OT: A different look at Jordan vs James for NBA Finals week
Very OT but it is NBA Finals week (should be a GREAT series) and I have been working on this new way to compare Jordan and James for a while, so I thought this would be a good time to get some input on it. I approached it a different way than game stats vs game stats and took a team approach. Open to all criticism on it, let me have it :P
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BymFZreT4B3OOGw0S09ydUNaSVE/view
I mean the Steph Curry comment was not my main point at all. Certainly could have been wrong, and still might be. But the idea didn't seem absurd to me, so I took a look at basketball-reference.com and found this:
Leaves out the incomplete seasons and the post-1st-retirement seasons. The trend reminds me of Harbaugh's "You get better at football by playing football."
Would have been real interesting to see what would have happened with MJ in today's game, when LeBron and Steph live off the chart, literally, to the right. WAY off, in Steph's case. The trend, extrapolated as is, certainly would put MJ in the elite category. But would it have continued? Who knows?
Jordan > LeBron
Discussion is just so worn out and exhausting.
And it is why the NBA is harder and harder to enjoy every passing day. It is NEVER a discussion about the best teams. It's ONLY about the best players.
And that's not just an NBA promotion. Have any discussion about any of the major sports with the general public. The NFL, NHL, MLB will always steer towards the teams, the NBA is just player v player.
The Spurs are one of the best modern-day NBA franchises, and one of the best franchises in history. No one EVER talks about them because they do not have quote "star" players that the league embraces.
They would promote Kawhi if he played in NYC. The NBA has always been biased toward large-market teams, the worst and most blatant such bias of any league.
Also, one reason the NBA promotes players more than other leagues is that basketball is the easiest sport for one guy to dominate both in the game and in the media. It has the fewest number of players in the game at a time, one guy can and often does play the entire game, there are no helmets to obscure individual players' faces, it's just set up to do well as an individual-focused league. Not saying that's right, but there are a lot of factors that drive it.
Able to promote Kawhi. He's just not the type of guy the NBA can push. He's quiet, humble, etc...
My point is less about what the league promotes. It's about how the general public looks at the NBA. And I really don't enjoy the discussions about player v player. It really diminishes the premise of sport.
If there is one thing that bothers me most about the NBA it has to be that a sub-4 seed rarely if ever beats a 1-seed in the playoffs. There is very little parity. The NBA playoffs are not all that interesting until the finals.
Oh yeah, and Jordan has the edge on LeBron. Not a big edge. LeBron is a great basketball player but Jordan excelled during the rough and tumble 1990's with several championships in hand. The rules favored big men back then. That's worth a lot in my book.
As a great NBA finals, but I won't forget that this was hands down one of the WORST playoffs I've seen, top to bottom, in ANY sport.
I appreciate the fact that it's not a crapshoot; professional basketball's the one US sport where the sorting process is so thorough and the sample size so big that I'm sure we end up with the best team, if there is one. (If anything, to me the problem is that it's so thorough that we end up with a whole lot of entirely meaningless regular season games.)
Baseball used to be like that. Most national leagues in soccer still are. But mostly we seem to prefer spectacle.
This hits the nail right on the head with NBA basketball.
Until the playoffs, it is not really even basketball; it's more of a scoring circus. Defense is optional. Passing incidental. People acutally think Kobe Bryant was a good basketball player, when he was just a scorer. He never would have won a title without his excellent supporting cast in LA.
Celtics v Lakers were about team, Pistons v Celtics, then Pistons v Lakers. Bulls started to change the dynamic because of Jordan, who, ironically, was a team player. By the time Kobe Bryant started to dominate, the NBA was unwatchable.
I will watch a little bit of the finals, but this is nothing compare to NCAA basketball march madness.
You should check out the WNBA - a lot of solid fundamentals and none of this superstar talk. Just some good old fashioned team basketball
Jordan.
I'm not sure how much it changes anything but Jordan played back when the first round was best of 5 and LeBron has played his entire career in a 7 game first rounf format. They are both great players and this topic will go on forever.
I've gotten to watch both MJ and LBJ in their primes, and I can tell you unequivocally that you can not compare the two!! They are completely different players that play the game in a completely different manner. There is however, no debate that LBJ does more overall than Jordan. There is also no debate that Jordan could score at will against anyone and is a better outside shooter.
This debate will rage on for decades, but if LeBron somehow wins these finals, and gets another MVP, in my opinion he will have surpassed Jordan. 7 straight finals.... some of the early teams had zero business being in the finals.
I guess I am the stat truther in this threat, but I must say again -- Lebron has a significantly higher 3 point percentage than Jordan (0.342 vs. 0.327).
Lebron also has the higher overall field goal percentage (0.501 vs. 0.497) but they are relatively close and Jordan was the way better free throw shooter (84% vs 74%).
Does it even matter who's putatively the better player? Jordan's legacy is beyond secure and any accolades LeBron's earned or will earn doesn't tarnish it. We'll never know how Jordan's Bulls would've fared against the 87 Lakers or how the 89 Pistons would've handled LeBron - and that's fine.
Unless you're arguing something patently stupid - like Aaron Craft would've beaten Larry Bird in a 3 pt shooint contest, these are arguements that everyone can win because there's no good way to definitely prove your case. Great players can only play against players in their era. If I had to guess, my bias would lean toward modern players being better able to adapt but that's only because they've had the benefit of learning from the legends that preceded them.
NBA has changed so much over the Jordan to LeBron time period, you might as well be comparing athletes from two different sports.
Jack Nicklaus vs. Willie Shoemaker.
Just be grateful that you've gotten to see (footage of) both players play.
Full disclosure: my bias is Jordan>LeBron. But not because Jordan is a "better player," which is meaningless as stated above. Just on basis of who would I rather watch.
From the late Frank DeFord, writing in 1998 on Michael Jordan, post the first threepeat:
"In the end, whenever the end, it wasn't so much the basketball. It was the beauty. It truly was a thing of beauty."
https://www.si.com/vault/1998/06/22/245207/michael-jordan-one-of-a-kind#
Brady.
The End