Michael Jordan:
The GOAT of Basketball or the GOAT of Image, Mythology & Brand Management?
Is the Jordan myth empowered by being in the right place at the right time?
A thread 🧵
Erik Spoelstra: "If we played LeBron in any of the 5 positions, he would be the best in the league in that position. I always regret and it bothers me to this day that I didn’t have the guts to play him in all 5 positions".
One of a kind
@KingJames
Ty Lue and Spo turned into elite coaches after graduating from LeBron’s University. I doubt if Ham can even graduate; he’s by far the worst student LeBron has had.
LeBron doesn't have Kobe's mentality, yet he trained harder, took better care of his body, and played at the highest level for a significantly longer time.
Make it make sense.
The MAIN difference between Kobe and LeBron is their mental strength.
Kobe NEVER made excuses and would push himself to train harder.
LeBron is the better overall player but I wonder if Bron had Kobe’s mentality how much MORE he could have accomplished 🤔
JJ right on point. At this point it is not even close. LeBron is by far the best and greatest player ever. It’s laughable to even compare others to him.
🐐👑
@KingJames
LeBron James surpassed:
- Kareem with 500 less shot attempts
- Jordan with 1300 less shot attempts
- Kobe with 2000 less shot attempts
The greatest scorer ever?
Standing ovation for LeBron James from the Brooklyn crowd. He checks out with 40 points on 13-for-17 shooting, 7 assists and 5 rebounds. He tied a career high in 3-pointers, going 9-for-10 from deep.
LeBron participated in 3 Olympics. Olympics has ZERO tolerance for doping. If you think they make an exception for LeBron, you are a fool.
If started doping after 2012, explain it to me that why was he a freak of nature before 2012.
Stop with this bs, you just want attention. 🤡
Gilbert Arenas, as a Michael Jordan fan, breaks down why LeBron James is the GOAT and the best player ever.
“I’m a Michael Jordan fan, but I am not going to do a strong hold that MJ is still the best player ever, I’m not gonna be that dinosaurish”
@LetsHoops
1st, why didn’t MJ play longer? Coz he couldn’t!! No one stopped him. 2nd, LeBron caught MJ in scoring with 1300 less shot attempt. All that while assisting way more than MJ.
If you play games of “lfs”, how many points LeBron would have if he took the same amount of shots as MJ?
LeBron James vs Michael Jordan vs Kobe Bryant vs Tim Duncan in elimination games.
LeBron by far the best here, but yeah those guys had "killer instinct" and LeBron doesn't. what a joke!
“Better prospect than LeBron”
“Higher ceiling than LeBron”
“Best prospect ever”
“Better rookie than LeBron”
Spurs lost 11 games in a row.
LeBron turned an absolute joke team to a contender in only 2 years.
Will they realize how insane is this comparison?
Jordan while gambling, right after getting swept in back-to-back years by the Celtics:
“This is fun!... We just lost to the Boston Celtics, but guess what? I'm winning!"
What would media do to LeBron if he did this?
Ric Bucher, a well-known LeBron hater & an NBA VOTER claims LeBron was awful & Lakers made a run when LBJ was on the bench in the 3rd quarter.
Fact check:
LeBron played 10:41 in the 3rd, with 11 pts, 4/4 FG, 1 Ast, 2 Blk, cut the deficit from 13 to 7
Have some shame
@RicBucher
Bill Walton: “When I watch LeBron, I can never figure out what the best part of his game is. In any particular game, he can be the BEST shooter, passer, dribbler, rebounder, defender, shot blocker, screener, he does everything, & he is still doing it better than everyone else.”
Pat Riley, the legendary coach of Kareem, Magic, Shaq, & Wade, and rival of MJ, Bird, & Kobe, has spoken about LeBron James:
"LeBron is in a class of his own, he is absolutely unique, he is Michael, Magic, Kobe, West, and Bill Russell. He's a combination of all of them!"
🐐👑
OKC goes on a big run, Darvin Ham doesn’t call a TO.
Lakers go on a 11-0 run, Darvin Ham takes a TO.
This dude is the most stupid individual ever in the basketball world.
Eddie House in 2011 Finals:
Game 1: DNP
Game 2: DNP
Game 3: DNP
Game 4: DNP
Game 5: 3.5 min, 0 pts, 1 Rb, 1 Ast
Game 6: 21 min, 43%FG, 9 pts, 3 Rb, 3 AST, 3 PF
LeBron was right Eddie, you were a bum.
Eddie House calls out LeBron for not showing up in the 4th quarter of the 2011 Finals, and he believes LeBron deserves more blame than the Heat's complementary pieces 😬
(🎥
@TheCartonShow
)
This was unfair, LeBron at 16 was easily at the level of a top 10 player in the NBA at the time. At 20, top 3 easily; At 22, he was the best in the world and no one ever challenged him for 15 years.
I’m not even exaggerating, you can learn more about basketball in just one season of this podcast than you could in 30 years of listening to Stephen A. Smith, Skip Bayless, Chris Broussard, Mad Dog, Brian Windhorst, Reggie Miller, Ric Bucher, and some others combined.
.
@kingjames
and
@jj_redick
are obsessed with basketball.
Consider their podcast, Mind the Game, a celebration of the sport as they discuss the state of the game, dissect X’s and O’s (like they do here), and wax poetic about the game they love.
Steph is not the man to take a lottery team to the NBA finals. No one is, except one man.
Get Steph some help, that’s the only way he can win, that’s the only way Jordan won, being on the best team in the league by a mile.
They are not LeBron. No one is.
The same people crying “Curry doesn’t have help” laughed at LeBron when he lost to the Avengers with no help in the finals. Forgive me if I don’t feel the slightest bit bad for Curry 😭
LeBron James in the background: "Who had the better flu game: AR [Austin Reaves] or MJ [Michael Jordan]?! It's up for debate!"
Reaves: "I'm gonna let LeBron keep talking and I'm gonna continue to talk about the game." 😆
Under
@JeanieBuss
ownership, Lakers not only missed playoffs in 7 out of 9 seasons, but also had some of the worst asset mismanagements in the NBA history:
A thread 🧵
"But he's not better than Jordan."
I genuinely believe that, at this point, people who think Jordan was better than LeBron are too stubborn and emotional to accept the fact that LeBron surpassed Jordan years ago.
Frank Vogel would win this series in 4 or 5. He wasn’t a top tier coach, but he made sufficient adjustments during/ after each game.
What we are seeing from Ham is a total incompetence and sabotage.
He runs Troy/Beasley/Schroder line up 2-3 times a game & Memphis feast on that.
Mind blowing LeBron James stat:
If you take away every single dunk or 3-pointer from his entire 20 seasons career, LeBron would be still number 14 in all time scoring list.
That's higher than career points for KD, TD, Harden, Jerry West, Dwade, Larry Bird, Steph,...
@KingJames
They witnessed this kid's extraordinary talent, yet still chose to lie to us with comparing Wemby to him. Let's be real, no player in history has come close to reaching LeBron's greatness. By far the greatest prospect in basketball and even sports history.
The gap between Lakers & Nuggets lies solely in coaching. I think Lakers are even better than Nuggets cos they have LeBron & AD.
But, with Ham, Lakers are automatically 10-20 points behind in each game, & our players have to work their asses off to beat both Ham and the opponent.
Austin Reaves: "Ever since the playoffs last year, they've for the most part beat us in those last three to four minutes. We have to figure out what we have to do to flip that."
We are in a year that Lauri Markkanen with 26/8/2/0.6/0.6 at 12 seed gets All NBA votes over 38 yrs old LeBron who just broke the NBA all time scoring record while averaging 29/8/7/0.9/0.6 finishing at 7th seed.
All media member who voted like this must be ashamed of themsrlves
@LeGoatFan_10
@LegionHoops
@FadeawayWorld
LeBron passed MJ in scoring with 1300 less shot attempts. Now that you play “if” games, how many points LeBron would have if he took as many shots as MJ? I tell you how many: 43000>
The level of insecurity by MJ stans is off the charts.
@mural_erza
@hoopshype
LeBron surpassed Jordan in scoring on 1,262 less shot attempts. He also surpassed Kobe in scoring on nearly 2,000 less shot attempts. ALL while posting 8K+ REB & 8K+ AST at the SAME TIME.
Jeanie Buss and Darvin Ham sacrificed the 2nd healthy season of LeBron and AD to maximize Taurean Prince.
This will go down as a historic sabotaging job by an incompetent owner and the worst coach in basketball.
The Lakers Worst Cumulative Plus-Minus Player on the Season Is…
You guessed it…
Taurean Prince.
He is a - 152 !!!
By comparison, Rui Hachimura, who’s
#1
is a +95.
These clowns called Jordan the GOAT in 92, & had zero expectation from him at age 39, but they want LeBron to beat a much tougher opponent in year 21.
Current Nuggets not only would destroy any competition Jordan faced, but also would absolutely destroy any Jordan Bulls team.
Stephen A. Smith on the GOAT debate:
"If LeBron James beats Denver and marches forward to ultimately win another chip, I don’t know how strong my argument is going to be on behalf of Jordan moving forward."
👀 (via
@FirstTake
)
1. Why didn't MJ play longer? Cos he couldn’t! No one stopped him.
2. LeBron caught MJ in scoring with 1300 fewer shot attempts, all while assisting way more than MJ.
If you wanna play game of "lfs," how many points would LeBron have if he took the same amount of shots as MJ?
Every Jordan fan should come to realization at some point that why arguing is simply a better basketball player. I was a Jordan fan, he was my GOAT, but LeBron is just better in basketball
This dude’s GOAT got retired as soon as he heard the greatest coach ever, Phil Jackson may not come back. But he wants LeBron to be coached with the worst coach in history for 3 seasons in a row.
Make it make sense
@Chris_Broussard
🤡
"As the leader, LeBron should accept that the losses are on him — even if it's not his fault. Getting rid of Darvin Ham was a mistake. Who is out there?"
—
@Chris_Broussard
The DPOY award lost its seriousness when Michael Jordan, Marcus Smart, JJJ, and Marc Gasol won it, while players like Kareem, Scottie Pippen, Tim Duncan, LeBron, and AD never did.
Congratulations to
@JeanieBuss
for being the worst owner in basketball, a weak, incompetent owner who favors inept coaches.
She'll fire Ham soon, blame everything on him, and hire another incompetent coach. Just wait and watch.
In the 90s, the NBA was mainly focused on money, marketing, & global image rather than basketball:
They expanded (6 new teams), shortened the 3-point line, inflated the stats by faking them, gave one player a pass, and helped him win more, etc.
The weakest era in basketball!
Former Grizzlies scorekeeper Alex Rucker admits to boosting NBA stats in the 90s:
"There's a discussion, 'That wasn't an assist, that was a pass.' ... And the majority opinion by a mile was, 'Oh no, that's definitely an assist. It's John Stockton.'”
😳 (via
@pablofindsout
)
Media and some MJ fans say Scottie Pippen was nobody and had the minimal impact on MJ’s titles🤔
Here is Phil Jackson calling Scottie a BETTER overall player than Michael Jordan: “Scottie is the greatest all around player in the league”
@bt_ramy
@BallsackSports
If he was healthy all the time yes. Unfortunately, LeBron wasn’t the luckiest all time great in terms of co-star health. Pippen, Shaq/Kobe, Kareem/Magic, Steph, Duncan, all had their costars healthy. For LBJ, Dwade, Bosh, Kyrie, AD, got injured a lot and he lost rings for that.
LeBron lead Cavs in 11 categories vs Pacer:
Jim Jackson:
“Nobody in history has been asked to do as much, not even MJ.
Revisionists history like us want to make it seems that Jordan played against great teams, but he didn’t.
MJ couldn’t carry teams, like LBJ”.
@ColinCowherd
@KennyLafortune
@NBA
If the fact that LeBron won a ring and a FMVP in 2020, broke multiple records etc, doesn’t convince you that he’s been better than Luka and Embiid, I don’t know what to tell you.
Luka can surpass LeBron in 20s decade in the next few years. I doubt if Embiid can in any way.
Remember when Michelle Beadle said this when Cavs were down 3-1 in 2016: “If LeBron James is able to come back and win this series I will literally eat a textbook of your choice”.
Watch what happened next😂
Old heads & nostalgia merchants can’t stand the facts.
The films are available. Watch them. You don’t need to listen to anyone. MJ was awarded the DPOY without being a top 5 defender in a much less talented league.
He was cooked by quick guards always.
Rasheed Wallace: "Michael Jordan wasn't all that of a good defender."
MJ was All-Defense 1st team 9 times, DPOY, led the league in steals 3 times and has more blocks than any other shooting guard.
(Via
@TylerIAm
|
@Underdog__NBA
)
Taurean Prince started 49 games over Rui and Reaves. That’s the reason we are in a dogfight for the 9th seed instead of being a top 3-4 seed.
No one but Darvin Ham, Jeanie Buss, and the Lakers front office are to blame.
They didn’t stop this sabotage until LeBron posted “⌛️”.
Active players to lead their team in PTS, REB, AST, STL and BLK in a single playoffs:
*minimum 14 games*
• LeBron James (2016)
Literally did everything for his team.
@NorCalBetter
@ImDeported
Stats are part of the case. But regardless of the stats, LeBron is the best and most complete player ever. No player in history did everything on the floor like he did. Sure, MJ a great scorer, TD/Pip great defenders, Shaq dominant in rim, Magic a great passer. LBJ does it all.
There is no other player in NBA history who could take this Cavs team to the finals. Not just finals, MJ, Steph, KD and so many other all time greats wouldn’t be able to even pass the first round with this team.
The true definition of one man team.
Jordan lovers can’t comprehend that another person came and surpassed MJ in every aspect of the game. Tell me what Jordan did in his peak than LeBron except FTs and midrange. LeBron was a far better offensive and defensive player, playmaker, etc. Just watch their game then talk.
Yes, LeBron is clearly the greatest old player ever. His total career value is also
#1
. And his peak can be argued against anyone’s, ever. Except Michael Jordan. Jordan’s peak was objectively higher.
I want to thank Darvin Ham and
@JeanieBuss
for being the dumbest people on earth in running/managing a team.
I’m done with this game. Thank you for ruining the night for millions of
@Lakers
fans.
Top 10 NBA players who generated the most points in NBA history. (total point generated by a player via direct scoring or passing).
LeBron James is leading the pack by a wide margin. 👑🐐
@mural_erza
@hoopshype
Wow, a very genius MJ fan👀
So playing less games but taking way more shots with less efficiency is better than playing more games, taking less shots (3.5 per game) and making them more efficient?
Dude, never try to become a businessman🥱
@reesetheone1
@LetsHoops
Chose not to🤦🏾♂️🤦🏾♂️
He simply couldn’t!
Winning rings against shitty teams in 90s is not the same as winning them against GS or Spurs dynasties. Why MJ never made it even to finals in 80s? Coz there were real contenders in 80s. In fact only won one playoff series as underdog.
Udonis Haslem says Dwyane Wade probably should’ve won MVP in 2009 over LeBron James
“We’re talking about a guy who was, at one point, considered the best in the world.”
(🎥
@theOGsShow
/ )
Media:
Jordan is God cos he scored 63 pts in 2X OT vs Celtics.
Reality:
- 22/41 FG (53.7%), 19/21 FTs
- Horrible on defense
- Swept
MJ's primary assignments shot 12-19 (11 uncontested).
Celtics scored 31 pts when MJ was the main defender, the most allowed by any player. 🤦🏻♂️
Christian Wood on LeBron:
"He should be in the MVP race... what 38 year old do you know that is doing what he's doing?"
Those voters are paid to not see greatness.
Luka is the closest specimen to LeBron on the offensive end. However, LeBron was easily a top 3 defender in the league at that time, and by year 8, he was clearly the best defender in the league.
Offensive stats only tell you half of the story.
You wondering why?
LeBron has generated more points than anyone in history by a wide margin.
Most point generated in history (scored/assisted):
68,000 pts: LeBron James
67k
66k
65k
64k
63k
62k
61k
60k
59k
58k
57k
56k
55k
54k
53k: John Stockton
52k
51k
50k: Kareem
49k: Kobe
@Paulmillsap4
First, 71% of earth surface is covered with oceans water (salty) and is not usable unless purified (costly). Second, only 3% of total water on earth is fresh, and only 20-30% of those is available. cost of water storage, purification, distribution etc is what we pay for water.
Remember when
@espn
created “Michael Jordan Day” only days before LeBron became the NBA’s all time leading scorer?
A combination of comedy, sadness and insecurity🤣🤣🤣
At this point, it’s ridicules to even compare any other player to LeBron.
4 different positions in 5 years at an elite level (best in the world to top 10 at worst) at age 33-38.
By far the best and greatest player ever. 🐐
In the years LeBron went to the Finals, his teams' No. 2 players had a total of 93.1 Wins Over Replacement Player, compared to his 259.6 (difference: 166.5). WORP for MJ's finals was 165.5 & Pippen had 120.8. The distance between LeBron & his help was greater than MJ's total 🤯.
One day, the NBA season starts without LeBron James.
Don’t take his last seasons for granted and enjoy his game before it's too late.
Once-in-a-lifetime player, the greatest to ever touch a basketball.
🐐
Stephen A Smith: LeBron fears Steph.
Steve Kerr: our entire team was fearful of LeBron James, he is terrifying.
@stephenasmith
a man with no shame or dignity. Lies consistently on live TV.
"For the entire 2010s, everyone agreed the Western Conference was tougher. Yet in that decade, in all of player movement one guy, Melo, decided to go East everyone else went West or stayed West."
—
@getnickwright
on LeBron’s former teammate Mario Chalmers: 'Nobody fears Bron:'