Lebron took a decent cavs team to a title over the all time most wins warriors and led every stat category. Verdict: not in his prime.

Holy crap imagine writing this post thinking it's smart or clever

Mullen didn’t understand what “lopsided” meant. I had to post the definition and explain the context. In excruciating, painful detail. I didn’t mean to trigger you as well, but there is nothing clever about posting definitions. It’s quite sad that I had to, really.

No

Hi Matt,

Certainly!



Okay, so the absolute best lolMatt can do here is claim he meant Jordan’s age 22 and 30 season, but that obviously makes no sense within the context of the “nearly two seasons” post as MJ returned late in his age 31 season. Still, super genius Matt here caught lying. A sad sight - Fox News level fraud here. Jordan astroturfers just can’t help it.

Interesting. The definition of lopsided has surely mutated since that original English version. Lopsided to me means a large margin....oh well.

I'm not an expert on English but I don't think Matt is correct here. The original definition is for actual physical disparity, lack of balance or unevenness, in size or appearance. When used metaphorically to refer to abstract figures, it denotes large disparity.

Why are we talking about the regular season? Top 5 VORP for each player in the post-season:

3.7 / 2.8
3.2 / 2.8
3.1 / 2.7
2.9 / 2.7
2.9 / 2.5

Lebron on the left obviously and not really close.

In case you try to dismiss this as an artifact of Lebron playing more or something, Top 5 by BPM:

18.2 / 14.3
14.0 / 13.8
13.1 / 12.8
11.0 / 10.9
11.0 / 9.6

Lebron on the left again and not that close.

In case you try to talk about how MJ's teams had more success in the post-season (which they didn't at their peak - if you only look at seasons where either was as good or better than MJ's 5th best season, they won the same number of titles and Lebron was more successful in seasons where they didn't title), here's how their teams did in the regular season at their regular season best:

12.0 / 11.6 (Lebron: 66-16, MJ: 47-35)
11.8 / 10.9 (Lebron: 58-24, MJ: 50-32)
10.1 / 10.1 (Lebron: 45-37, MJ: 55-27)
9.8 / 9.8 (Lebron: 66-16, MJ: 61-21)
8.9 / 9.5 (Lebron: 50-32, MJ: 57-25)

At Lebron's statistical best in the regular season, he led otherwise bad teams to win tons of games. At MJ's statistical best in the regular season, he put up good numbers, but his teams didn't do quite as well despite generally having considerably better support around him.

Also, if you're going to go with this peak thing, let's not forget that during MJ's second three-peat, he put up a mere 4.9 total VORP with an average of 8.0 BPM and a high of 2.2 VORP and 8.7 BPM. Which are great numbers, but simply not worthy of comparison to Lebron. Lebron's never had a playoff VORP as low as MJ's highest during his second three-peat in a season he made the finals. His playoff BPM was lower than MJ's best during this period exactly once in the past 11 years.

If you want to argue this peak thing, you can't rest your argument on post-peak MJ coasting to titles on a stacked team - you have to consider what their best accomplishments are at their best. Lebron beat a 73-9 warriors team with a concussed Kevin Love and an overrated Kyrie, both of whom were huge defensive liabilities as his sidekicks, becoming the first player in NBA history to lead all players in all five categories for an entire playoff series. His other two wins came against Duncan/Parker/Ginobili/Kawhi/Pop and Westbrook/Harden/Durant. Lebron has the top playoff VORP season on record and more impressively has 5 of the top 6 seasons in history. Nobody in the history of the game has even been all that close to as good as Lebron at his best.

It's also important to realize that despite Lebron already being substantially better than MJ in the post-season, this understates the difference between the two at their best. In elimination games, Lebron widens the gap further - his numbers improve substantially to a completely absurd super-human level, while MJ's look more like his numbers generally do. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader what their numbers look like but they are not close.

Man I've really got you foaming at the mouth. Jordan was quite close to his best at ages 22, 30, and 31. Did you really need to queue the autistic screeching because I said "absolute prime" instead of "near his prime"? Jordan is still ahead of LeBron in VORP if you sum their top 9 seasons. So obviously if you could somehow get Jordan to retroactively play those other 3 years he'd be further ahead. It wouldn't be surprising at all if he put up "top 5 season" numbers at those ages. It's not until you start including his Wizard years that LeBron eeks out an edge.

Did you really need to find a semi-typo (not even typo really; any idiot would know what I meant based on context), to feel like you one-upped me? Has it been that bad...? Sorry man I didn't mean to make you feel inadequate. That's Trump level spin you got going on there.

I've been over this in this very thread. VORP is not a good metric in post-season, because teams don't all play the same # of games so their minutes aren't consistent. For example, a player on a team that sweeps everyone will have FAR fewer minutes than someone on a team that goes to game 7 every game. Yet sweeping everyone is obviously the preferable outcome.

Also, sample size. We have more regular season games than post-season, and a less biased sample (not all teams from same conference).

Lol, that's exactly how you calculate VORP -- it includes minutes played so teams that play more games are going to have players with higher VORP, and this isn't necessarily a good thing. "an artifact"? what?

This is true, LeBron is ahead here. But you do realize you're looking at numbers accumulated from a ~15-20 game sample size for each post-season, right? And *the same 3 or 4 teams across all games*. Do you see a problem, statistically, with that? Google "bias" in statistics for a primer. And remember what everyone has said about quality of that conference for LeBron's whole career.

That's interesting. Because you know what? BPM is artificially inflated for players on teams with high efficiency differentials. See here (https://www.basketball-reference.com/about/bpm.html) under "The Team Summation". Meaning that since LeBron played on a better team in his top BPM years (vs. Jordan), his BPM numbers are artificially inflated higher through no contribution of his own; it's just because he was on a team with a better point differential. Given the 19 win difference in that 12.0 vs. 11.6 season, for example, without doing the explicit calculation, Jordan was almost certainly ahead in "raw" box numbers. [EDIT: Jesus. I just realized you flipped the numbers. This is VORP with MJ on the left and LeBron on the right. And the order of their records is reversed to make it look like LeBron had the higher numbers. Jordan is ALREADY ahead here, before you take into account the artificial BPM inflation by LeBron playing on a team with higher efficiency differential. This is nowhere close.)

Also, we probably shouldn't cherry pick so much that we're filtering out all championships won that weren't in a player's age 23-26 seasons. That's completely nonsensical. Are you even listening to yourself at this point? You are honest to god a cherry picking machine, and I've never seen anything like it. You can create any narrative you like with this nonsense.

Where do you get this "considerably better support" narrative? In MJ's ~best season, he had a 23 year old Pippen and Grant, yes, but their numbers were actually worse than LeBron's Mo Williams and Delonte West in his best season. They weren't that good yet. LeBron also played in an absolutely awful Eastern Conference while the Bulls had teams like the Pistons, Knicks, and Cavs (Bulls were a 6 seed that year). LeBron was accumulating his stats in a historically terrible conference. The Dwight Howard led Orlando (3 seed) won the East that year FFS. 2 seed was an old Boston team. This narrative that LeBron had far worse support is completely wrong. I feel like you're compensating for LeBron team hopping and creating superteams, yet still failing? That's the only explanation I can come up with.

Where are you getting those numbers and why are you only looking at playoffs (~20 game sample size each year)? That's completely nonsensical. As I said, playoffs only includes something like 15 to 20 games and they play against 4 teams total. It's like the most biased statistical sample possible. Although Jordan's playoff VORP in those seasons was 5.9 total (not 4.9 as you said), so I'm not even sure that's what you're doing.

LeBron's playoff VORP was higher (in part) b/c MJ and the Bulls completely dominated and swept teams, playing fewer games, so MJ got fewer minutes.

And this:

is such a jumbled mess of cherry picking I don't even know where to start. "VORP as low as MJ's highest during his second three-peat in a season he made the finals while using the bathroom 3 times and eating a pop-tart before the game". WTF man.

Yeah, and you can't filter out all of the failures either. Like LeBron losing to that 2011 Mavericks team. This is what's known as "cherry picking". You keep saying "stacked team" for MJ. DO YOU REALIZE LEBRON SPECIFICALLY WENT TO MIAMI TO FORM A SUPERTEAM OF 3 ALL-PROS. Like what? Just because they didn't perform up to expectation doesn't mean you can retroactively rewrite history. That just means they sucked relative to how good they should have been.

Yeah and a gimped Curry. GS's best player and (2 time reigning) MVP that year. Yeesh. Slightly more relevant than a mediocre Kevin Love head boo-boo.

You had me until that last sentence. Can you explain the implications of all this happening in a historically terrible Eastern Conference? And why when LeBron reaches the finals he has lost 6 out of 9 times? Do you think his stats may be a teensy bit inflated by playing relatively terrible playoff teams in ~75% or more of his playoff games? You know him playing terrible competition in the East is super consistent with him losing 6 out of 9 times once he reaches the finals, right?

Yeah man, Jordan was almost never on the team that was about to be eliminated. Because he never let his team get to that point. I'll leave it as an exercise what that does to you argument, particularly since LeBron played a lot of elimination games in a historically terrible conference.

Fine. Whatever. I pulled the definition from a freakin' dictionary. Jesus Christ. What I actually said was "more lopsided" anyway. Meaning if a player had played 3 extra seasons in or near his prime his numbers would likely be better overall. Like duh, that's the most obviously correct statement ever.

I'll tell you what. Just use whatever made-up definitions of words you want so you guys can try to nit-pick one incorrect (but not, actually) thing I've said, due to a maybe possible grammar error that's actually not an error if you use a dictionary. Compared to your avalanche of wrong I'm ok with that if it helps you sleep at night with your LeBron huggy-bear. I'm done with this semantic word nit-pickery and autistic screeching.

Irrelevant as Lebron is better on a rate-basis as well.

MJ played in an expansion era where the number of teams was far too high relative to the talent pool available at the time, which also explains why his opponents during his 6 titles were ridiculously weak. If we're going to adjust for things like this, Lebron comes out even further ahead and it's quite possible that MJ isn't second either.

Well then let's take the largest possible sample size - their whole careers. Looks like Lebron wins again.

What on earth are you rambling about? Either way, since I keep being told that MJ had so much more team success than Lebron, it sounds according to you argument that Lebron's raw numbers must be even better!

I didn't come up with this - you did.

So it sounds like a few championships MJ collected on stacked teams while being nowhere near his best don't matter for the purposes of determining who was better. So either way you cut it, Lebron wins. Lebron at his best was better than Jordan. Lebron's total body of work also easily eclipses Jordan's, unless you're fixated on this whole ring narrative, which according your own argument, is based on small sample size.

Well defense is a thing and you have to consider what the league looked like at the time.

Then what was this?

Are we talking about how they were at their best or not? I'd also take losing to the Mavs over minor league baseball. If you took out everything else, if there were two players, one whose career consisted entirely of the year where they took the team to the finals and lost to the Mavs and the other whose career consisted entirely of the year where they spent a year in minor league baseball, who had the better NBA career? Clearly the former right? So how does the season where Lebron moved to a new team, while still adjusting and still got the team to the NBA finals count against him? It's better than not having had the season at all, and his career minus that year is still miles ahead of MJ's career.

NBA is historically good right now. NBA was historically bad during MJ's time. This massively outweights whatever point you're trying to make here.

Nope, he's played historically elite opponents and his supporting cast, relative to the teams he's playing is historically poor. Literally twice he left the Cavs, after leading them to like the league's best record the first time and leading them to the finals the second time - and the team is instantly in the conversation for the worst team in the league. It doesn't count against Lebron's legacy (well to a reasonable person) that he took *that* team to the Finals and lost to the team that had the best record in league's history, then added the best player not named Lebron that wasn't already on the team.

Also, weren't you hanging your hat on how 100+ games Lebron played during his best playoff runs were supposed to be small sample size and biased or whatever? Now you're talking about his teams' records in substantially fewer games as some kind of argument in MJ's favor?

Well flat out lying about easily looked up facts don't help your case. I mean he got eliminated a bunch of times, how did he get eliminated without playing elimination games? Lebron's teams somehow have a much better record in elimination games too - I wonder if that has something to do with how they played.

Why do you have to look up such a simple word in a dictionary? Were you not aware previously that in regards to comparing quantities, most people use "lopsided" to refer to large disparities? Then you tried to play a gotcha with a dictionary definition. And now you're accusing other people of autistic screeching?

Most LOL part of Matt R's argument. You and I and all of us are on an irrelevant 2006 pokerforum arguing about whether MJ or Lebron is the GOAT because you love this autistic screeching.

You think you are going to get this with your girlfriend? You going to be the ******* that argue VORP with your bros?

You love it, you dirty little slut.

Matt R got absolutely destroyed this page, wow. Guy is up here writing novels about the dictionary definition of lopsided because he got caught lying. Then the next post he’s claiming autism for claiming he never said something - when his own words are quoted verbatim, he screeches autism for pointing out that he did indeed say that and it actually doesn’t matter?

He even claimed MJ was close to his best at age 30-31...when he literally played minor league baseball most of those years, and put up 17 games of bad shooting towards the end and losing to the Magic in the semifinals

You’d think on 5x the word volume of everyone else he’d be able to put up a better fight, but this is just pathetic....

I call it the juan Valdez rule. When you start throwing around autistic screeching and triggered non-ironically then you definitely lost.

"The Horace Grant GOAT supporting player but multiple All-Star, All-NBA Kevin Love & Chris Bosh TRASH" argument is so LeBron it hurts.

It's right up there with the "unbeatable Spurs team -- that never won back-to-back championships."

Imagine being excited to play with the supposed goat, only to be stabbed in the back by him



And Victor, you didn't answer me. Will you agree that:

1) Labronne has run hotter than the sun re:injuries in his career
2) Had he played in Jordan's era, Lebronne would have gotten destroyed by an Oakley/Laimbeer type while driving to the net

A lot of all time greats, mj included, have run extremely well in the injury category. MJ missed one season essentially early in his career but not much else other than his retirements.

PED use tends to make you run hot with injuries. But LeBron is still the GOAT and PED use doesn't disqualify him. Just like Bonds Serena and Lance are still the GOATS of their sports

If we teleport LeBron and he keeps 30 years worth of basketball/analytical/nutritional/PED knowledge that no one had back then -- he crushes the league, obviously.

Do you guys think he was on roids as a poor kid in akron?

It's about relative strength. The league was weaker back then. Transport love lebron Irving cavs back to Jordan's er and they crush.

Right. LeBron has had better teammates, but played against better competition. Whereas Jordan had worse teammates, but played worse competition.

I can agree with that.

Ho yeah right .....
they beat magic/Kareem Or the 80s Celtics or the 96+ bulls.....
Get real...

And when I hear MJ had huge help in his first 3 peat like candybar at seem to suggest or MJ in the east in his first 7 years had no competition vs him ....wow .

MJ never had a weak ass east conference like Lebron did and the proof pretty easy to show .

MJ never needed 7 games to win championship while he needed couple time 7 games series to pass through the east conference ...

Lebron dominate the east good for him , MJ dominate the league !
Difference between winning the finals ....