Some folks appear to forget that Lebron took cleveland to a championship.

Cleveland. Not some nice city people want to live in with a history of playing minimally decent basketball, rather a place where the river once caught on fire.

This is probably the best post in this entire thread.



DIAMOND SHARP WISDOM AT FULL DISPLAY!

Dude, you continue to have circular thinking. It's embarrassing you have around a million posts in this thread alone and all of them are this stupid.

Lebron could average a 100/50/50 on 90% TS% and if he loses it was, he wasn't good enough. But if Jordan for some reason wins and he struggles, he just did enough. Do you see how stupid this entire thing is? Winning is way more than how your best player plays. Lebron could have done more, sure, but even so the rest of his team, especially Wade played horribly. I'm unsure what that really has to do with how well Lebron played but here we are, again and again.

That line "mama there goes that man" is right on. I want my blankey. He is a filthy bad man.

These 3 lines of conversation tells me not to engage in Montrealcorp because he isn't intellectually honest at all and a bad faith arguer like twog.

Lol this thread started 8 years ago and LeBron has played nothing but phenomenal seasons since and won 2 championships, adding his careers biggest achievement (beating GS) in the process.

Don't pretend that MJ struggled like Lebron, specifically:


* MJ never averaged 22 on 36% like Lebron did in the 2007 Finals

* MJ never averaged 26 on 35% like Lebron in the 2008 ECSF

* MJ never averaged 17 ppg with historic choke like Lebron in the 2011 Finals

* MJ never averaged 22 ppg and still won the East like Lebron in 2014 ECF (Wade was equal-scoring partner)

* MJ never won a Finals while averaging 16 on 39% for the first 3 games and being a net negative overall (negative net rating), like Lebron in the 2013 Finals

* MJ never lost 3 fourth quarter leads and choked in the critical Game 4 OT like Lebron in the 2009 ECF

* MJ never lost to 1-star teams like Lebron in 2009 and 2011.. as the favorite no less

* MJ never passed to teammates for misses in the clutch like Lebron did countless times (to donyell marshall, kyle korver, etc) - Jordan's fearlessness was contagious, so his teammates always made their winning attempts, and he was finding them in more opportune spots than the predictable drive-and-kick strategy that Lebron employs at the end of games (and throughout the game)..

Heck, the Suns overtly doubled Jordan in the backcourt in 93', which allowed Paxson to be open, and then Utah overtly doubled Jordan in the 97' Finals (Jordan planned it), so Kerr got an easy look.. Ultimately, Jordan was fearless so teammates were fearless and therefore sought their "Joooordan moment".




Lebron and Jordan didn't lose under the same circumstances - Lebron loses far more and much worse, and also with high seeds - it's night and day:


* Lebron lost when expected to win or when it was even money in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2014

* Lebron was even money in 2014 and everyone expected a great series, but he lost by record amount - that would never happen to Jordan

* Lebron lost 5 times with a 1 or 2 seed (Jordan never) - these losses include record losses, so veteran Lebron lost with top seeds by more than rookie Jordan lost with 8 seeds in (85-87').

* Lebron's production was erased by his matchup (KD) as he lost by near-record amount in 2017 despite having the Curry-killer (a comparable cast)




Why can't Lebron beat top teams when his sidekick plays poorly, and Jordan could?

Jordan won the 1996 Finals with Pippen averaging 15 on 34% and letting Schrempf/Kemp dominate - Wade never played that badly

Ultimately, Lebron never beat a top 5 SRS team with poor scoring and efficiency from a sidekick, so he has zero carry-jobs against good teams in 2 decades of playing.

Btw, Jordan also won the 1998 Finals with Rodman averaging 4/8 off the bench and Pippen basically missing the last 2 games (15 on 41% overall).. Jordan did this by setting the record with 30 clutch points (last 5 within 5) - if Lebron did HALF of that in the 2009 ECF, he would've won as expected, and the same goes for many other series that he lost because he couldn't dominate in crunch time (10' ECSF, 11' Finals, and he shouldn't need bailout in the 13' Finals).

Similarly, Jordan won the 97' and 98' ECF against top 5 SRS teams with nothing from Pippen, and he beat the #1 SRS team in 1989 with nothing from Pippen.




Wade was great in the 2014 ECF and helped carry Lebron to the victory - both Wade and Lebron averaged about 21 ppg in that series and were equal partners.. Wade continued his all-star performance through 2016 and was a star in those playoffs.

But he was abnormally bad in the 14' Finals because the Spurs were exploiting the bad fit between Lebron and Wade by leaving them open for spot-ups when the other guy drove - this is documented fact - SB Nation documented the Spurs' strategy here.
.

Alright.
Ill bet you 10 - 1 you won’t see any post by me where this is true in all the pages you can back on ....

Even more , I’ll ask you to give me 1$ for every 5 posts you can find by me where I don’t blame at all LeBron losing the warriors !
Maybe that would stop saying nonsense about me ......
Want take the bet ?

So instead of insult why don’t use words to explain your thought if it is so stupid .
Should be easy to counter .....

Im not the one downgrading Duncan to uplift LeBron to win a ring last year .
Omg is 35 he won a ring mvp vs rags .
I mean hell , kareem won the freakin mvp final in 1985 vs prime Bird with Celtics in 1985 at 37 years old .

These argents by 3ball could only be made by a man with an extremely small penis

Giannis, Wilt, and Shaq are physical forces that match or exceed Lebron

and there's other guys

Wade was the Shaq of 6'4" guys, and that was enough to be 1st option over 11' Lebron in the Playoffs .. and "Air" Jordan is the "Shaq" of 6'6" guys...

or peak Hakeem showed distinct superiority to Shaq, Robinson and Ewing, so he's a superior physical force to Lebron

Btw, people ask why kemp didn't have better stats - it's because he was doing that ****with a guard physique - Kemp was 6'10" and strong enough to average 20/10 in the 90's despite a guard physique - he'd be a goat talent as a guard in today's game; the 90's no-spacing era simply suppressed his talent..

lol ....
LeBron average stats career .
27/7/7

LeBron play like a regular season performance in the finals , nothing more =
Goat performance in a losing situation ?

Ilmao.

Jordan average 43/6/5 in a losing series , bah he couldn’t win anything without pippen , entering the league at 7ppg .

If it was a goat performance in 2014 , what would you call LeBron performance losing vs the warriors in
2015 35/13/8
2017 33/12/10
2018 34/8/10

Super goat like ?
Are you saying 2014 and those loses vs the warriors are similar performance ?

So dirk in 2011 played as great as a goat because he had similar stats than LeBron when he beat him in 2011?

It’s all good if you think so , I guess I just have a higher prerequisite to state a goat performance , shrug .

You guys seem to throw goat performances like pop corn ...

a monster. eyes in the back of his head.

I really can’t parse your argument much here...it’s not organized, is all over the place and full of straw men and irrelevant statements.

I think the key takeaway here is that you massively overrate bulk scoring and PPG. Candybar has touched on this but if your team is going to lose, hogging the ball and producing more inefficient offense to score points isn’t productive.

MJ’s best season scoring wise he averaged 37.1 PPG on 56 TS% in 1986. He shot a ton, the team went 40-42, offense was 12th out of 23 teams, got swept in round 1.

First ring year, he averaged 31 PPG on 60 TS% in 1991. The team won 61 games, had the best offense in the league, and won a ring.

MJ reduced his scoring load, got more efficient, improved his supporting cast and got a legit coach, and somehow won despite reducing his scoring significantly. Somehow people can’t figure this out and think spamming points is meaningful.

Hell, even in the Celtics series you reference, when MJ averaged 43 PPG on 58 TS%, his net rating for the series was -4 (115 oRTG and 119 dRTG) compared to the team’s -13 (108 oRTG and 121 dRTG). That’s very good and a heavy effect (+9 difference), but still losing basketball on an absolute basis. Compare that to LeBron in the 2014 Finals, despite averaging a full 15 ppg less, put up a +4 net rating (120 oRTG and 116 dRTG) compared to the team’s -16 (105 oRTG and 121 dRTG). LeBron had a much more significant impact that series and contributed far more to winning basketball than MJ did getting swept in the first round, yet because it was in the Finals and he “only” averaged 28/8/4 on insane efficiency, these are weak numbers?

I mean you truly can’t reason with these people. Sort by PPG and “wins” with absolutely no nuance or context whatsoever, unless it was an MJ loss and somehow equivocating the Bad Boy Pistons to the superteam Warriors. The Warriors would literally beat the “Bad Boys” by 75 points if they tried the entire game.

Your main issue is you don’t understand basketball statistics. Dirk averaged 26/9/2 on 53 TS% in the 2011 Finals, and basically had a neutral net rating. His performance was orders of magnitude worse than LeBron’s 2014 Finals performance.

MJ’s career regular statistics (excluding Wizards years)

31.5/6.3/5.4 on 58 TS%, 10.2 BPM

Would you like to look up how many playoff series Jordan had where he roughly equaled or in some of cases, did far worse than these stats? His team lost a bunch of times of course but also won a lot of the time, including in the Finals. Conversely, LeBron’s teams virtually never win when he even slightly underperforms his benchmark and in lots of cases lose despite him going nuclear. Why do you think that is?

Lebron beating a 2nd super team this year in the Nets would finally cut off the remaining testicle of MJ slurpers.

Montrealcorp.

Did you finish college?

If you wrote arguments this bad back in university they fail you and say you are not being coherent in your arguments. Do we need to explain to you why you are embarrassing yourself with these statements?

It’s because of LeBron’s play style - his offenses have very very poor ball movement because he’s so ball dominant. So when the ball dominant point forward has a mediocre game, or when a good defense in the playoffs game plans for that, they lose.

Conversely, Jordan was a hyper efficient volume scorer that could both score on ball and off ball. He could play more fluidly, and the ways he could score and put pressure on the defense was far more versatile. When he got the ball in his hands he could make a quick move with one or two dribbles and score. He didn’t stop the ball movement and let the defense recover. That’s both why he carried his team yet also opened up his teammates’ scoring opportunities. That’s why he 3 peated twice over the course of 8 years which is just absurd, while LeBron loses on superteams far more than you would expect if the made up narrative that “he had bad teammates” was even remotely true.

This has the MJ-stans that used to talk about how MJ led great offenses completely stumped but I think this is probably the most significant contribution to the MJ-Lebron debate in quite some time. So if you follow the broader MJ-Lebron debate among people who know what they are talking about, there's a relatively broad consensus that Lebron's a better floor raiser, but people have doubts about Lebron's offense scaling next to better teammates because Lebron's best offenses weren't quite as good relative to the league as MJ's best offenses. And this has been attributed to MJ having more value off-ball (relative to the era). But if you disaggregate this into components that these players can influence significantly, that theory completely falls apart:

We can also examine their extended peak. Both players started consistently having teams that were "contenders" starting from their age 24 season and pretty much every single one of these teams other than the Lakers in 19 was good enough to contend, so let's look at this by age:

TS% Rank/# of Teams in the League for MJ, Lebron
Age 24: 11/23, 4/30
Age 25: 5/25, 3/30
Age 26: 6/27, 2/30
Age 27: 3/27, 4/30
Age 28: 5/27, 1/30
Age 29: 12/27, 1/30
Age 30: 14/27 (w/o MJ), 4/30
Age 31: 12/27 (mostly w/o MJ), 4/30
Age 32: 8/29, 3/30
Age 33: 7/29, 3/30
Age 34: 19/29, 20/30
Age 35: DNP, 9/30

This idea that MJ's offense scales better next to good teammates and that's why he's led top offenses becomes extremely hard to justify. The part that is hard to scale is scoring efficiency - entirely different components like offensive rebounding and scoring efficiency obviously scale when you put those together. And it's important to note neither player played in a way that contributed significantly to offensive rebounding and if you had to differentiate, of course Lebron is a substantially better rebounder, offensive or otherwise.

So the area of offense that MJ's volume scoring had the most impact on should be overall scoring efficiency, yet MJ's teams generally weren't elite from the standpoint of scoring efficiency - he's been on just 3 top-5 offenses in terms of scoring efficiency, despite fewer teams back in his era (note the league expansion however). Meanwhile Lebron led top-4 offense 10 years straight across all kinds of teams. So this largely comes down to MJ's teammates being substantially better at offensive rebounding than Lebron's teammates relative to the league. Which obviously scales next to volume scoring. Lebron's teammates were as good at offensive rebounding as MJ's, Lebron would have like 8-10 league-leading offenses.

It seems like you guys are totally missing the point about Robert Parish. Color me shocked.

TienTien (and others) are saying LeBron will definitely pass MJ in the GOAT argument sometime in the near future because of his LONGEVITY. Ie he’s played for more seasons even tho his peak is lower, and will likely break the scoring record, for example.

Literally no one thinks Parish is an all time great. He was really good and a hall of famer, who played a lot of seasons.

Because of his longevity however, he has passed Larry Bird in most meaningful pure counting statistical categories. Do you guys think Parish is greater all time than Bird? No of course not, because Parish isn’t named LeBron James so you won’t apply your reasoning consistently because you’re all non-self aware LeBron Stanzombies.

In before yeah but LeBron carried his teammates when he won and he played against GOAT competition and it’s his teammates fault when he lost and omg I can’t believe Jordan fanz are so biased and say Jordan played against good competition like the 80’s Celtics and Lakers, and Sonics and Suns and Jazz and peak Shaq Magic and on and on and on nowhere near as good as the Jeff Teague Hawks. It’s like Night of the Living LeStans in here lol.

If Matt R. walked into any NBA coaching meeting before playing against LeBron and said:

How fast would they throw him out the door for complete stupidity?

Good defenses that game planned against LeBron and lost:

- 2007 Pistons - #5 defense
- 2011 Bulls - #1 defense
- 2012 Celtics - #2 defense
- 2013 Indiana - #1 defense
- 2013 Spurs - #3 defense
- 2014 Indiana - #1 defense
- 2015 Hawks - #5 defense
- 2016 Hawks - #2 defense
- 2016 Warriors - #6 defense
- 2018 Raptors - #5 defense
- 2018 Celtics - #2 defense


All these elite coaches: Thibs / Popovich / Steve Kerr / Doc Rivers / Brad Stevens could have just called up Matt R. and Matt R. would have delivered the secret:


Time to bow out. It's time to retire the keyboard.

Mediocre LeBron games in 2020 playoffs where his team won:

Game 2 vs Portland 10/6/6
Game 4 vs Houston 16/15/9
Game 1 vs Denver 15/6/12

This is just 2020 playoffs. Need me to embarrass you further and find other games where LeBron had mediocre games and his team won? Or will you pull the old goalpost shift and say "look, LeBron played mediocre and his team won, evidence that LeBron sucks!"


Matt R. I truly believe you are able to make better arguments than twog / 3ball, but lately I actually think you are intellectually incapable.

TienTien lol of course not every good defense will win every time. They have to score as well and they won’t play well every single series. I’m talking about on average over the course of a career you ****ing buffoon.

TienTien, tell me more about how when LeBron breaks the career scoring record he becomes GOAT but Jordan fans sort by ppg and that upsets you. “Braaaaaains I need braaaains to fuel my LeStan argumentsssss”. Is the LeStan zombie virus transmitted when u guys bite each other or is it transmitted via your NBA 2k Xbox simulations sponsored by Doritos?

My new favorite part of this thread is that Tien doesn’t understand averages over the course of an 18 year career and thinks that in individual series a player or team will always play at expectation and there is no variation in play quality or strategy.

This is the peak of his reasoning ability, yet he also insults others’ intelligence while keeping a straight face behind his cheesy poof stained keyboard and he doesn’t see the irony. Talk about projection and insecurity. You make LeBron look like an alpha when he whines about not getting any respect and crowning himself the GOAT.