Posted by technomaster:

Jordan never made it to the finals when he was 22. Thus... Lebron is clearly better. Not really fair - Jordan missed a lot of time w/ a broken foot that year. Even then, Jordan did not reach the NBA finals until 1991 (age 27--- already a player in his prime).

This is one of the main reasons why I hate these type of discussions. People will start throwing stats and calculations and other insignificant stuff into the fray which has absolutely no bearings upon the matter at hand.

Open your eyes. And you can clearly see the difference in the eras. The worst team in that era would prolly make the EC playoffs in this era.

My God, they barely have true centers in this era. Please, please, please.

STOP!!!

I bet Lebron today would DESTROY Jordan today in a game of 1-on-1. In fact, he'd probably beat him if Jordan were in his prime - he's just so much bigger/beefier that he should be able to use his size to his advantage. It's not like Jordan's a dead-eye shooter.

Anyway, I was bringing up the anti-argument, how Jordan won every time in the finals... but didn't actually reach the finals until much later than Lebron did.

Lebron's still a relative noob. At this point, it's tough to say which players make up the core role players on his team - Verajao? Gooden? Big Z? If Gibson is the 2nd best player on the team right now, yeah, it's pretty gosh darned amazing that the Cavs are even standing in the finals.

Of course, we all need to take a step back - The Cavs were able to handle the Nets and their 3 perimeter stars... and they defeated the Pistons team that still has 3 or 4 core players in their primes from their championship team 3 years ago. (then again, I've always been quick to bash these Pistons as a mediocre group who happened to execute well when they had to!)

The NBA is a very different place from the 90s... and even more so from the 80s. More than anything else I'd blame massive expansion. The Hornets, Heat, Bobcats, Magic, T-Wolves, Raptors, and Grizzlies... that's a lot of teams. Figuring that there are an average of 2 stars per team, that's 14 players that could be part of the other 23 teams. Or if you say there are 3 really high quality players on each of those expansion teams, 21 of the 23 "original" teams could have an extra quality player or star.

Before, you had it made if you found a reliable third option - and you were absolutely killer if you had 4 top players. Nowadays, we're lucky if you manage to throw together 2 stars.

Back to the main discussion point - Lebron brings different elements to the table compared to Jordan. He's much more of a hybrid of Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan than one or the other. He's not the scorer or defender that Jordan was, nor is he offensive orchestrator that Johnson was (then again, Johnson played all of his career w/ Kareem, Worthy, Scott, Cooper, and a host of others).

Regarding the killer instinct, he sure seemed to have that killer instinct mentality when he scored all those points against the Pistons - but now that his team is completely overmatched, he doesn't? Sheesh.

Time to just watch and enjoy. I spent so many years *hating* Michael Jordan, Pippen, and the Bulls that I don't think I fully appreciated their brilliance until it was over. Now all that's burned into my brain is every brilliant moment Jordan had against the Knicks... and all those damned finals appearances I watched thinking, "damn it, we should have beaten the Heat" or "damn those pacers, that f-in' Reggie Miller". It wasn't always the Bulls who beat us, but it was always the Bulls in the finals for a long time.

MJ had waaay more heart than any player we label as being great now, guys we call superstars never had the killer instinct mj had

As I remember it, Jordan's 3 point shot became a weapon later in his career.

You have to factor in he is being guarded by the best on ball defender in the league, and then once he beats him he has to beat the best interior defender in the league, while having the luxury of kicking out to ?

We are measuring at this point in their career, not when jordan became an unstoppable force, and the knicks defense i believe was better in the mid 90's than the spurs today. But Jordan faced them a lot later in his career