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is Lebron the best player since MJ?


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is he?  

10 members have voted

  1. 1. best player since MJ?

    • Shaq (3x Finals MVP, 4x Champ, 1x MVP)
      0
    • Duncan (3x Finals MVP, 5x champ, 2x MVP)
      5
    • Lebron (2x Finals MVP, 4x MVP)
      5


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Jordan is 6 for 6 in finals series, but you can't give Lebron negative points for getting to the finals and losing while Jordan lost several playoff series to the Celtics and Pistons before he could get to the finals. If Lebron wins this series (I still have my doubts) Lebron and Jordan will both have won 3 titles around the same age. Still a lot of years to go for Lebron.

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Jordan is 6 for 6 in finals series, but you can't give Lebron negative points for getting to the finals and losing while Jordan earlier in his career lost to Celtics and Pistons before he could get to the finals. If Lebron wins this series (I still have my doubts) LeBron and Jordan will both have won 3 titles around the same age.

 

True.  LeBron also seems to be doing to Curry what Jordan did to Barkley in '93, after Barkley was awarded the MVP thanks in part to voters growing tired of giving Jordan the award.  Jordan put up video game numbers in the '93 Finals against Barkley's Suns. 

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Yeah, I'm going to disagree with that. Bron lost to a terrible Mavs team and a Spurs team who could have played in the Senior Citizen league. And they should have lost twice as it took a miracle to beat them the year before. And this all after he went to form a super squad and was still 2-2 in the finals. This Warriors team is god awful. That Thunder team was o.k. but werent ready for the finals and couldnt stack up against Miami's big 3.

Jordan beat teams littered with HOF'ers in era where the league was competitive as hell. Bron has dominated an Eastern Conference that sends below .500 teams to the playoffs, yearly.

Plenty of greats on the teams you named too, not to mention that they all have better supporting casts than LeBron ever did. And that the championship thing is just tired. Babe Ruth and Jim Brown didn't win every year. Bonds and Manning either. Barkley and Stockton never won sh*t. This debate is never going to be a fair fight because Jordan is the best-marketed celebrity in the history of sports.

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This is offset by the fact that there were 90 players in the league then that wouldn't have had jobs now even with expansion because they were just plain not good enough. This is as much a factor of the bigger pool today (think how many more kids played basketball twenty years ago as compared to forty) as the higher average level of athleticism.

They wouldn't have jobs now because they'd be in their 70s.

 

The fact remains that without expansion, there would be 23 teams in the NBA today rather than 30.  And with 15 man rosters, that means the best 345 basketball players in the world would have have jobs rather than 450 there is now.  While there is a bigger pool, that still means there are less NBA jobs to fill so there will be a higher level of play with a better pool of NBA talent.

 

And we're not talking about 40 years ago, let's stick to the Bird-Magic era and do 30 years exactly, 1984-85 season. The Lakers beat the Celtics in the Finals.  The Lakers had 5 HOFers (Magic, Kareem, Worthy, McAdoo, Wilkes) on that team while Celtics had 4 HOFers (Bird, Parish, McHale, Johnson).  The Lakers beat the Nuggets in the WCFs, and the Nuggets had 2 HOFers (Issel, English) on that team.  The Celtis beat the Sixers in the EFCs, and the Sixers had 3 HOFers (Barkley, Dr. J, Malone).  

 

That's 14 HOFers in the conference finals in 1985.  How many HOFers will there be out of Rockets, Warriors, Cavs and Hawks from this year?

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The 80's was the best level of competition the nba ever had. The leagues talent got diluted heavily in 1989 with 4 expansion teams and 2 more in 1995. MJ and the bulls benefited from that.

 

right now i think the NBA is 1-3 teams too many 

 

 

but i wouldn't wanna see any team taken away   - just the Clippers or Kings to move to Seattle 

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 And that the championship thing is just tired. Babe Ruth and Jim Brown didn't win every year. Bonds and Manning either. Barkley and Stockton never won sh*t. This debate is never going to be a fair fight because Jordan is the best-marketed celebrity in the history of sports.

 

It's not tired at all in Basketball.  In football there are 53 players, and RB's don't touch the ball every possession, so of course Jim Brown didn't win much with those terrible Browns teams.  And RB's/QB's aren't on the field when the other team has the ball.  In baseball there are 25 players, and even then the Babe was on 7 championship teams, which is partly why he's considered the greatest who ever lived. 

 

In Basketball, with only 12 guys and the best playing 36+ (and sometimes nearly all 48) of the 48 minutes, making an impact both on offense and defense every single possession, championships matter more because of individual play than any other sport.  That's there has only been one team since the 1970's (the 2005 Pistons, who partly won because the league was very weak that year) that won a title without having a top 5 or so player on the planet.  All great teams are driven by superstars, but in no major sport is that more the case than basketball.

 

There's not much of an explanation for why Stockton and Malone never won a title together, except that they happened to hit their peak at the wrong time.  Those Jazz teams won 60+ games three times in the 1990's but 2 of those seasons were when Jordan's Bulls also were putting up 2 of the best seasons in NBA history.  Their best shot was in 1994-95 with Jordan playing baseball, but they lost in the 1st round to the Rockets in 5, back when the 1st round was still 5 games.

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This debate is never going to be a fair fight because Jordan is the best-marketed celebrity in the history of sports.

Dissonance is a helluva drug. It's like when Lebron flopped his way to his first ring and the jejune brigade started crying that Bill Lambier and Dennis Rodman and all those extreme guys never flopped their extreme ways to extreming to a title. Meanwhile Jordan hangs 63 in the playoffs against maybe the greatest team ever and Dallas has the MVP and future DPOY for their title and none of that counts for anything because who the **** knows. Basketball is the most naked of any sport and that still doesn't stop the majority of both quantitative and qualitative analyses from getting everything batsh*t wrong.

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This is offset by the fact that there were 90 players in the league then that wouldn't have had jobs now even with expansion because they were just plain not good enough. This is as much a factor of the bigger pool today (think how many more kids played basketball twenty years ago as compared to forty) as the higher average level of athleticism.

 

 

Isn't that like diminishing Butkus's accomplishments because if plucked directly from the 60's and placed on an NFL team today, he wouldn't even make the roster...

 

nvmind.. read that wrong, bigger pool today is a direct result of Magic/Bird/Jordan though

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