And none of them are the biggest man on the floor, nor in the current argument for GOAT.
I haaaaated Mangy Ainge. I think I still hold a hatred for him somewhere in my soul many years later, even though I don’t care about the NBA like I did in my teens. He’s that repulsive.
The closest anyone has come to Jordan is Kobe. He had the same attitude and nearly as much talent. Lebron is like a much better Scottie Pippen, incredibly gifted and talented but really needed someone else to be the leader. Being so good makes him the default leader though and sometimes he struggles with that. Getting free trips to the finals year after year is more harming his legacy than helping it.
DeMarcus Cousins (Go Cats!)
Blake Griffin - Flop or seizure - you make the call!
Sigh…moment of silence…Tim Duncan - (skip to :53) Playoff Flop Edition. Duncan knows when it’s winning time.
They should invent a new category for the Academy Awards - Best Flop of the year
Maybe LeBron would win that one 
Not a big basketball fan, but I was under the impression that Steph Curry is on a career arc that would put him in that conversation, no?
Kobe was a good shooting guard, but let’s no go overboard, he isn’t anywhere close to Jordan or LeBron:
[ul]
---------------------Jordan LeBron Kobe
Peak PER:----------31.7 31.7 28.0
Peak Win shares:–21.2 20.3 15.3
Peak VORP:--------12.0 11.6 7.1
Peak true shting%-.614 .649 .580 [/ul]
He leads just fine from where I’m sitting. He makes his teammates better, and adjusts his game to whatever his team needs.
And isn’t this what they used to say about Jordan? Needs to trust his teammates, make them better, etc? Turns out he just needed better teammates.
Jordan’s path to the Finals:
'91 Knicks, 76ers, Pistons - respectable!
'92 Heat, Knicks, Cavaliers - less, er, respectable
'93 Hawks, Cavaliers, Knicks - dumpster fire
'96 Heat, Knicks, Magic - Young Shaq! Penny!
'97 Bullets, Hawks, Heat - dumpster fire II
'98 Nets, Hornets, Pacers - meh city
He is (though he is, in fact, smaller than LeBron). Curry’s gonna end up with all the non-Wilt records.
Peak PER: 31.5
Peak Win shares: 17.9
Peak VORP: 9.8
Peak true shooting% .672
Durant’s not far off:
Peak PER: 29.8
Peak Win shares: 19.2
Peak VORP: 8.5
Peak true shooting% .651
Not really, part of Phil Jackson’s influence was getting through to Michael that he needed to trust his teammates, instead of always trying to do things himself. Hence passing to John Paxson and Steve Kerr in key finals moments. The Triangle offense was always said to be the thing that got everyone to play together at a championship level. I think more importantly was Jackson’s experience with that early 70s Knicks team.
Now hang on a minute. That early 90s Cavs team was way better than you are giving credit. Brad Daugherty, Mark Price, Larry Nance. I think you are selling them short just because they couldn’t beat Jordan. They were a pretty great team. And those Knicks teams were really tough to play against. Ewing, Oakley, Mason, Starks. Come on, they went to the Finals in 94 and took Houston 7 games. This is revisionist history trying to delegitimize the Jordan Bulls by making it seem like they didn’t beat anyone good. Even that 97 Heat team had Mourning, Hardaway, Jamal Mashburn. They won 61 games that year. 98 Pacers, Reggie Miller, Rik Smits, Chris Mullin, the Davis Brothers. Meh I think is going too far. I’m not saying they were all all-time great teams, but I disagree with the dumpster fire description of most of these teams.
Sure, he does this plenty of times and some other times he simply disappears completely from the game during key moments. This has happened several times, in the finals. And i stand by my Kobe comment, him and Kevin Garnett are the only two players since Jordan to share his killer instinct, Kobe just happens to play the same position and be a multi ring champion so he is the closer comparison. None of those 90s teams were dumpsters fires, not one. This is the first year Lebron is going to face an East team that might actually have a chance, every other time he’s been to the finals his competition would struggle to make the playoffs in the West. And back when the East had some decent competition Lebron lost to the Magic and Celtics.
In eight years, when he has the stats and longevity to back it up, we can revisit that. Using Curry to back up LeBron’s flopping as evidence he’s the greatest? Nah.
They also added better players.
Let’s compare:
'07 Wizards, Nets, Pistons. They beat a grizzled, veteran, recent champion Pistons team, comparable to the '91 Pistons.
'11 76ers, Celtics, Bulls. A recent champion Celtics team with the #1 defense, and a 62-win Bulls team featuring peak Derrick Rose. Not too shabby.
'12 Knicks, Pacers, Celtics. Celts still clinging to that #1 defense in the league.
'13 Bucks, Bulls, Pacers. Dumpster fire alert! Rose-less Bulls, and a 49 win Pacer team.
'14 Bobcats, Nets, Pacers. Just ok, Pacers have 56 wins and #1 defense.
'15 Celtics, Bulls, Hawks. Hawks have 60 wins but are decidedly not that good.
'16 Pistons, Hawks, Raptors. Average-ish.
'17 Pacers, Raptors, Celtics. Celts are young and the 1 seed, but middle-of-the-pack by playoff-team standards. Average-ish.
I may have been harsh on the '90s Cavaliers, statistically they’re no great shakes, but respectable. Overall, sure looks like a wash to me.
Not that I recall. Some series and games are better than others, but I’ve never seen LeBron James disappear. Again, though, I’m not a hero-ball guy.
It just comes off to me as an insult to Jordan. Kobe is nowhere close to as great as MJ was. They are both 2-guards who won 5+ rings, though, no denying that. Advanced stats are very unkind to Kobe though, and they love Jordan.
Relative to other playoffs runs, of course some of them were. 8 teams make it in to the playoffs per conference every year, no matter what. Some slates of teams are just stronger than others. The '92 Heat team was 6 games under .500. Not all playoff teams are juggernauts.
Struggle to make the playoffs? C’mon. The 62-20 Bulls of '11, with the #1 defense and #11 offense, ain’t struggling to make the playoffs in the West.
Yeah, those were good teams. The '08 Celtics were 66-16, #1 defense, #10 offense, and the KG killer instinct. The '09 Magic invented the modern NBA.
Jordan lost to good teams too. Even Russell did, on two occasions.
Remind me who these great players the Bulls added for the first three-peat that weren’t already on the team in 88-89 and 89-90
LeBron is the one who keeps chasing better players to play with. Not Jordan. They retooled between the first and second three-peats a bit (minus Horace Grant and John Paxson, plus Toni Kukoc, Dennis Rodman, and Steve Kerr. Luc Longley for Bill Cartwright). But this assertion that Jordan needed all these better players to win seems unsupported by the facts. I guess Dennis Rodman being the greatest rebounder ever counts, but he replaced Horace Grant who was pretty good himself.
How many different lineups has LeBron played with? How many all stars have been brought in to play with him or has he gone to play with? I don’t see how you throw this “needed better players” criticism at Jordan but not think it applies much moreso to LeBron.
They added them in 1987, the 5th and 10th picks: Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant.
Over their first four seasons:
Pippen’s PER improved from 12.9 to 14.9 to 16.3 to 20.6, remaining in the low 20s through 1998.
Grant went from 13 to 13.8 to 16.6 to 17.6, staying between 17 and 20 through 1997 (when he was on Orlando).
They nailed their draft pick, and pulled off a heist of a trade.
Well, Jordan didn’t have to. He had vastly more talent than Lebron did in his first Cleveland stint, and he wasn’t playing in a superteam era, or with the shorter contracts and free agency we have today, or rookie contracts that encourage unloading pricey veterans. Jordan with '03-‘10 Cleveland talent in 2018 looks like Anthony Davis’ Pelicans: a transcendant superstar that’s fighting to make the playoffs, and getting bounced early if they make it.
Saying a guy’s team played better with better players isn’t a criticism of the player; that’s great-man-theory-of-history junk. Of course the Bulls got better with Pippen and Grant. With all respect to Phil Jackson’s coaching, you can’t get blood from a stone, and you can’t win a title with the '86 or '87 Bulls roster unless the league has been devastated by a series of plane crashes. You can’t win it with the '07 Cavs roster either, which is why it’s a borderline miracle that they made the Finals at all.
Jordan was improving at the same time his roster was, of course, he didn’t peak until a few years after the first title team.
I mean, is your explanation for the Bulls not winning a title until '91 really the Triangle offense, and nothing else?
In fact the Cavaliers play with that idea on their current radio game broadcasts during player introductions at the start of the game. Each player states his name, school and position. James says, “LeBron James, Akron St. Vincent-St Mary’s, Every position”. 
Of course not. Obviously they were both great players. I’m just saying that LeBron has also played with great players when he went to Miami, and then he went back to Cleveland to play with other great players. I guess it seemed like you were trying to say that the other players on the team also being great affected how great Jordan was, but the other great players LeBron has played with have no affect on his greatness. Like it’s only a ding against Jordan that he had great teammates. That seems inconsistent.
Evidence of greatness? Who said that?
However, if you’re making the argument that James can’t be GOAT because he flops, and there’s another guy that flops and currently plays as well as anybody ever has, it is a good argument that flopping doesn’t preclude greatness.
You might be better served arguing that these players would be even greater if they didn’t flop. That’s reasonable to me on first blush, but to say they’re not great (or the greatest) because of flopping doesn’t really make sense. I mean their accomplishments are what they are. Saying one is better because you prefer the aesthetic in which it was accomplished seems like hokum to me.
I grew up in Chicago in the 90s. Watched a lot of Jordan. If he had the same stats and accomplishments, but had a different attitude, his greatness as a player would be exactly the same. Maybe he wouldn’t have had those stats if he had a different personality, but that’s really a different argument.
That’s not what I was trying to convey; then again, I’m no David Halberstam.
What I’ve been indirectly addressing throughout the thread is that team success and the greatness of any given player aren’t perfectly correlated. It truly is a team game, and even the all-time greats can’t win a title without some help: Kareem needed Oscar Robertson and then Magic; Jordan needed Pippen; LeBron needed Wade & Bosh; Kobe needed Shaq and then Gasol; Wilt needed Hal Greer and then Baylor & West, and so on. Kareem didn’t stop being a great player between 1972 and 1980 - on the contrary, his best seasons were during those years - he just wasn’t on a championship-caliber team.
So it is with Jordan. I question the narrative that Phil Jackson’s coaching made Jordan “trust his teammates” and all that, and thus made the Bulls a championship-level team. That’s the context in which I brought up the Bulls needing better players to win titles.
Look at Jordan’s numbers (excluding his rookie year and broken-foot sophomore year) up through his retirement:
Year___FGA___AST__Usage
86-87__27.8__4.6___38.3
87-88__24.4__5.9___34.1
88-89__22.2__8.0___32.1
89-90__24.0__6.3___33.7 - Jackson is made head coach
90-91__22.4__5.5___32.9
91-92__22.7__6.1___31.7
92-93__25.7__5.5___34.7
See? Outside of the Jordan-against-the-world, 38.3% usage-rate 86-87 season, Jordan’s ball-hogging-related numbers remarkably consistent, save for an uptick in '93, at Jordan’s apex. Yet, the Bulls are winning more and more games, from 40 in '86-'87 to 67 in '91-'92. I find the roster improvement - especially adding a second Hall of Famer - to be a more likely explanation than Phil Jackson convincing Jordan to trust his teammates. That’s just me though, a noted Jackson skeptic.
I always end up feeling sorry for Pippen in this discussions, it seems like he remains underrated, and he was scandalously underpaid during the Bulls dynasty (in part due to poor decisions on his part, but still!). Though not as great as Pippen, Bosh is that figure in LeBron’s story - the Heat could not have won two titles without Bosh transforming himself into a small-ball center and sacrificing much of his individual offense, and getting very little credit or attention from the casual NBA fan. Instead of being underpaid, he ended up with a serious medical problem that ended his career early. It’s hard out there for a second banana, evidently.