Quote:
Originally Posted by Victor
Just comparing the top players is not representative. Depending on the year, they may have been slightly better at times in the 90s.
But more important is the league average players and the league replacement level players. Can't really argue they were better in Jordans era.
No. No. And no. Jordan and LeBron aren't getting checked by "replacement level players" that come off the bench for 10-20 minutes a game. They're getting checked by the opponents best defender. As you can see by my listing of the most relevant players, the best players in the league in Jordan's best (statistical) year were better than in LeBron's best statistical year. Of course that's not a measurement of defense blah blah blah, so it's a little more complicated than that, but it immediately proves the claim that Jordan's era was much weaker (bacalotroll said "an order of magnitude" looool) completely wrong in the most clear and obvious way possible.
And anyway, let's do a corrected version of what you said. Rather than take the top guys (the ones mostly facing off against Jordan or LeBron), let's take the average starter. Surely you can at least agree Jordan and LeBron play the bulk of their minutes against starters and high minute reserves, right? Anyway:
Jordan's best statistical year 1987-88; 23 teams in the league; 115 starting positions available for players to fill.
LeBron's best statistical year 2008-09; 30 teams in the league; 150 starting positions available.
Player ability is correlated with minutes played, and BPM is as good of an advanced stat as any, and VORP incorporates both. So we'll use VORP.
The median starting player in 1987-88 would be around the 57-58th best player in the league. The median starting player in 2008-09 would be the 75th best player in the league
A sampling of the median starting player in Jordan's best statistical year (player around #57-58 in VORP):
Robert Parish, AC Green, Dennis Johnson, Rolando Blackman, Sleepy Floyd, Kevin Johnson, Tom Chambers, Terry Cummings.
LeBron (average starting player around #75 in total VORP):
36 year old Grant Hill, Leandro Barbosa, Amar'e Stoudamire, Paul Millsap, Mike Miller, Rafer Alston, John Salmons, Richard Jefferson, Brad Miller.
I mean I don't know for sure which team constructed of those players would be "better", as they are both entirely mediocre (as you would expect), but the 1987-88 group seems better to me. Then once you account for the fact the top of the league was better in those years (Hakeem, Magic, Bird, Barkley, Jordan), the competition Jordan faced was clearly superior.
So yes, I am going to argue the competition in '87-88 was better than in 2008-'09, because it obviously was for anyone that bothered to actually think about the right way to analyze that claim and look at the players.