guys.

wait you're serious ?

[Slim Charlez]

Lol. These kids and their no caps. SMH.

[freethedevil]

Hard to make it past the bloviation, but I assume the gist of what you're trying to say is that the prospect of having to actually watch pre mid-2000s basketball is kind of scary to you?

Do I really have to spell this out to you? You're in no position to make assumptions about what I have or haven't seen. You doing that instead of addressing my rebuttal is gaslighting. Stop trying to put yourself on a pedestal. If you know ****, demonstrate it.

Considering what you decided to cite as evidence, I'm going to assume you don't understand the nature of what you're arguing.

Relative to era stats will not answer how well a player will do in another era. This is a cross era comparison, you citing **** like o-rating and assists isn't relevant. The question wasn't, who was better relative to era, the question was, if we transport lebron to another era, how well would he do. Things like the three point shooting, more advanced defensive schemes, and the evolution of offensive schemes don't particularly care about anything you've cited.
.

You know why I haven't asked you if you watched the celtics play? Because I don't need to, I'm familiar enough with the subject that I can let my posts do the talking. You on the other hand?

did you ever watch the 1986 Celtics play basketball? Even a Youtubed game? If not, please stop pretending to know what you're talking about. It's actually embarrassing to read.

What part of my post was this a response to? Oh right, nothing, because have zero clue what you're talking about. Hence why you tried to use era-specfic stats for a cross-era comparison.

You suggested Larry Bird, Bill Walton, Dennis Johnson, Danny Ainge, Kevin McHale, and Robert Parish was not a prolific passing unit

Citation needed.

(Pssh, there isn't one because I never said that. Not only are you clueless regarding basketball, but you also seem to struggle with reading.)

BTW, this is the 6th time you've failed to address anything in the post you responded to. This whole "general discussion" thing might be a bit much for someone like yourself.

[ItsMyPotPie]

Hopefully I live long enough and watch the league to the point where the idea for the then general consensus GOAT would score 100+ against 2017-2019 warriors pops up.

[Mulhollanddrive]

Bridges would still stay in the corner and do nothing.

[draftnightsuit]

90 is selling Lebron a little short. He would get to the basket and score on literally every possession.

[Marrrcuss]

The Celtics were going to sick Ainge, DJ and Bird on him. No way he survives that. He may have died...

[basketballRob]

Mikal better tighten up his takes, if he wants the Magic to sign him in 2022.

Sent from my SM-G950U using RealGM Forums mobile app

[_qubik]

Old dudes already retired, that brand of basketball, those great dudes are over, its just history and nostalgia now. And here we are putting fuel to the fire. Lebron is great today, he would be great at any time, any era, any skillset needed to play, this dude would succeed. The same can be said of all the guys on his level in history, or you all thinking MJ, Kareem, Duncan would be scrubs at a given time in basketball ?

[mademan]

I agree.

[Duke4life831]

Weird random bump. Also we need a new meme for the opposite of Old guy yells at clouds. Because the young guys talking about things in the past that they have no knowledge on is just as bad and annoying and seems to be happening more and more often (yes I know this thread is from a quote a year ago).

[Haldi]

Basketball, interestingly enough, seems to be the only athletic feat in which the athletes have not improved drastically after 30 years.

Fans of every other sport will accept this. Only basketball fans go through mental gymnastics to explain their nostalgic nonsense.

Completely agree, and just look at most peoples top 10 lists around here and its like 7-9 players from the first 30-40 years of the nba and maybe 2 players from the last 20, and only cause they have to put Lebron in there lol. And basketball is a very young sport too. Imagine thinking all the best players of a sport all came from the first 30-40 years of the sport and right around that time the sport really blows up worldwide, but every player that comes after just becomes worse at the sport lol.

[TheMartian]

Lebron probably would have swept the celtics.

That is so damn funny, IT'S NOT.

[NyKnicks1714]

I think if you took just about any player from 2021, with modern strength & conditioning and 35 years of basketball knowledge evolution at their backs, and air-dropped them into the NBA of 1986, they would perform shockingly well relative to what they are now.