og15 wrote:JonFromVA wrote:
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.
