MJ VS LEBRON: ThE RING ARGUMENT
Today, Michael Jordan is nearly universally considered the "best" basketball player of all time and the LeBron lovers are eager to change that. While I genuinely think this is an entertaining and close race, I am getting sick and tired of hearing, "LeBron hasn't done it in the Finals. He's got three rings to Jordan's six:' Even more outrageous is, "LeBron can NEVER pass Jordan because he has lost in the Finals five times:' These types of ridiculous ring-based arguments permeate the discussion of basketball's GOAT and I am calling for that to end.
While I do think as of right now Jordan is the best player of all time, I think that this race is extremely close. The LeBron haters rely way too much on his lack of rings in this debate. Basketball is a team sport in which there are five players per team on the court at once. Furthermore, never underestimate the value of a good coach (or even a deep bench). The point is, a team doesn't win with one great player and a bunch of Joe Schmo's. Jordan certainly never won rings with JoeSchmo's. Last time I checked, Scottie Pippen has the same six rings, three NBA all-first team selections, seven all-star appearances, and eight NBA all defensive team selections. This dude was a stud and was with Jordan for all of their Finals success
LeBron, on the other hand, carried a team to the NBA Finals in '07with a team in which the highest paid players were Larry Hughes, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Drew Gooden, and Eric Snow. There are two total all-star selections in that group, both by Big Z. I watched Big Z play with this team. He was serviceable, but not someone that you could feed in an isolation scenario and seriously expect good things to happen. Even so, LeBron took these schmucks to the NBA Finals! Yes, they got swept by the Spurs. That's because the Spurs were a significantly better team than LeBron and the Joe Schmo's. It's fun to speculate what Jordan would have done with this team, but LeBron deserves more praise for this accomplishment than he gets. If you put a young Michael Jordan with that team, I'm not sure he gets them to the NBA Finals.
To add to how much LBJ meant to this team. the year after he took his talents to South Beach in 2010, the Cavs won 19 games and were the second worst team in the NBA (17 wins for the Wolves that year. Yikes.). The Cavaliers proceeded to win 21, 24. and 33 wins in the three following years. The year after that, The King returned and took the Cavaliers to the NBA Finals for three straight seasons (maybe more, TBD). The inarguable take-home message is that without LeBron, the Cavaliers are awful. With him, they contend for championships.
The same thing can't be said for Michael Jordan and the Bulls. With him, they were amazing. Without him, they were still a contender for a championship. The year after his first retirement, the Bulls won 55 games and were two games away from the top seed in the East. They lost in the conference semifinals to the Knicks in seven games. That same Knicks team went on to lose the NBA Finals in seven games.
The second year after Jordan's retirement, the Bulls went 34-31 without him and 13-4 after he was reinserted into the lineup. They again lost in the conference semifinals, with Jordan this time. In fact, Nick Anderson of the Magic commented that Jordan wearing the number 45 made him play like a 45-year old. I bring this up because some people try to give the argument that nobody talked bad about Jordan because they were so scared of him. Please, shut up. Scottie Pippen was first-team All-NBA that year and NBA All-Defensive first team.
The Bulls without Jordan were still a playoff team at worst and a contender at best. With Jordan, they weren't as invincible as people like to believe. They were pretty close to it, but not invincible. The Cavaliers, however, have been awful without LeBron. With him, they are real contenders. It is obvious that LeBron James has had a worse supporting cast as a Cavalier than Michael Jordan did with the Bulls. What is undeniable is that both players made their teams significantly better. Even so, it is likely that Jordan, if given the same teams as LeBron, would not have had the same results that he had with the Bulls. So don't tell me that LeBron isn't as good as Jordan because Jordan won 6 rings. LeBron may have very well won more than 6 rings if he was handed Jordan's supported cast. I can at the very least guarantee he wouldn't have quit to try and play baseball. Furthermore, Sam Jones won 10 rings but he is nowhere in this discussion. I didn't even know who Sam Jones was until I googled 'random dudes with more rings than Jordan' and picked a guy. Robert Horry has 7 rings, by the way.
Rings are the clearly result of what you accomplish as a team, not as an individual. Otherwise, dudes like Sam Jones and Robert Horry would not have rings. So, when you want to talk about the greatest TEAM of all time, I'd be happy to talk rings. If we are talking about the greatest player of all time, rings should be on the periphery of the discussion at most. It should not be treated as a trump card. If you want to measure the impact players have on their team's success, let's talk about how much better their teams were with them on the floor than when they sought out warmer weather or decided to try baseball.
Yes, to this point I have ignored LeBron's controversial move to South Beach and the 'amazing' cast he had there. That is because all I am trying to convey is that we can't judge LeBron's cavaliers days in the same way we judge Jordan's Bulls days because Jordan had a significantly better supporting cast. LeBron's days with the Miami Heat are a little more like Jordan's with the Bulls. Still, let's not get carried away with Jordan's undefeated record in the Finals. Remember, Jordan's Bulls lost while he was wearing number 45 before they even got to the Finals.
With the Miami Heat, LeBron had a much more comparable supporting cast to Jordan's Bulls. I will be the first to tell you that LeBron had an extraordinarily disappointing Finals in 2011, while Dirk Nowitzki had Germans and LeBron haters around the world rejoicing. With that said, he went to the Finals every single year that he played for the Heat. While the first loss to the Mavericks was largely on LeBron, the only other time he lost with the Heat, his pal D Wade was not the same player due to injuries. He played in 54 regular season games in 2014, was not an All-NBA selection, and didn't average 20 points per game for the first time since his rookie season ten years earlier. Chris Bosh averaged 16.2 points and 6.6 rebounds that year. That dude was a bona fide Zydrunas Ilgauskas by 2014. LBJ's supporting cast was good but not great and they still went to 4 straight Finals, something Jordan never did. Again, even with the Heat, comparing LeBron's greatness to Jordan's is more complicated than the end result of the season.
Long story short, rings are so much more about the team than the individual. So let's please stop using rings as a primary measure of how good a player is. If everybody wants to keep doing that when they talk about Jordan versus LeBron, we should look at what Bill Russell did in his career. Hell, take a close look at Robert Horry while you're at it. In my view, we should instead be taking a closer look at people like Wilt Chamberlain and Magic Johnson. When analyzing what players do for a team, there is so much more to it than if the end result was a ring or not. Nobody has scored 100 points in a game or averaged 50 and 25 for a season recently. Because of stats like that, until the day somebody actually takes a group of Joe Schmo's like Tiago Splitter, Rasho Nesterovic, Kwame Brown, and Stanislav Medvedenko to an NBA Finals and walks away with a ring, the debate of who is the true GOAT of the NBA will forever be up in the air to me.
