Jordan was a man inside basketball who made the Americans and any other country love basketball showing things that could be done on and off the court !!! I was left with Jordan because he is a man that made all Basque players who measure 3mtr in front of him were only centimeters in size !!!
I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see the conversation after Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals turn once again to the debate over whether LeBron James is as good as Michael Jordan was — or, more precisely, the loud insistence from a certain subset of NBA fans that LeBron certainly isn’t, and the persistent attempts of others to debunk their logic.
LeBron was awful in that game. He scored just 11 points, and none in the fourth quarter, as the Cavaliers let a 21-point lead evaporate. It was embarrassing, especially against a Celtics team without Isaiah Thomas. Jordan never scored fewer than 15 in a postseason game, never blew a 20-point postseason lead, and rarely lost playoff games after the player named “Isiah Thomas” stopped playing.
It’s true that Jordan had never performed so poorly. But it’s also true that Jordan never won 13 consecutive playoff games; he never even made it to 10. LeBron’s Game 3 dud was a blip of inconsistency at the end of a run that rivaled or surpassed the most consistent stretches of Jordan’s career. He’d scored 30 points in eight straight games, tying Jordan’s record, and though LeBron’s game may have been worse than Jordan’s worst, if he’d played well, it would have extended a streak that was as good as or better than Jordan’s best. And wait, since when is Game 3 of the Eastern Conference finals the determining factor in the GOAT discussion?
Turning each game of the postseason into an MJ vs. LeBron referendum is dumb. No single game in the middle of an incomplete playoff run could possibly turn the tide in either player’s favor. This was true when LeBron had 11 points; it will be true if he has 111 points in Game 1 of the Finals. (It could be the greatest performance anybody has ever seen, and the next day your Twitter timeline would still be flooded with images of MJ smoking a cigar with his six rings on.) And with the endless wait between the conference finals and the Finals, we got plenty of arguments about this, distracting us from what we should be thinking about: how freakin’ great the basketball between the Warriors and Cavaliers should be.
So let’s settle the score. In this post, we will attempt to provide a comprehensive answer to the MJ vs. LeBron debate, so that we can carry on and enjoy the basketball currently being played.
Rings
Michael Jordan won six championships. (Have you heard?) LeBron has won three. Three is not as many as six.
But of course, LeBron is still playing basketball, whereas MJ is retired. And he’s won three titles in the last five years. If the Cavs win this year, LeBron will have four rings at 32 years old. MJ didn’t win his fourth ring until he was 33.
But it’s not just that MJ won six titles. It’s that he went 6–0 in the Finals, whereas LeBron is currently 3–4.
Some see this as an argument for Jordan’s postseason clutchness. But it also shows that LeBron has been better at getting to the Finals, whereas Jordan often failed to reach them. This graph compares both players’ finishes in the standings throughout their careers:
Jordan is the best at finishing first, but also had a real knack for finishing somewhere in between ninth and 16th. Jordan never lost in the Finals, but LeBron never lost in the first round.
The answer here is unfinished. For now, James’s history of Finals losses make him look worse than Jordan. But if he finishes his career with six rings and a bunch of Finals losses as well, we shouldn’t celebrate MJ for losing before the Finals so frequently. For now, I think we have to agree: Both players are extremely good at basketball.
