I'm just browsing this thread, but I have to say the first page is full of inaccuracies that make me question if the posters involved actually watched the NBA during Jordan's career.
Say what? Are you sure you're talking about the same Michael Jordan? MJ was a relentless force when it came to attacking the basket. He made his name initially by driving the lane in a league where there was super handchecking and no such thing as a flagrant. After getting beaten to a pulp physically by the Bad Boys, he became one of the first NBA players to embrace weight lifting and bulked up considerably.
The added bulk allowed him to continue to pound the lane and then become the greatest post-up guard of all time. He was the best post player in the NBA this side of Olajuwon, and that was in a time when defenders could keep their forearm in your back down in the post. He dominated people in the post regardless of size and was extremely durable as a player. His only major injury was a broken foot that caused him to miss most of his second season. He came back early from that injury against doctor's orders and went on to drop 63 and 48 on the Bird Celtics in the playoffs.
He was also a bird dog on defense who teamed with Pippen to form the "Doberman Defense" because both were long, physical athletes who were relentless on defense. He is not only the best player of all time but the best defensive two guard of all time and unlike Lebron in recent years never showed any cracks as far as getting roasted playing on-ball defense. Go look at last year's Finals and watch not only KD but Andre Iguodala make LBJ look like he was standing in cement. The same has happened at various times this season, as the Cavs have slid tremendously on defense, LBJ included.
Lebron can play any position on the floor. Can’t say that about MJ. I believe Lebron is the best ever.
This is patently false. LBJ has never played center for any extended minutes ever in his career. He may have gotten some run there in the 2015 Finals when GSW went to their ultra short death lineup, but Lebron has never played the 5 position with any regularity and would get destroyed by the good centers in the game. LBJ can log decent minutes at the 1-4 positions depending on lineups, and MJ could play the 1-3 positions. MJ played PG for an entire season with the Bulls under Doug Collins. You really think LBJ is going to match up with the Ewing/Olajuwon/Robinson/Shaq type centers that played during MJ's era? No way in hell.
Under today's rules Jordan would shoot 20 fts per game. He would also average 50-60 points per game...
This is absolutely true as far as the FTAs. Not sure about what he would ultimately average pointswise, but his already incredible numbers would be augmented substantially, both in terms of points and FG%. So many times in his era he'd miss a shot that in today's game would be an automatic FTA due to handchecking. People who didn't watch his era don't understand the impact of the physicality of the game. LBJ is big enough to withstand that beating, but if you let MJ play with today's no handcheck rules, he would dominate the league way worse than he already did. People try to talk about zone, yet nobody in the NBA plays zone. To play zone effectively, you have to commit full time like Boeheim at Syracuse. You don't just pop into it, and today's NBA teams don't run much zone at all. Either way, MJ had a much better jumper than LBJ, and he was better at attacking the rim. The tradeoff between no handchecking and the <5% of zone defense that gets played today would be a huge landslide in MJ's favor.
Lebron is probably better all around and a better post player but he's two inches taller and much heavier-which helps when scoring in paint/rebounding/blocking shots and so forth. Both were/are great athletes. Who would I want to have the ball with a few seconds on the clock? MJ easily.
LBJ is nowhere near the post player that MJ was. Lebron has been puzzling in terms of his inability to develop a dependable post game the way MJ and Kobe did. Kobe mimicked MJ's turnaround fadeaway and actually worked with Olajuwon to develop his low post game. LBJ for all his size has never made it a point to bully his way into being a dependable post player. He finally showed some glimpses when the Ws were forced to go ultra small in the 2015 Finals, but he doesn't have one particular move he can go to regularly like MJ could. MJ was the best post player in the NBA during his second threepeat with the exception of Olajuwon.
As for the last second shot in a Finals game...yeah that is no contest. Jordan is 3/3 on those while LBJ has yet to hit one.
MJ lost in the first round, LeBron never has. Also, MJ never won a playoff series without Scottie. Going 1-9 in playoff games before teaming up with another hall of famer.
This one really irritates me. Let's get some things straight with regard to losing in the first round. First off, LBJ missed the playoffs his first two seasons. MJ never missed the playoffs. Now guess what MJ got for taking his teams to the playoffs in a time when the East was the dominant conference? He got to play Larry Bird's Celtics twice...with no Grant, no Pippen. The 86 Celtics are considered by many to be the greatest NBA team of all time, and MJ put 63 and 48 on them while still losing.
In fact, here are the win totals of MJ's first round opponents that he lost to...
Rookie year: Bucks 59 wins
Second year: Celtics 67 wins NBA champs
Third year: Celtics 59 wins NBA champ runner-up
Now let's look at LBJ:
Rookie year: missed playoffs
Second year: missed playoffs
Third year: Wizards 42 wins
Fourth year: Wizards 41 wins
Fifth year: Wizards 43 wins
So Jordan, with nobody around him, took on one of the most legendary squads in NBA history not once but twice in those first round losses, and on average he went up against a 62-win team. Meanwhile, LBJ gave himself two additional years to have a roster built around him because he missed the damn playoffs, and when he got there into a much weaker Eastern Conference, he faced three nondescript Washington Wizard teams who were barely above .500 on average.
So when you want to run your mouth about losing in the first round, it's very important to compare apples to apples and provide the full context. You really think the guy that Larry Bird called "God dressed as Michael Jordan" would have any trouble playing a 42 win Wizards team in the playoffs? Come on, now.
It is interesting to note that the teams that knocked MJ out of the playoffs before he won were the Bird Celtics and the Bad Boys (and man would it be fun to watch the Bad Boys try to beat the Bulls with today's wussy no handchecking rules...good luck with that). Little bit different level of competition than what LBJ has feasted on in the Leastern Conference.
Also, Pippen was a shadow of himself when the Bulls started winning playoff series. In Pippen's first two seasons, the Bulls advanced to the second round and the ECF. His numbers were 10/5/2 and 13/7/4...he wasn't anywhere close to his HOF form when MJ started making deep playoff runs.
Here is my problem with only counting the finals in this thing and that being the only factor. It takes a team to win a championship not an individual. Lebron has done more with less. Other than when he was in Miami he had not really had a supporting crew. MJ consistently had more than what Lebron has dealt with. MJ played with HOF Lebron not so much.
This is absolutely ludicrous. I will give you the first Finals appearance, although the East sucked anyway so it wasn't like he had to beat a monster team. Still....the dude left to go to Miami to join forces with a guy who was already a Finals MVP in DWade and then another perennial All-Star in Bosh. He then filled in that roster with guys like Mike Miller and Ray Allen who went on to bail LBJ out of another Finals loss by hitting that miracle 3 pointer in the corner in Game 6 vs the Spurs. So he builds his own All Star team with a couple of HOFers on the roster who played huge roles in winning rings for him. Then, he goes to Cleveland and joins a top 10 player in the league who barring injury will be a HOFer in Kyrie Irving and a multiple All-Star and double-double machine in Kevin Love.
Now the kicker to all of this is that the East has absolutely sucked this whole time compared to Jordan's East. Up until this year, LBJ EASILY had the most talent of any team in the East from the time he went to Miami through last year with the Cavs. The East is so bad this year that the ECF is going to have one team missing its two superstar players in the Celtics and a Cavs team that turned its roster over at midseason.
Meanwhile, Jordan had to go up against Bird's Celtics and the freaking Bad Boys, both of whom were legendary squads. And did you realize that Horace Grant never even made an All-Star team with the Bulls? The whole going to the Finals every year argument totally ignores the lack of competition in the East now. We know from his Finals record that if LBJ played in the tougher conference like MJ did in his era that LBJ would have only made it to 3 Finals (and one of those was a gift when the NBA stepped in to suspend Draymond for hurting people's feelings too much when the Cavs were down 1-3).
If you think today's weak Eastern Conference compares in any way to what Jordan faced, then you just don't know the game. Today's NBA is like the early 90s NFL when the real Super Bowl was the 49ers-Cowboys in the NFC Championship.
But let me leave you with this thought about the Finals...how about the time Lebron took his handpicked superteam from Miami and then proceeded to choke against a heavy underdog in the Dallas Mavericks? To add insult to injury, Lebron got punked by role player Jason Jet Terry. Jet went to the media during the Finals and literally called out LBJ and dared Lebron to guard him. What happened? The Mavs went to a lineup that featured Jet and little JJ Barea, and Jet murdered Lebron while the Mavs won 4 games in a row for the title. This wasn't Kevin Durant or Steph Curry calling him out in the Finals...this was little role player Jason Terry.
Now ask yourself this....would any NBA player dare to call out Michael Jordan in the NBA Finals? The thought of it is so ridiculous. People were scared of Jordan. They knew he played his best on the brightest stage. LBJ actually had a game in that Mavs Finals where he scored 8 points. 8 points. When your team needs you most. Meanwhile MJ, had a Finals series where he AVERAGED 41 ppg en route to one of his 6 Finals MVP trophies. The dude averaged 41 points when you could handcheck...Seriously.
And it wasn't just the Mavs series. When the Heat lost to the Spurs in the Finals, they did so by the largest per game margin in NBA Finals history during that gentleman's sweep. 21 year old Kawhi Leonard won the MVP and outplayed LBJ head-to-head. The games were mostly blowouts by the half, so LBJ piled up some garbage stats in the second half of those games while the Spurs emptied the bench, but Kawhi outplayed him in front of the whole world. Imagine a 21 year old player trying to go head up with Michael Jordan in his prime. Yikes.
Anyway, hopefully this post goes through. I just saw a lot of inaccuracies being thrown around and wanted to give my two cents. LBJ is one of the all time greats and the best of his era, but it is comical to see people overreact to him beating up on tomato cans in the East. Now he gets to play a crippled Celtics team before he gets run out of the Finals. His fans will say that he had no shot against the superior talent of the West, but they will still give him all the credit for beating a crippled Celtics team with no talent in the ECF to make it to another Finals loss. I see people ask who is the best team Jordan beat in the Finals relative to the Ws, but who is the best team that LBJ has beaten in the East during this run?
