MJ was forced to take a lot of tough shots because look at the stats of his teammates - they were low-producers that frequently didn't have it going, so this required Jordan to "take over" and carry the offense on many possessions.

This is common knowledge and also intuitive - MJ"s crazy shot highlight reel is another demonstration of his weak help.

Furthermore, the only real decision is to decide NOT to dominate the ball and allow the team to run a ball movement offense instead (allow the team to be coached) - knowing how to execute the best brand of ball, chemistry, teammate development, high assist teams and #1 offenses - that's "high IQ"... Otoh, finding the open man is just vision, which gets conflated with IQ (understanding and executing the best brand of ball and chemistry that elevates teammates)

If young Jordan wasn't a "willing passer", then why did 80's Jordan average equal assists to young Lebron in the regular season and more assists in the playoffs, while teammates grew by leaps and bounds alongside him?

Lebron has no history of teammate development, while Jordan has a tremendous history of teammate development during the 80's, while averaging the same assists as Lebron in the regular season and more in the playoffs.

It's a completely false narrative that young Jordan wasn't a "willing passer" - this misperception began in the 80's when the media needed a reason for why Jordan didn't win like Bird and Magic, without acknowledging their respective casts.. The narrative took off from there but everyone actually knew that Jordan was a great passer by 89' when the 26-year Jordan was a 1st-time point guard and instantly the league's best PG - that's goat talent for the game of basketball.

Are you too dumb to answer this question yourself?

Yeah perhaps it's much harder to score at the rim now with substantially more talented rim protectors around, who knows.

These don't look legitimate - they literally don't add up to MJ's actual verified stats:

MJ's 3P FG% during those 3 seasons: .338.
MJ's 3P FG% according to shot-tracking in a post from a deleted account: .383

These games also imply that MJ averaged 24.8 FGA per game, when he actually averaged 23.0. I'm going to assume that either some MJ fan made stuff up or a lot of games are available online specifically due to MJ's performance (who the hell cares about random Bulls games from the 90's otherwise), which adds a ton of bias here.

Also looks like people found that his tracking was way off when it comes things like on/off:

https://forums.realgm.com/boards/vie...6762#p75906762

So I'm guessing the guy is no bueno when it comes to tracking things accurately (or youtube games create way too much of a bias) which makes this whole data set rather suspect.

In particular, he has MJ at 629/847 at the rim, but just 679/1021 for at the rim + short mid-range (I assume this is within 10 feet). So did MJ really just shoot 50/174 or .287 from 3-10 feet in the literal physical prime of his career? I guess that's not impossible especially now that we've seen twog's GIFs and what they imply about MJ's tendency to take some terrible shots from this distance. But I have more respect for MJ than that and I'm fairly sure (assuming this is a legitimate effort) that this is due to the tracker being biased towards thinking that misses were not at the rim and the makes were at the rim.

This whole thing is quite funny given twog's proclamation:

MJ career 3-10 (in the tracking era) FG%: .377
Ant career 3-10 FG%: .382
MJ 3-10 at the peak of his powers according to the data set quoted by twog: .287

Just for fun:

Lebron career 3-10 FG%: .428
Lebron 3-10 FG at age 35+ (i.e. post MJ 2nd retirement age): .460

Again, I don't think it should really be that controversial that modern players legitimately have so many advantages and access to so much information that allow them being far more skilled earlier in life than MJ and his generation. Tons of good high school players nowadays have literally mastered lots of moves that were practically unheard of during MJ's time. This isn't unique to basketball - high school baseball players nowadays literally have access to training and knowledge (pitching, swinging mechanics, pitch design, etc) that weren't available to the professionals in the 90's.

This does not diminish MJ's greatness - it's just how the sport has evolved.

The only real sense in which this affects the GOAT debate is that it makes Lebron somehow still being competitive with the new generation while nearing 40 even more impressive. Because his generation didn't really benefit from this skill revolution. But Lebron is already the GOAT without taking any of this into account, so this is just icing on the cake.