Most people think Jordan is the GOAT so what are you even talking about?

It would be rather silly to hold losses against Lebron in his late 30s when he's far better than anyone else at the same ages in NBA history. That's not remotely up for debate. If you're gonna count it at all it actually moves him closer to Jordan not further away. Nice pretzel logic though again as per usual. "lebron is better at Jordan at this age (and it's not close) therefore he can't be the GOAT". Make that make sense. It's almost as good as "Lebron lost in the finals with a complete joke of a team he sucks".

At least as expected this year he lost to the -400 Nuggets which as you've taught us in the past is better than losing in the finals. Now if the Lakers really want to impress you next year they'll win 20 games since apparently that's the mark of a real juggernaut. It's what the real great players, Legends like Antione Jamison do.

Cowherd said the Lakers need another star, however the Lakers are the only team with 2 franchise players on 1 team.. Lebron's inferior brand of ball and weak fits cannot win with "normal" rosters of 1 franchise player like Jokic"s team, or Curry's, or MJ's.. Lebron"s weaker chemistry needs 3 franchise players (super-team) or 2 franchise players where it's arguable that he's 2nd option to AD.

lmao@thinking Chris Bosh and Kevin Love are franchise players.

Don't blame age because Lebron and AD averaged 28 each just like Lebron/Kyrie in 2017, or Lebron/Wade in 2011 - he lost with all of these elite performances by teammates.

So the question is how can Lebron lose with AD and Reaves playing amazing - 2 guys giving pippen production tonight and yet another loss like his entire career of losing with great teammate production.

The answer is brand of ball and chemistry... Basketball is a battle of attrition where a player's energy is FINITE - extra effort on one end takes away from capacity on the other end.. Lebron's ball-dominance doesn't win this attrition battle because it lets defenses rest, so they maintain offensive capacity.. Meanwhile, Lebron's team gets worn down by zippy ball movement and has less capacity for offense aa the game progresses, as we saw in this series.

You're looking at one stat. He's clearly not the player he was in 2017 or 2011.
And even with that one stat-

NBA team ppg average:
2024: 114.2
2017:105.6
2011:99.6

So obviously 28 ppg is worth more in 2011 and 2017 than it is today. He's fallen off a ton defensively since his prime. He's still a very good player but he's a long way from being the best player in the league like he was back then.

Somehow you don't realize that playing at a high level for longer than other players is a good thing for Lebron not a bad one. Much like losing in the first round instead of the finals, you think if he was a washed up cancerous scrub like Kobe 3 years ago that would be better for him. It's totally illogical.

The answer to your question- he's playing a better team with the best player in the league.
You want to talk about years he was favored to win the championship and didn't win (where he's still a dog to win them) then play stupid when Denver was -400 to win the series.

As for AD playing amazing- He disappeared in the second halves of game 2 and tonight- both 2 point last second losses on the road. Tonight due obviously due to injury which is no doubt also somehow Lebron's fault.

They were among the top 1st options in the game especially Love - he was basically Luka at the time but no sidekick like Brunson or Porzingas.. Both Bosh and Love were #3 in PER the year before joining Lebron.

Lebron took the top 3 players in the conference (Lebron, Wade, Bosh) and put them on 1 team - so no one cares about him beating DeRozan and Rose when he should be facing Wade and Bosh.

Btw, if Draymond was the best scorer on a team, the team would win zero games, while baby Love won 40 in the West with zero cast.. Ask 2019 Lebron how hard that is

hhahaha franchise players don't consistently win 20-30 games as the best player on their own team when they don't have much help.
they win 50-60 games and go to conference finals and finals.

kevin love and bosh franchise players hahaha. incredible just incredible.

Love won 40 once. he also won 17 and 26 as a full time starter. ask Lebron how hard that would be to do bc he could probably do it at 55 years old.

Btw Draymond is a glorified role player not a franchise player what the hell does he have to do with anything?

Of course he should have been facing Wade and Bosh with no help. That's what guys like you wanted for Lebron's entire career. No help for Lebron, every other star gets tons of help and you can say "see Lebron isn't that great he can't win a championship". Meanwhile your (lmao) #2 all time gets to be the second best player on his own team.



It's like having a 100 yard dash, making one guy start from 120 yards out and when he loses by 15 yards saying "derp derp he's so much slower than these other guys".

Nearly every young star loses a lot in their early years, so you're blaming Love for losing in his first few years when Lebron lost too and was only winning 45 games by Year 5 despite more help than Love had - Lebron entered the league with the East all-star center on his team and proceeded to be lottery for 2 years.

And again, if Jordan had the East all-star center and then received a HOF coach and an acquisition that was playing better than 1990 Pippen - he would obviously 3-peat with all that and yet Lebron had all this before entering his first playoff!!

Despite all this help, Lebron was only winning 45 games in Year 5 before receiving another all-star that spaced the floor and opened up Lebron's game... By Year 7, the Cavs had acquired a superior scorer than Pippen to play 3rd option, so they had more scoring options than the 1st three-peat Bulls, while also having better defensive ranking since 07' (long before Lebron was all-defense).

So Lebron was following the same organic path as Curry, MJ, Jokic and Giannis by having an organic juggernaut by Year 7 with a "normal" cast of 1 franchise player... These casts require chemistry but Lebron gave up on this chemistry learning curve in 2011 - he obtained better casts than the 1 franchise player model by getting 3 franchise players on 1 team (super-team), yet still mostly lost (Bron-ball).

Well look, maybe I'm a casual...but I felt the words from the man himself on his podcast recently say it all. 'I played like **** and we would have won if I had played better'. I think you are right to note that Dallas did a phenomenal job of mixing things up on him, daring him to lean into his relative weaknesses, etc. And they played out of their minds as a team.

But LeBron was not LeBron in the way he was for each of the next 7 years; and then once again in 2020 (and to an age limited extent last year and this year).

Yeah look I disagree on letting Rondo / Dwight go, at that point. Just run back what was working. Dwight and JaVale were providing ~25 strong minutes inside per game, and what they brought in instead (Gasol, Drummond, etc) struggled against Ayton the following playoffs.

Harrell was unlucky, sure.

Yeah look I'm not arguing this - it was an epically bad trade. 2022 was lost due to injury, but you can reasonably contend that the Lakers had to work way harder than they should have in the 2023 / 2024 regular season when LeBron / AD have been healthy, due to the trade. You can also look at what they have specifically lacked against Denver last year and this year and trace it back to that offseason.

We can't know how much influence he has had, absolutely. It will likely be a subject of contention over the next 20 years, with LeBron's narrative and counter narratives from others aired out across multiple documentaries and books.

Spot on. Cleveland was really badly run during his first stint, to the extent that winning a title was likely impossible, that is beyond debate at this point.

Miami were really well run, offered him more stability and organisational coherence than he enjoyed anywhere else. There were no excuses in Miami, and he went to four straight finals and won two titles, which LeBron would say should have been three. Great situation, great outcome.

The second Cleveland stint is where it got weird again. Some of it was bad luck - Love and Kyrie going down in 2015; some of it was unavoidable - Kyrie feeling he had to be the man elsewhere; and some of it was bad acquisitions or players hitting the wall earlier than expected - Isaiah Thomas being cooked after the injury or Love ending up a replacement level player come 2018.

But it's a fair point - the more you criticise "LeGM" the more you need to marvel at LeBron as a player.

He had it in Miami, and if he had stayed in Miami and worked through a rebuild under Riley and Spo I think it's interesting to speculate on whether he would have won more titles overall.

I think LeBron has probably been too quick to undermine coaches and change up supporting casts. I would surmise that every year he feels a need to see new faces and feeds off new energy in the locker room. And there's no way the Lakers failed to consult him about the Westbrook trade.

I thought this was a really reasonable treatment of the topic:



And remember that I believe LeBron's peak is right up there with MJ and has impactful stretches MJ never touched (2016 Finals, 2018 playoffs), largely because LeBron had way more to carry in those scenarios as you rightly point out.

Curry has four rings, same as LeBron, and was only Finals MVP for one of them.

Durant has two rings and two Finals MVP, two less than LeBron.

(And if you think GS 2016 - 2019 wasn't a super team I don't know what to tell you!)

Kobe has one more ring than LeBron, sure, but was only Finals MVP for two of them.

You just spew constant nonsense easily corrected with a quick google. It has been LeBron's era, and I know you know it too.

No, you're extremely uninformed if you think just because MJ is conventionally thought of the best player during that period that this implies a very high chance that MJ would rank as the best player according to this particular version of RAPM, especially given that this is based on predetermined 5-year periods.

Even just looking at this data set, Shaq's best is just 16th, Kobe's 26th, Wade's 40th and Harden's 51st. Kyle Korver is ahead of Shaq at 15th and KG (3rd and 13th), Dirk (7th and 12th) and Duncan (8th and 11th) are the only players other than Lebron to have more than 2 separate 5-year spans in the top 15. There's approximately zero chance that you'd be able to guess these results without having seen similar stats based on PBP data. It's extremely impressive that Lebron has the top two spots given how much this disagrees with pure box stats or conventional player rankings and also how no one else even has two top-10 spots. The other thing that's legitimately crazy is that these two 5-year stretches are also #1 and #2 in minutes played.

People have also looked at playoff #s and have concluded that Lebron appears to be better than MJ in terms of impact as well (I think people were able to get PBP for MJ's playoffs).

I would also disagree with this. MJ could very well come 3rd and still have an argument for the highest peak. You're putting way too much trust in stats that, if you understand how they are arrived at, all have a lot of flaws. RAPM is fundamentally not about how good you are as a basketball player, but rather an estimate of how much value you added in the circumstances you were put in.

We simply do not have the data to be reasonably certain that MJ was the clear best player in his era. While his team success is impressive, collinearity is a huge issue for discerning his individual impact versus that of Pippen and Phil Jackson and we already know how fragile individual stats are.

Again, I think you're really underestimating how hard it is to compare players and how Lebron due to a number of factors (playing in the PBP era, unprecedented longevity, unprecedented versatility, success across significant era changes, a large number of team contexts) stands alone in terms of how confident we can be about his impact.

Also, this is why longevity matters purely from an epistemological perspective even if all you cared about who truly was the best player at their best. It's very hard to be certain that you had truly GOAT-level peak or simply circumstances that maximized your value.

MJ's 96-97 and 97-98 season were in the play-by-play era. Keep in mind when you're looking at BPM and say, whoa MJ was amazing in 91 or whatever, this is statistically what's going on as well. We only have the play-by-play data from 96-97 season and forward and BPM is trying to extrapolate based on box stats what MJ might have looked like in a PBP era. That's really not that different from looking at MJ's actual play-by-play data (which does include two of his late prime seasons) and trying to figure out how good he must have been in his prime. These are both very loose approximations of what we're trying to understand.

Fwiw Murray destroys Jokic's goat case for same reason everyone else's is destroyed:

i.e. Murray & Porter with 24 ppg and "taking over" & isolation "that guy" game-winners is too much help compared to Jordan, who always carried the scoring & clutch load.

Everyone in history needed teammates to carry equal scoring loads and "take over", except MJ, who always won without elite producers or teammates "taking over".... only MJ took over for 6 chips - that's why he's goat.

Scoring isn't the only thing that matters, Jokic had a dominant series. Murray was pretty bad for most of the games but did hit 2 crazy game winners

Murray averaged 7.2 assists, so that's more than Pippen, while Porter Jr. and Gordon averaged 8 and 10 rebounds, which is more than Horace.

So Jokic had more help in literally every category, but I don't brag about his superior rebounding, passing or spacing help because those are role player categories - every team has players to handle these things - otoh, the stars on the top of the roster are the difference-makers because their production style dictates brand of ball and chemistry, which determines how much impact these role players have.

Btw, Lebron has many seasons where he was 3rd or 4th on his own team in rebounds because he had so many good rebounders like Haslem, Bosh, Love, Tristan, Varejao, Zydrunas, AD, and many, many more.. Meanwhile, all his sidekicks averaged more APG than Pippen (Wade, Kyrie, Westbrook, Rondo).

Ultimately, great scoring help like Murray that can "take over" is the only thing that every star in history needed, except the GOAT - everyone needed great-scoring help like Murray except Jordan.

So you can keep saying that scoring isn't the only thing that matters, except it's the only category where high levels requires stars - scoring is the "star" category, which is why MJ needed the least star help of anyone ever - he carried the scoring load far more than anyone ever did, so he could win with a bunch of defenders and hustlers - no one is remotely close to his level of carrying the scoring load (defeating max defensive attention).




Porter averaged 22.8 on 70% TS... and 8.4 RPG.... That's better than Pippen ever played and Porter Jr was Jokic's 3rd option, not his 2nd like pippen.

So again, everyone needed more help than MJ because MJ achieved goat scoring levels AND goat brand of ball simultaneously, aka he's the only guy to win titles as scoring champ or usage champ... (edit: shaq and kareem won titles as scoring champ in their peak seasons of 00' and 71', so their peak burden to win a ring was MJ's standard burden to win a r

Any team can play break-even .500 basketball so they're even through 3 quarters on average, at which point a goat closer like MJ wins every game in the 4th quarter.

That was the 90's Bulls model for every game and occasionally the current Nuggets have to resort to this approach when Jokic is being held to 22 points and 7 TO's like he was last night.

So Murray has shown us that the 90's Bulls were garbage team of role players that played break-even basketball without MJ (34-31 in 95' when the cat was out of the bag) and then MJ returned to win every game in the 4th and 3-peat again.

I can't believe you typed that many words to slurp LeBron for topping a stat you then explain isn't actually very good

well-oiled machine tho

Sure Lebron probably also felt he wasn't playing well. This is universal across sports, but when the other team gameplans against you well, even if you play exactly as expected based on your skills, you're not going to feel like you played well. Lebron was certainly frustrated that he couldn't dissect the Mavs' defense.

And Lebron did get better - the same strategy wouldn't have worked on him - and he's rarely had such poor spacing again. Another subtle change is that Lebron now understands that he has to statpad (or be aggressive) in situations where it doesn't make a big difference - i.e. if decisions are close in terms of basketball terms, maximizing stats and keeping himself more involved is the better meta move to keep people off his back.

None of this is to say Lebron was particularly bad from the standpoint of how his play impacted his team. Kobe put up worse overall stats and his team, who won 1 fewer game than the Heat in the regular season, was swept by the Mavs and no one said anything about how Kobe choked, because well, he's not Lebron and also he kept chucking inefficiently to put up enough points.

Spo's best regular season record without Lebron is 53-29, second best is 48-34. His overall playoff series record without Lebron is 9-8. I think he's an above average coach but there isn't much evidence that he's a great coach. Also if he's indeed a great coach, the Heat have not done a particular good job in terms of roster construction. With that said, that might still be better than what Lebron's had in Cleveland and LA overall.

Definitely, I assume this has to do with some kind of PTSD from his first Cavs stint, not to mention the Heat using amnesty on Miller, which did nothing from a basketball perspective and was entirely about saving on taxes, all after Lebron took a paycut to help the Heat build a better team around him. Lebron understood from that point that one-sided loyalty is unlikely to be reciprocated.

I don't think the criteria he's using are reasonable at all. For those that didn't watch, these were the criteria:

10 points for DPOY
1 point each for PPG/APG/RPG
10 points for All-defensive selection
Win Shares as points
PER as points
BPM as points
VORP as points
5 points for leading the league in points, rebounds or assists
5 points for All-Star Game MVP

I don't think I need to explain why this is bad, regardless of the results, right?

We done with the 2010’s

Video shows Lebron threatening a woman

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/smjDWXu7TJc


Westbrook could never get away with that

Again, you're misunderstanding the evidence here. The variance inherent in stats like this makes Lebron's dominance even more impressive, because the prior is already that he's the best player and his two non-overlapping 5-year spans are literally the top 2 (and given that these 2 are also the #1 and #2 in minutes, in terms of value, the gap is even larger). This is fairly strong evidence that Lebron's by far the best player. And different methodologies leading to similar conclusions (coach-adjusted, non-box informed, etc) add to the confidence. In other words, the evidence is consistent with him being a huge outlier even among the best players of his generation, rather than simply the best player. We do not have comparable evidence for MJ compared to his peers.

For example, a random World Series title is somewhat less impressive than a random NBA title simply because the variance is higher. But a baseball team that's completely crushed the regular season for multiple years in a row (thus our prior is that this is already the best team) and winning 3 titles in a row is more impressive than a similarly dominant NBA team that winning 3 titles in a row and is demonstrative of a larger gap between the team and the rest of the league because it's substantially harder to overcome the variance in baseball.

lmao@calling that a threat.
Shall we discuss what Kobe would do with women?

Kobe simply misperceived what he thought she wanted - he didn't blatantly threaten physical harm - and Lebron threatened violence because she was saying he was crying too much and doing the boo-hoo motion with her hands - I think Lebron had another lady thrown out of the game for that once.. So he really hates being called a crybaby and "soft".. that angers him more than losing or being a bricklayer for 4 decades

What's this nonsense about it being a goat achievement to win with 3 different teams?.. He mostly lost at every stop despite hand-picking the preseason favorite each time - he never had a stretch of mostly winning with any cast - each stop of mostly loses only adds to the now-massive sample size of him falling short of 3-peat or dynasty or 70 wins, aka goat-caliber stuff - he simply isn't capable of goat-caliber winning regardless of cast and his record of mostly losing at every stop coupled with worst-ever Finals record makes him the biggest loser of all-time... Oh, and he's a crybaby and soft (since that angers him)