LeBron James has proven he’s definitively better than Michael Jordan in one specific way
Michael Jordan may be 6-0 in the Finals, but LeBron has a far better record than MJ against another opponent: Father Time.
Folks, it’s easy to get distracted, here at the end of time. The world is warming at an unsustainable clip, American politics writ large are totally fine and very normal, Timothee Chalamet is trying his hand at playing Dylan, there’s a lot to keep track of. So you could be forgiven for taking the incredible, machine-like consistency of Los Angeles Lakers’ forward LeBron James’ excellence for granted. In just a few weeks he’ll be 40, and just came off a career-high four straight triple-doubles. His Lakers (10-6) are currently sitting at a surprising fourth place in the Western Conference with his (former) podcast co-host leading the team, and most nights, for long stretches of gameplay, the veteran participating in his 22nd season is the reason why.
What LeBron is doing on a nightly basis in the NBA would be tremendous at any age. To do it well into middle age is literally unprecedented. But it’s not unprecedented to try. NBA history provides a relatively large sample size of stars aging in the league, but it’s often the case of long and slow decline. The skill sets begin to dull, the waistline begins to thicken, the attention wanes. Career starters are relegated to the bench. Thunderous in-game dunkers become back to the basket blackholes in the post. Wings with once unstoppable first steps plant themselves in the corner and settle for pull-ups, now accessories of the offense.
21 years ago, the season before LeBron entered the league, Michael Jordan played his final games for the Wizards in Washington, at the age of 40. Jordan played a respectable 82 games, but many of his averages reached historic lows, so he wisely decided it was time to walk away from the game. At SB Nation, we’re always looking for a novel angle, new and exciting ways to discuss and think about sports, so I had a completely original, wild pitch: Why not compare LeBron James, the greatest player of this generation, to Michael Jordan, the greatest player of the last generation? All the grouchy assholes can relax, the precious ring count hasn’t changed, and the legacy of J.J. Barea is alive and well. But to get specific, this is a chance to analyze the last two seasons for two men of a certain age, and potentially find a new way to explain how remarkable LeBron’s endless plateau of greatness has been.
Mileage
I suspect the Jordan apologist arguments against this angle will consist of something like: Sports science wasn’t where it is today. The way we think about basketball and the way it is played has completely changed, as it pertains to ideas like rest management. They’ll say the league has metastasized into a pastry display case where three-point flinging cupcakes sit nestled in wax paper behind a protective glass of offense-friendly rule changes.
I say that’s complete bullshit. LeBron’s obsession and complete dedication to the game — and his holistic, year-round training regimen — is a big part of the reason why said shift has occurred over the course of the past two decades. A part of being great, something we regularly celebrate Jordan for, is seeking extra-textual advantages you can exploit to win. LeBron has merely dedicated every waking moment, every bite of food and measured sip of wine over the last two-plus decades, not to mention millions of dollars, to extracting every single ounce of greatness possible from his body. It’s not so different from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the player who LeBron has just managed to wrest the all-time NBA scoring title from, who was into yoga and eating clean while his opponents were drinking beer in the locker room at halftime. It’s how, at a size that was once unsustainable in the NBA on your lower half, Kareem managed to get 19 incredible years out of his body- or two less (and counting) than LeBron- and we rightfully celebrate him for his innovation.
And setting that aside, well, aside, the actual game of basketball is far more brutal, draining, physical, and taxing minute-to-minute on the floor than it was in the 90s (please save that random Bill Laimbeer throwing an elbow clip for your Facebook uncle and check possessions per game stats compared to just 20 years ago). The league is deeper and more talented than it ever has been. Like LeBron, Jordan enjoyed a relatively blessed, injury-free career. Unlike LeBron, he retired twice, giving his body four and a half years of rest (I know, I know, minor league baseball), before signing to DC in 2001.
Today, there is more professional basketball for a star to participate in than there ever has been, and LeBron does it all. The playoffs are longer, with a play-in round and a best-of-seven first round. The Lakers won the first-ever In-Season Tournament, there’s FIBA and the Olympics every other offseason (LeBron just won his third gold medal, 20 years after playing in his first Olympics). In 2018, at 34, he led the league in minutes for the third time, a distinction Jordan only earned twice, in Chicago, as a 24 and 25-year-old. LeBron has had a few injury-shortened or injury-abbreviated seasons in LA, but so did Jordan, who broke his foot in ‘85 and came back from retirement the first time in ‘95, just in time to get waxed by the Magic. He also played 60 games for the Wizards in his first season before bowing out with a knee injury. In total, Jordan played 15 seasons — including the three aforementioned partial seasons — to LeBron’s 21.
Whatever advantages you could grant LeBron for stepping into history slightly after Jordan — and, I don’t know, actually caring about his body? Not staying up all night drinking scotch and smoking cigars, gambling and being venerated as a hero for playing through a hangover? — have to be offset by how above and beyond LeBron’s production has been. At the moment, LeBron has played 68,987 minutes (over 1.5 months!) with regular season and postseason combined. For his career, Jordan played 48,485. This gap doesn’t include LeBron’s significantly more active two decades of international play.
The minute counting matters because theoretically, the more you play at an advanced age, the greater the odds for declivity in production, or career-killing injury. You get slower, fatter, the jumpers start landing front rim, etc. The Jordan GOAT argument is based on his unprecedented multiple periods of peak performance, which lasted as long, if not longer than any player that had come before him (and yes, netted six rings). As we are about to discuss, if you’re taking in greatness as a holistic body of work, LeBron’s ability to elongate his peak, and show little to no noticeable decline in on-court performance over two decades, gives his case a sheer heft Jordan’s lacks, especially with both men now approaching the same physical age — if not time served — in their careers.
Individual Performance
To Jordan’s credit, in his final season he played 82 games, and averaged an incredible 37 minutes per contest, just a tick below his stunning 38-minute-a-game career average. Jordan’s 2002-2003 averages don’t look bad from afar either. The field goal attempts stay around the same levels he maintained through his second dynasty run, but the percentage drops, he gets to the line significantly less, he’s maintaining if not slightly above career levels for rebounds and assists (though way down on assists his final season), the real difference is points. A historic career scorer who never averaged less than 26.9 points per game for a full season immediately drops to 22.9 his first season with the Wizards, then down to 20 (again, to Jordan’s credit, that he has these two seasons on his permanent record and still retires with an average above 30 ppg, good for the greatest all time, is wild).
So Jordan is nowhere near his career numbers, but respectable for most NBA players. To dig into the stats, as someone who was watching these games live, what really changes — and the key issue that happens with almost all aging athletes across sports, even the great ones — is the consistency. Jordan simply became incapable of summoning night-in and night-out dominance. Against the Nets in a late January matchup in 2003, he had 8 points in 37 minutes, a previously inconceivable stat line for him. A few days later he dropped 45 on New Orleans. Somewhat counterintuitively, this was a piece of why the Jordan Wizards tenure was so captivating, getting those last glimpses of a talent that could still live up to his legacy of greatness while the majority of the time he was a shadow of his former self.
What’s stunning about analyzing LeBron’s stats north of 35 is how unexceptional they are in comparison to the rest of his body of work. Perhaps a part of this is because otherworldly scoring was never a part of his game and he’s always simply been God’s perfect all-around basketball player as a positionless distributor and board-getter as well as a finisher, but I’d argue maintaining that complete stat line is more taxing and impressive than reverting to a rote bucket.
Last season LeBron was barely off his career averages for points and rebounds, averaged one assist per game over his career average, and actually turned in the highest three-point percentage of his entire fucking career, while playing in 71 games and averaging 35 minutes a night. He seemingly knows his body on a cellular level, and methodically, expertly finds pockets to rest while on the floor playing. Those complaining that his defensive intensity has come at the expense of his offense have a valid point, as he can (and does) take entire defensive possessions off. To take him to task statistically — even if your mileage may vary with defensive rating, an imperfect stat — at his peak in Miami as a 27-year-old, LeBron’s defensive rating (estimate of points allowed per 100 possessions, an inexact science for sure) was 97. This early season, it’s 117. But, again, the Lakers have been a winning team with an average to slightly above-average team defense both of the last two seasons, statistically speaking.
So if you want to blow through all this, and make this debate that can get complicated and full of Devil’s Advocate bar arguments and asterisks incredibly simple, boil it down to the essential question of which 40-year-old was closer to the all-time great player they were at 24? Or, which 40-year-old would you want on your team? The answer is LeBron, hands down.
Team Success
In Michael Jordan’s two seasons as a Washington Wizard, the team was a combined 74-90, going 37-45 both years, finishing tenth in the East both seasons and missing the playoffs. He had joined a team — that he was the presiding GM for — that had gone 19-63 the prior year, good for an 18-game improvement. In LeBron’s last two seasons, the Lakers have gone 90-74, making the playoffs both years and ending both in the same manner, with deceptively competitive, but repetitive losses to the Denver Nuggets in which they were simply out-executed over and over again in the waning minutes of the fourth quarter. In his six seasons with the Lakers, they’ve been under .500 twice, in his first year with the team, and the disastrous 2021-2022 campaign.
But let’s open the aperture for a moment and consider what both players did, both for and to what will be in all likelihood the final franchises either plays for. I lived in Maryland and would occasionally attend Wizards games when Michael Jordan was there. It was aggravating because of the constant noise and attention being generated by a middling to bad team no one should logically care about. He rendered a team in the midst of a needed rebuild into a carnival act, a horror show about what the ravages of time and hedonistic pleasures can do to your rheumy eyes, filled-out jersey, and quick twitch reflexes.
I understand why the Wizards felt they had to welcome the distraction. For two years, they were a nightly national story. Interest and revenue skyrocketed, it’s a move you make 10/10 times. (For his part, Jordan looks back at the decision as a mistake and attributes it to a mixture of desire and professional diligence as a GM. “I was soothing an itch that I had, I also thought I was being innovative in my job by going down and evaluating the talent firsthand. I thought it would be a good idea to play against them, see what their tendencies were and what we were paying for.” Jordan told……Cigar Aficionado in 2005) But it’s hard to argue he had anything but a deleterious effect on the franchise.
For instance, I found an old clip of Jordan “coaching up” 2001 first pick Kwame Brown:
Jordan took over as Wizards GM beginning in January of 2000, before he joined the team as a player, and for the first year pulled what Knicks fans will immediately recognize as “A Phil Jackson”, ruling by fiat while ensconced far away, at home in Chicago. The calculation by owner Abe Pollin, and subsequent susceptible rubes who have given Jordan executive power and franchise ownerships, seems to be that he was a great player, so he must understand how to put together great teams, apparently without ever reading The Jordan Rules.
When he came out of retirement to put his name on the roster he had put together, the experiment went roughly as well as you might expect. After watching a three-year reign of terror in which Jordan surrounded himself with cronies and made dumb decision after dumb decision, ruling via fear, intimidation, and unchecked ego, Pollin said no thanks to Jordan allegedly wanting to play at least one more year, fired him from his position, and essentially cut him from the team, ending his career against his will, officially ending a sneak preview of Jordan’s reign of ineptitude as an executive and owner in Charlotte.
LeBron James has often been accused of hijacking his franchises and running them from the inside, using his power and blatant conflicts of interest to make disastrous long-term decisions. The latest of which is getting his son signed to a four-year deal by the Lakers, shockingly as a Klutch client, LeBron’s shadow agency run by his best friend while he still plays in the league. This impression is a classic Catch-22, the opposite of LeBron James’ standing on the floor. When playing, LeBron seemingly gets all the credit when something goes right, and none of the blame when something goes wrong. Off of it, though, critics are quick to blame “GM LeBron” when a hiring or trade made by one of his teams goes left. When they win a championship, you’ll never hear these same critics credit “GM LeBron” for organizational brilliance, but I digress.
The L.A.Bron experience has been a mixed bag for some. I’m sure he has detractors who wonder what might have been if the team had exercised some patience and allowed a young core of Julius Randle, Brandon Ingram, Kyle Kuzma, and others to simply mature and grow into a team around him, rather than perpetually operating in the most short-sighted, win-now mode possible, making one leveraged move after the next, trying to unmake a growing list of unfortunate decisions. But like Jordan, if LeBron wants to come to your team at virtually any age, you have to do it, and anyone who would tell you this experience hasn’t been an overall success is an idiot.
The Lakers won a title with LeBron at 36, to Jordan’s last title at 35 (I’ll briefly pause here to allow some of those same idiots to shout a meaningless asterisk for a bubble title out the window or under their breath on the train…………..we good?) which should be the beginning and end of the discussion, but if you want more, LeBron has made the Lakers consistently competitive and compelling. Even when not contending for a championship, he’s in pursuit of yet another impossible career milestone. It certainly hasn’t been without drama — the roster is in flux, and the coach is always on the chopping block, and there’s always another inscrutable Machiavellian emoji Tweet to debate — but at least from the outside, it appears to be a far more harmonious working environment than Jordan briefly transforming the MCI Center into Lord of the Flies. Any objective person would have to give the edge to old man LeBron here as well.
So what more can we say? At what point can the most hard-hearted, Jordan-loving LeBron skeptic can acknowledge LeBron has the edge here? When he’s doing this at 50? 100? What is the distinction we have to now make? Best career ever vs. best player? This isn’t rhetorical, please sound off in the comments and let us know how we can account for this increasing performance gap.
This entire exercise may very well be a case of stirring some shit to make a point we all agree on, but to me, the idea is that we have to keep reminding ourselves of the history being written nightly. We are watching something truly special and miraculous we may never see again in our lifetimes. It’s easy to assume with advances in science, player training, health and fitness, LeBron’s twilight years may become the new normal for some exceptional stars. But this sustained greatness into middle age also may never happen again.
And, as we’ve just definitively shown, it’s never happened before, either.