LeBron vs. Jordan

steveschneider wrote:

He nailed the one at :12

The one with :02 wasn't as easy a shot or that big of a choke job. It was a catch and shoot shot that almost went in.

Turtleneck wrote:

Completely disagree. While not physically imposing, Jordan intimidated players because of his talent combined with relentless effort. Jordan did not want to simply win, he wanted to win and rip your heart out at the same time. James is clearly a beast, but when it comes to killer instinct, he is perceived as soft.

SpartanDawgs265 wrote:

Put durant on mj's bulls, they win 6 titles.  MJ had the greatest team ever and MJ dick suckers act like he was the reason they won all the titles. Lebron proves he is the GOAT by winning with way less.  Jordan would have never led the cavs to the nba finals EVER.  Jordan dick suckers are so delusional now and act like he had zero flaws.  He was a terrible 3 point shooter, took way to many gambles on defense which killed the team and was a terrible team mate.

SpartanDawgs265 wrote:

Umm no, Jordan lost in the first round of the play offs before and choose to go suck dick at baseball for a reason. There was no sure fire thing he would win a title. He also sucked donkey balls at the end of his career. Even Kobe at least looked like a GOAT before he got injured, jordan sucked dick.  He could have won those titles like Dirk at the end of his career but he was undressed as a ball hog one trick pony who knocks up baby mommas for a living.  He is a piece of shit.  On top of being worse at basketball than Lebron, Jordan is a terrible human being.  Lebron held the decision which raised 2.5 million dollars for underprivileged kids and jordan was a coke head, gambling, professional thug

SpartanDawgs265 wrote:Jordan had a cramp game too in the playoffs where he sat out the whole third quarter, he also was one of the first people to start flopping.

SpartanDawgs265 wrote:put durant on mj's bulls, they win 6 titles.

SpartanDawgs265 wrote: proves he is the GOAT by winning with way less.

SpartanDawgs265 wrote: way to many gambles on defense which killed the team and was a terrible team mate.

Turtleneck wrote:

 Durant cannot win one with the very good he plays for right now.  




Last week you said Wade was the best SG in the history of the game. Your words. How is that less?     



Six championships, a legitimate dynasty, and toss in a record setting 72-10 season. He really killed his team.    

Narwhal wrote:

It was also nice of the NBA to change the game for Jordan. The NBA hated tPistons style and BOOM! isolation became the only game.

Punisher98 wrote:

Pretty good look with two seconds left. You can't just pick and choose what counts and what doesn't. He missed the shot he'd tell you himself he should've hit it.

SpartanDawgs265 wrote:

Yea a bum compared to the greatest ever, I would take durant over jordan. Jordan was a career 32 percent 3 point shooter and was a ball hog piece of shit.  Where did every one get he was an awesome shooter, lebron and durant are way better shooters and I would not hesitate to take durant over jordan (if lebron was not available) if I was starting a team. Put lebron  on mj's bulls, they would have won 15 titles. Jordan had trouble winning with future hall of famers for a long time and lebron is doing more with way less. Hell he is the leading rebounder on the team, if lebron had rodman there would be no point in even playing the game.

steveschneider wrote:

Good look? His body wasn't even facing the basket! It was a low percentage sideways shot.  

duffy munn wrote:


Jordan had a better supporting cast ? Really ? I guess you would trade Bosh, Wade and Ray Allen for Steve Kerr, Will Purdue and Horace Grant.

duffy munn wrote:


Jordan had a better supporting cast ? Really ? I guess you would trade Bosh, Wade and Ray Allen for Steve Kerr, Will Purdue and Horace Grant.

steveschneider wrote:

That's because you are talking out of the wazoo.

I won that debate.    

Punisher98 wrote:

Sounds good I really don't feel like debating trivial shit like this all day. I would take LeBron over Bird anyday of the week and I stand by it

steveschneider wrote:



That's because you are talking out of the wazoo.

I'll take that your surrender as I won the debate  

Punisher98 wrote:

You didn't win jack shit, its just a waste of time to argue with someone that thinks that Larry Bird is hands down better than Lebron. You're obviously an LBJ hater, which is fine, its just I'm not gonna change your mind if you can look at stats that clearly suggest LBJ is more effective and just completely ignore them. More points, more assists, more blocks. More MVP, same amount of titles. At 29.

"LeBron isn't tough" is your argument.  

Punisher98 wrote:

Pippen? Rodman? Kucoc? Armstrong?

Jordan had some help for sure

steveschneider wrote:

Oh so you are back to arguing again? I thought you threw in the towel like a wimp. I won deal with it.     

Turtleneck wrote:

Jordan had some help for sure, but he did not have anything like Wade for a running mate.

Punisher98 wrote:

I'd take Pippen over Wade for sure.

Turtleneck wrote:

I can't stand Wade, but he is much better than Pippen. No way I would take Pippen over Wade unless I didn't care about winning.

Other Teams Pursuing That wrote:This discussion will be silly by the time LeBron retires. He's the best. The talent is better now, the defense is better now, etc, etc. Old people won't let it die, but it will when LeBron retires.

Giant Moose wrote:
I know for me I'll always debate if LeBron truly is the best because of it taking a long time to win his first title and him choosing to do it with another team rather than the one that drafted him. Sure, he's a great talent and one of the best of all-time but he'll always have that hanging over his head.

Other Teams Pursuing That wrote:This discussion will be silly by the time LeBron retires. He's the best. The talent is better now, the defense is better now, etc, etc. Old people won't let it die, but it will when LeBron retires.

Bizarro Fletch wrote:

In what way is the defense better now?  NBA defenses have been totally neutered since the days when Jordan played.

NigelUno wrote:

The defense is better because the talent is better?

Bizarro Fletch wrote:

If that's actually a question, I would say no.

Punisher98 wrote:

Pippen? Rodman? Kucoc? Armstrong?

Jordan had some help for sure

StylesGShmooth wrote:Don't know why this debate continues to happen when Lebron's legacy isn't done being written.  Jordan was a better scorer and a better wing defender, Lebron's a better rebounder and can defend more positions a higher level.  Not sure about court vision and passing.  Lebron's is on display more but I think Jordan was just as good if not better he just chose to keep it more often.  Jordan and Kobe as well are beyond competitive to points of being serious assholes.  Lebron doesn't really have that in him, too nice of a guy that wants everyone to like him.  Only seems to go into the full on F-U mode when someone really taunts him or picks on him.  Kinda why Paul George told Lance to shut the **** up.  

One argument that always seems faulty to me, btw, is the fact that Jordan never loss in the Finals and Lebron did.  Kinda silly, because with that argument Lebron's resume would be boosted if he lost in the ECF to the Pistons & Bulls those years.  Hell, I consider Lebron dragging that pile of crap Cavaliers team to the Finals his greatest accomplishment.

Anyway, Jordan and it's not even a debate just yet.  Who knows in a few years though.

Also, yes, Defense is much much better now than in the past.

"I know that a lot of my fouls [against me] are not basketball plays." LeBron James said it in a clipped tone after Chicago snapped Miami's 27-game win streak Wednesday. James went on to cite a drive in which Kirk Hinrich tackled him and another possession on which Taj Gibson got him by the collar and yanked, only two of the incidents in which James was hit hard. Each was called a common foul, not a flagrant foul.

Late in the game, James responded with a hard shoulder on Carlos Boozer screen, correctly called a flagrant.

LeBron neglected to a mention a key, bizarre, fourth-quarter play in which Hinrich wrested the ball from Chris Bosh by grabbing his wrists and pulling the big man downward. That foul actually went uncalled, epitomizing a choppy, sloppy game, replete with ignored contact.

Hard fouls are common fouls
James' detractors, including Gibson, classified his comments as mere whining, of course. But Gibson admitted committing a hard foul, and added, "Every game we played them was a physical game. You're going to know things are like that; tough, hard fouls are going to be called. … You just try to slow him down. We're not trying to intentionally hurt him."

In fact, as NBA analysts and coaches have made clear, it's well known that the best way to stop the Heat is to get physical with them.

No one denies, with a straight face, that James was fouled hard, repeatedly, during the game. Mike Breen said, late in the game, "James has taken about four or five hard, hard hits tonight."

In fact, the main case made against LeBron is that this kind of thing happens all the time. As Jeff Van Gundy aptly noted during the game, when Gibson's foul was initially called a flagrant (then downgraded to a common foul), "That's a good fake help-up. That's, you hit him hard, and then, to avoid the flagrant foul, you go to help him up. That's not a flagrant foul. … It's not excessive. … That's not even a hard [call]. That's not even one that's close."

In other words, this is just ordinary basketball these days. Which is to say, hard fouls are common fouls in the supposedly soft modern game. This is "tackle basketball," as Henry Abbott has termed it on TrueHoop, the willingness to upend an opponent rather than cede the layup or dunk he earned from beating your defense.

It is intentional harm, inflicted on driving players, codified into strategy by successful coaches such as Tom Thibodeau. Rugged, physical play did not cease when the 1990s ended. In some ways, today's game is even more physical than what we witnessed back then, and the collisions involve bigger and stronger players.

Were the 1990s really rougher?
Our collective infatuation with Michael Jordan's golden era has spurred some mythology about toughness in those times. Jordan himself has passionately asserted that LeBron could not have thrived as he does now in an era that was not as "soft."

The problem with such assertions is that there isn't much evidence to support them.

One way to define the physicality of the game is the effectiveness of the defense. When people say the game is soft now, they are saying it was much harder to score then. It is often asserted that Jordan could easily score 40 or perhaps 45 or 50 points per game in today's "soft" game.

In 2010, Jordan himself told USA Today that he could have scored 100 (his career high was 69): "It's less physical [today] and the rules have changed, obviously. Based on these rules, if I had to play with my style of play, I'm pretty sure I would have fouled out or I would have been at the free throw line pretty often and I could have scored 100 points."

But overall, in fact, scoring was much easier for most of the 1990s, including Jordan's heyday. (And it was even easier in the 1980s.) Not only was the game played faster, a clear sign that there was relatively little resistance as players went up and down the court and to the basket, but teams also scored a lot more per possession. For instance, in 1992-93, known for a rough-and-tumble series between the Knicks and the Bulls, scoring was at 108.0 points per 100 possessions. This year, it's down to 105.8, which is actually an increase from last season.

Think about that -- when the team had the ball in the 1990s, it scored more than it does now.

That's despite the following: Offensive strategy has evolved in the mathematically correct direction, which is to shoot more 3s and space the floor better. Of course, that's in part because players are more afraid to enter the lane -- watch a Clippers game for the number of times Chris Paul shies away from going to the rim because he knows he'll get hit. He has admitted as much, despite being one of the toughest, most physical point guards we've ever seen.

But defenses are so fast, physical and prepared that, even with much improved outside shooting in the game these days (the 3-point percentage across the league is 35.9, as opposed to 32.0 percent in Jordan's first championship season), scoring is down.

In the 1990s, teams shot a much higher percentage from the field than they do now, and a higher percentage on 2-point baskets. If players were getting banged on every play, why was it so much easier for the skinnier players of that decade to score? Why was it so much easier then to get to the bucket and score on 2-point shots? And, if they were better shooters then, why is 3-point shooting better now?

So, just to be clear: The case some people are making is that less effective defense was also more physical. Can that be?

Without a doubt, there was plenty of rough play in the 1990s -- far too much, in fact, which is one reason that we still talk about those days as being so rough. The players remember, the coaches remember, and the fans remember. That's when we started to realize exactly how well the rough stuff worked.

The Detroit Pistons and New York Knicks famously employed the Jordan Rules, which were designed to intimidate and stymie MJ, and those "rules" worked sometimes, too -- that's one reason that Jordan remembers those years so distinctly.

The game often disintegrated and bogged down, particularly in those notorious Knicks games, and by the time the '90s ended, the game was slowing down considerably, with an excessive emphasis on defense (often physical defense). And there are plenty of highlight reels of hard fouls, nasty play and brawls spilling into the front rows.

But if the claim is that the 1990s overall were a lot more physical than the game today, the evidence is hard to find.

Who got more whistles than LeBron? MJ
Perhaps people mean that more rough play was permitted back then.

It doesn't appear so, at least according to the statistical evidence.

In fact, in some ways players were more protected by the refs then, when we look at the number of fouls called. In those days, basketball had the aural effect of Brazilian Carnival, with whistles constantly going off. Today, the average team earns fewer free throws per field goal attempt than in any season of the '80s or '90s. And overall, this season is on pace to set the new all-time NBA record for fewest free throws attempted.

Although some of that is related to offensive strategy today, keep in mind that offensive strategy is largely dictated by how the defense plays -- if players can't get to the basket, they will go less often. It's not as if today's athletes don't have the talent and athleticism to score at the rim. It's just that today's game doesn't permit as much of that.

And the notion that old-school refs were silent as stars got walloped is bogus. Through age 28, Jordan was granted more free throws than LeBron per game, even though LeBron plays more minutes. If James is indeed playing in a softer era and getting all the calls, it's not resulting in more freebies from the stripe. As Gibson and Van Gundy said, the treatment LeBron got Wednesday night was just ordinary stuff -- and not all of it was whistled.

When it comes to LeBron specifically, one of the complaints about him is that he bullies his way to the basket -- that he is too physical. And he's not the only one: Kobe Bryant, Dwyane Wade, Derrick Rose and Russell Westbrook are among the many perimeter players known for their punishing style. It's hard to square that with the claim that the game is less physical.

Furthermore, one way that the game is more physical now is because of the new rules allowing zone defense, which means more bigs are waiting to stop (or wallop) LeBron and anyone else who wants to go to the basket. In the '80s and '90s, Jordan didn't have to play against zones and zone-style defense, because that kind of defense was illegal. Sure, he absorbed some hard fouls here and there, but he also got to the basket all the time without getting hit -- enough that several highlight videos of his exploits were released before he even made the Finals.

Of course, Jordan's era had legalized handchecking, which was certainly a deterrent for would-be drivers. Handchecking was a significant physical tactic, one that helped a defense. And it's one of the ways that the '90s were more physical than the game today. But handchecking didn't do more to thwart offensive players than legalized zone (which includes the similar tactic of bigs coming out hard to bump and stop ball-handlers). We know that because the aforementioned numbers say so.

This is where someone suggests that the heightened physical play is obvious if you merely watch those old games. I would respond that you indeed should go back and watch.

What you'll find in those '90s "slugfests" might shock you. Yep, there are some hard fouls (just as there are today). But defensive communication is often weak; screens are dealt with poorly; and double-teams result in wide-open shots.

For an example, witness Penny Hardaway knifing through the Bulls for 38 points in the 1996 Eastern Conference finals. Skinny Penny does it with undeniable skill, but he also gets to the rim with ridiculous ease. Keep in mind, these are the 72-win Bulls we're talking about, the greatest team to ever play -- the team with the No. 1 defense in the league that season. Just imagine how easy it was to score on the Celtics that year as they were giving up 107.0 points per game, or the Vancouver Grizzlies, with Big Country Reeves manning the middle. Weakside defense was, indeed, weak.

Those Chicago Bulls teams were fantastic defenders. But they weren't especially physical. And neither was the era -- it was merely an era we say we like better, an era we increasingly mythologize the further we get from it. To extol the rugged virtues of the Jordan epoch often seems like a way to knock today's players, for whatever reasons. But it is analysis, or storytelling?

Athletes get bigger, faster and stronger with each passing year. Defenses would still rather hit an opponent than cede a dunk. LeBron is complaining about getting clobbered because it's actually happening. David Lee bloodied Dwight Howard's mouth Monday with an elbow without getting called for it -- it was so ordinary it barely happened.

This is what exists in the game today. Overall, modern basketball is almost certainly as physical, and probably a lot more physical, than it was in Jordan's day. Perhaps it's our collective memory that has gone a little soft and weak.