Michael Jordan vs LeBron James

I'm here to talk to you about the greatness of Scottie Pippen.

A master defender and uniquely team-oriented for someone of his overall ability, Pippen does generally get his due.

But I'm not sure it's appreciated how perfectly complimentary he is for Jordan.

Typically when superstar players combine, there's plenty of negative overlap. Basically, if their value is predicated on holding the ball and being the primary scoring option, then there isn't really room for both of them to fully express themselves.

But the skill set Pippen brings fits more fluidly with other great players.

If you let Jordan have literally whichever player he wants, I'm not sure he could have picked anyone who elevates him more. Maybe David Robinson, or a different great big man? But I'm not sure. The list can't be that long.

And I think that's really important to stop and appreciate. It isn't that Pippen is vaguely serviceable and MJ can find a way to make it work or something. It's a lot closer to Jordan basically having the pick of the litter.

And then he gets Horace Grant or the great Dennis Rodman, and solid coaching from Phil Jackson.

If you're a budding superstar in the 1990s, can you really ask for more than that?

And then LeBron is kind of the exact opposite. It actually seems hard to dream up a career path that was less favorable to him.

Cleveland

He was the 1-man team during the first stretch of his career in Cleveland. And you can say "well he was developing during that time anyways".

But I think most people would tell you LeBron was uniquely "NBA ready" and was good enough to win early (imo, earlier than MJ). So you have to consider that, in a different situation, this is a really wide stretch of years where he could have been stacking championships.

I just know the LeBron James who beat the Pistons in '07 has some theoretical championships in him. And by playing in Cleveland he was reduced to basically 0% chance to realize any of them.

(MJ probably wasn't ever really winning championships in the 80s, even if similarly he was a 1-man team for a few years.)

Miami

So then there's the 4 years of "super team" in Miami.

And it's funny that people criticize him for this or act like it was a stacked deck. Really I think I'd take Pippen and Grant or Pippen and Rodman, kind of easily. (Especially in the context of it being a well coached team that had years to form together.) So LeBron's unfairly good team is basically what Jordan had the whole time.

People will dog him for the two losses during these years. But remember they were an underdog the year they beat the Thunder, and they were up against Duncan's Spurs twice. Winning 2 seems totally solid.

And this is where the whole "Jordan never lost in the finals thing" can be blinding. Ya, that's cool, and I think you can give style points to his legacy for it. (You can give style points for other reasons too, like holding his pose on that shot against the Utah Jazz.) But it doesn't mean this becomes the expectation of what other people should do and all other legacies are necessarily tarnished if they don't have this particular feature to them.

Just as a matter of science and probability and stuff, there's always a chance of losing in the finals. Jordan dodging that whammy might have more to do with luck and happenstance than that it's embedded into him that this is what Jordan does.

(For example, if he played in a uniquely weak Eastern Conference and had some of the bad and shaky teams that LeBron had, he would have finals losses.)

So you shouldn't use this as the benchmark just because Jordan's career happened to play out that way.

Winning 2 championships in 4 years is perfectly good.

Cleveland Part II

It's kind of 3 unique years:

• Love and Kyrie are injured and LeBron is the 1-man team again
• They're healthy and defeat a 73-win team in the finals
• Kevin Durant joins forces with the Warriors and it's kind of impossible for anyone else to win

Of these it's essentially one viable crack at a title.

Sure, you want to feel like they're superheroes and that they should overcome whatever challenge. But that's just not how it works. If there's a disproportionate amount of talent on the other side, it's just not reasonable to hold it against them if they aren't able to win.

(None of Jordan's wins were against a uniquely good collection of talent or done with a uniquely poor supporting cast. So it's not like there's some standard of this happening.)

And so with the 4 years in Miami, that makes a total of five seasons where you could say he's given a reasonably viable chance to win.

Which seems absurd, and especially when you consider that he was good early and has stayed good late. He should easily have at least 10-12 viable tries.

And within the wasted years, he's basically never under-performed or lost earlier than he absolutely had to (mixed in with a couple "whoa, he beat them?" type of things).

It seems just so hard to be any more dominant.

So "Jordan never lost in the finals". But consider LeBron has really only ever lost 2 playoff series of all the series where winning was a decently reasonable possibility. So besides blaming him for things that are outside of his control, he's every bit of the flawless consummate winner sort of thing that people think applies to Michael but for some reason not to LeBron.

The difference is mostly just the course they had and where the barriers were and how it gets displayed to us, rather than there are real reasons to think MJ had a better psychological edge or was a better winner or something.

Durant impact

I don't "blame" Durant for doing what he did.

At first I thought it was weird. Like so little to gain vs the downside of what happens if you go to Golden State and lose with them. I was surprised that he wanted that.

But then I started to get it. With LeBron at the height of his powers and Golden State so good, there wasn't much of any other path to a title. So he just wanted to technically have a ring to check that box and never have to worry about it again.

So Durant didn't do anything wrong but LeBron is still harmed by it. It's bad for him that the game theory of the NBA reduces to where great players will join forces until they're good enough.

(In Jordan's time, Stockton and Malone just tried to beat you. The culture wasn't to join forces. So being the best player in the league meant a bit more and would take you further.)

It's almost like LeBron is playing Mario Kart and getting hit with the blue shell and whatnot, whereas in Jordan's era if you were the best you could just run away with it.

Conclusion

So I mean, Jordan basically lowkey had a super team the whole time, and the rest of the league didn't do anything interesting to challenge them.

LeBron at the height of his powers has to deal with a totally different circumstance of the players joining forces and it always being a struggle.

While it's just conjecture to say who would have done what in the other's shoes, I do think it's clear that they had totally different paths and different windows of opportunity. And that you can't compare them outside of this context.

LeBron's resume is clearly worse, and I'm okay with being a little overly fixated on rings when it comes to declaring someone the GOAT (it's good to make them battle for it and make the games mean something). But it seems mostly outside of his control and impossible for it to not be worse. So to me it's just murky, and any subsequent title LeBron can add would strengthen his argument.

In my mind LeBron is better, but I'd like a 4th title before I put him in the hall of GOATs.

Analytics

It's more of an afterthought than a foundation to my case here. But also consider that LeBron plays in an era where advanced analytics are a thing.

LeBron's team can use analytics too, but if you're the best player then you'd prefer nobody was using them.

With analytics, now there's an outside factor that stretches the game into something more than just the player abilities. Now it also matters how good your team is at using analytics and forming strategies. It's kind of like if having the hottest cheerleaders improved your team's chances -- naturally now a superstar is less dominant and has less impact on the outcome than before, because now the game also includes this other thing.

More on Pippen

There just aren't that many Scottie Pippens.

I'm gonna make a really controversial statement: Pippen wins 6 championships more often than MJ does.

Not because he's better than Jordan. (I'm going outside the box but not off my rocker.)

MJ wins one championship more often than Pippen. MJ elevates a bad team into a pretty good team better than Pippen does. But I claim Pippen elevates a great team into an ATG GOAT type of team better than Jordan does.

There's just more room for him to fit.

Somewhere on the spectrum, when a team has enough talent, there comes a point where you prefer adding Pippen to adding Jordan. (At least, I claim this is so.)

Because of the negative overlap and how players compliment each other. Pippen is the rare puzzle piece that can effectively compliment other elite talent, and essentially is like the magic elixir that you need if you want to have one of those mysteriously good, how do you possibly beat them type of teams.

Any elite player who got Scottie Pippen was going to be a juggernaut, even if they wouldn't have necessarily done as much as MJ did with it.

So if you shuffle up all the players from the 90s and run every permutation of them playing together (and I guess you want to stay within the confines of whatever would fit in a salary cap), I feel like Pippen might be attached to more GOAT dynasty type of teams, just because of the way he meshes with elite talent.

(Jordan would win more championships overall, but Pippen would have more wildly good extreme outcomes.)

So even though Jordan is clearly the better player, it's a weird thing where it could actually be Pippen who's more responsible for the enigmatic sort of magical quality about the Bulls.

Tin Foil Hat

It's no secret that Jordan as we know him is a success of marketing. And he came at a time where the NBA probably felt they needed a little adrenaline boost, with the great teams of the 80s fading off and whatnot.

If you want someone to seem like the god and savior, what better sidekick for him than someone who lowkey is actually helping a bunch but will tend to not absorb much of the credit for it.

I'm gonna say it may not have been an accident that the Bulls got Scottie Pippen.