Where does the guy that first dribbled between his legs go in the pantheon?

You're not good at this logic thing.

Einstein (or whoever) can both be the greatest mind of all time yet know less than an undergrad student today. That is how progress works.

I wonder , does a 85% free throw shooter in 1970 worst than one in 2020 ...

Yeah I’m not good because I try to apply your ideas ...

So in sports it’s different than , that’s what your saying ?

Food for thoughts.
Just to show how some ideas are disproportionate and I argue earlier that they were wrong
( Matt did good job at it as well ).
At the top , the skilled level doesn’t get better by a big margin even if decades separates them and NO, even if the bottom get better over time , the gap is so big between the number 1 player with the 400th it just doesn’t change anything .
The 400th best player in tennis today wouldn’t beat guys like Boris Becker in early 90 for example .

Team games ?
A guy called Jaromir Jagr was basically still scoring over 20 goals per season at 42-43 years old even if the league today supposedly much better overall than in 1990.

When you talk about guys like Jordan , LeBron , KAJ , Bird, ( same idea in hockey) for them to have more difficulty to excel takes a lot more than some more international players joining the game just to replace the worst bottom players of the league ...

There is a reason Matt arguments about record of track and field is right .
Improved at the elites level is extremely difficult and it takes more than TIME to do it .
And not forget , record in track and field can last a very long time even when the majority today uses steroids and still can’t beat some record .
That just showed you how difficult it is to improve at a certain level .
Diminishing return isn’t only a viable concept in economy....

Ok, sure. I agree.

Actually, that's precisely what changes things. Take out the worst players from a league and replace them with better players, and you have a stronger league (harder to dominate, everyone's stats will be worse).

This is painfully obvious when you look at high school sports, which have a wider range of skill levels. Top players will be much more dominant in high school than in the NBA because they are facing comparably weaker competition. In high school baseball, the best prospects are frequently hitting close to .500 or throwing no-hitters.

How much you are able to dominate is exactly proportional to how big the skill gap is between best and worst.

I agree once again, but you are missing my point if you think that I'm implying that.

Read what I wrote above closely.

No it doesnt because the elites players almost never play vs the bottom half of the league
(probably more the bottom tier but you know what I mean ) , whether it’s in hockey , nba ,etc .
Matt already made that point .
So even if the league got better because the bottom half went from C to B , the elites players still dominate any B players by a big margin since they basically almost never play vs the worst .

How many minutes you think a 4th line in hockey plays ?
Or the 8th - 10th player in the NBA plays ?

Yes the leagues are much harder for the majority because the gap gets more narrow but not for the elites and certainly not for the all time greats .

If what you say would be true , guys like LeBron , KAJ , MJ ( even the wizards years MJ pull some pretty good stats) and others in NBA wouldn’t be able to be the best in the leagues after so many years if they didn’t have already a huge gap with the bottom leagues they play in..

NBA isn't the NHL, friend.

Line shifts don't work the same.

Yes it might be more true for high school but high school is irrelevant because the level is way too weak still and even the development of the players aren’t even close of being fully develop.

yes being the greatest high school players is a great achievement but it as absolutely nothing comparable when you speak about the best leagues in the world with man, not kids .
There is a reason a lot of great high school talent don’t pop in the man worlds .

I agree but do you see a lot of the top nhl players playing half their time vs the 4th liner and worst defense pair and during power play ?
You know what I mean right ?

I do.

That's why I was trying to help.

And you have evidence of this? That the below average players are always matching up against other below average players? LOL that's not how reality works.
Good job missing the point as usual. I understand that English is not your first language, but you are doing a really poor job of properly following logic and understanding analogies.

I brought up high school to show the undeniable mathematical fact that facing a wider range of competition will inflate your stats and make you look better. This is universally true regardless of what league you are in.

Barkley's reasoning was about LeBron not being effective when the game was played dirty.

In a free-for-all LeBron and Shaq would easily be the 2 GOAT.

No I’m saying the elites don’t play much outside the core players of the NBA which imo is represented by around the top 250 players .
And the bottom 250 players ( 166 to 250) which represent the 3 best players from the bench , plays between 20-25 min pg.
Those gets better faster over time for sure but still I don’t think they would cause much trouble to any elite players now because they aren’t even on the starting line up .

So when you say the league is stronger because the NBA is more international than ever , ok I agree . Those bench players got better .
But I disagree that those bench player of today , which makes the NBA stronger on average, would give any more trouble for the elites players from the past like MJ , KAJ , Bird etc just because the bench players got better ....

I'm going to spell this out for you on the off chance you really can't see the flaw in your thinking. Our argument is that if two players are roughly as dominant twenty years apart, then the later player is probably better because the league has improved. You seem to think that the logical conclusion to this idea is that we must think Jokic is better than Shaq (which is obviously ridiculous and would therefore be a big problem with our theory), because they had similar BPMs. But the idea that Jokic is remotely as dominant now as Shaq was then is the only ludicrous part. Noone on the planet thinks Jokic is as dominant now as Shaq was then. It is a clear flaw in BPM. You know this, the choices of BPM, Shaq (underrated by BPM), and Jokic (overrated by BPM) are not a coincidence. Your entire argument is in complete bad faith.

Why exactly is Shaq so much more dominant that Jokic?

Because he's huge and intimidating? Jokic is much, much more skilled w/ a much higher IQ.

Jokic is the wrong guy to pick on with this bc people still don't realize what a point he is.

No lol, I hardly ever even watch NBA, basically everything I know is stats. I just don't think there is ANY one catch all stat that is perfectly accurate. BPM is one of the best ones and the best choice for this comparison (RPM is my personal favourite but we don't have historicals for that so it's useless here). But it's not perfect. I definitely think a BPM of say 5 now is in general better than a BPM of 5 twenty years ago. But I also think Shaq was better than Jokic. Not a contradiction because I think Shaq was underrted by his BPM and Jokic is overrated. Maybe I'm wrong on Jokic though as Dodger says and he really is that good. In which case, yea, he's probably better than Shaq ever was.

EDIT: You do bring up a good point about the improvement not being continuous and constant year on year. This is definitely true. When talking about specific years like in this instance, it IS possible that 2000 was a crazy outlier tough year for it's era and 2020 is a crazy outlier soft year, and that 2000 was actually tougher than 2020. This is within the realms of possibility, the league improvement is only a trend upwards not a strict rule. The trend is all you need though for the original discussion of MJ vs LeBron though, because we aren't talking about specific years there but two 10+ year periods of dominance.

Shaq was more impactful on both ends of the floor. He was a much more dangerous scorer, better defender (in his prime), and better rebounder. Jokic's playmaking isn't enough to make up the difference. Jokic's basketball IQ makes him a smart defender, but he lacks the athleticism to be a dominant rim protector like Shaq was. Shaq could only be stopped by double teams and fouls and even then he'd often get fouled and still score.

Right, and his value in fouling out your team plus putting other guys beyond himself at the line as a result of being in the penalty.

But with Jokic's shooting and ability to bring the ball up from the 5 it's like if you crossed peak Sabonis with Odom and Diaw or something. I could see Shaq being superior but:

I think is overstating it. Shaq always had a Penny, or a Kobe, or a Wade. Look at how many games Denver has been winning with lacking secondary pieces comparatively.

Prime Shaq and a pre-peak Kobe was enough to 3-peat. Prime Shaq with some decent shooters but no stars would be enough to contend. He's in the discussion for best center of all-time, along with Wilt, Russell, Kareem, and Olajuwon. Jokic is underrated by the general public but he's not on that level of impact and not as good as his BPM (4th in 2019 whereas he's closer to the 10th best player imo).

If free for all means street ball then the goat is obviously, without any doubt whatisever, allen iverson. With classic no blood no foul rules that guy can score on anyone. But lebron would be damn good too. Shaq is too fat, cant mive, would be on the wrong end of the court half the time.

Wait, wat?

Guys like Harrell and Barkley would have more value. Zion and Giannis. Athletic dudes that can score through contact. Bron obviously.

A guy my size is not the answer.

In that scenario the answer is Kareem. Real size plus the indefensible skyhook.

According to Charles Barkley LeBron is not even top 5

https://news.google.com/articles/CBM...S&ceid=US%3Aen