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The Last Dance
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Kareem has a hell of a resume.
10 finals.
6 rings.
6 MVPs
2x FMVP
19x all-star
15x all-nba
11x all-defense
3x NCAA champ
3x MVP of NCAA tourney
2x College POTY
Kareem had zero personality though. Part of being an icon and a GOAT is some flash. Although he did fight Bruce Lee in a movie.
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Another point on Kobe. He seemed like a guy who was chasing MJ and didn't care about anything else. If MJ is Batman, I view Kobe as Robin. MJ spoke at Kobe's funeral and told a nice story about how they became friends and how Kobe keep picking his mind, he kind of willed MJ into being his mentor through persistence. Kobe has that fire and hunger, no one should doubt that he got the most out of what he was born with no matter where he falls in the rankings.
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Kobe is difficult to rank. Him winning without Shaq was really good for his legacy.
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Sonny wrote: View Post
Kareem is also a 6 time MVP though, Magic 3x MVP. Can't forget about that.
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The Great One wrote: View PostWith Kareem, people just look at the numbers, 6 championships, all time scoring leader etc etc. So it's easy to say he's the GOAT lol. You have to know the history of the game. Kareem couldn't win a title with the Lakers before Magic. Magic was the Lakers transformative player. Kareem was his sidekick.
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Also, people popping into Twitter to argue Kobe belongs in this conversation are hilarious. Kobe was great, he was also nowhere near MJ & Lebron level imho. He was literally MJ-lite. One MVP season! In an era when the award was not dominated by any one guy. Shaq, Iverson, Garnett, Nash, Nowtizki, Lebron, D-Rose, all winning MVP's and Kobe grabbed one of them in that era. GTFO with trying to argue him into a top 3 all time GOAT conversation.
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I also want to add, Bird > Kareem.
And yes, I know one is the all time scoring leader and one isn't even top 30.
Top 5 players of all time:
MJ
LeBron
Bird
Magic
Duncan
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golden wrote: View Post
Some good discussion here. A few points:- Jordan was a competitive asshole who wasn't fun to play with. I thought the series did a great job showing that, even though it was 90% MJ propaganda puff piece, it was also still all primarily true. MJ was a pain in the ass to play with and he was arguably the basketball GOAT. Both things can be true (basically the argument of the series).
- I compared the regular season W/L records of MJ's and LBJ's Finals opponents for their careers and guess what? Almost exactly the same. 62 win Finals opponents as an overall average. I think MJ's opponents are underrated, he played some very, very good 60+ win teams in the Finals. The fact that he would beat them felt so certain at the time, personally I think that's more a reflection of MJ's greatness than the quality of his opponents. This dude would just beat you. Fuck all the stats.
> Regular season wins do not tell the story of opponent strength in the playoffs. Even less so by averaging out regular season wins. I think we all understand that you need legit superstars (like KD, Curry & Klay) to win championships... and KD & Klay are 2-way guys + Draymond's defense. Top seed 59-win Raptors teams got Lebronto'ed. Nuff said. Again, did MJ face anything even close to the KD Warriors? On the same line of debate ... what legit 2-way superstars did Lebron have as sidekicks? Lebron was short-changed twice.
. - Lebron does end up getting criticized for dragging sorry ass rosters to the Finals. He's great enough (and the East was weak enough) for Lebron to take an otherwise lottery-bound team right to the 4th round. You know how MJ & LBJ Finals opponents both averaged 62 wins? Lebron's teams averaged 8 fewer wins than MJ's. That MJ's Bulls were better teams than most of Lebron's Finals teams is just straight facts. I don't hold that against Lebron - I guess aside from the fact that Lebron meddled with his own rosters (ahem Tristan Thompson payout ahem) and got his own coaches fired, so there's some blood on his hands for the relatively crappy teams he ended up with.
> Agreed. Lebron as GM was probably his own worst enemy, so in some ways you could argue that he probably deserves his fate as control freak. That said, if Lebron had Popovich and Buford as his coach & GM with the Cavs to start, then he doesn't need to be LeGM.
. - Lebron is an amazingly productive overall basketball player who can basically do everything at the highest level, I don't think anyone in the GOAT conversation is like him in that way. Magic's probably closest. But in his prime Lebron could basically play 5 positions at both ends and be your best offensive and defensive player and absolutely stuff the box score. He can run your offence as a point guard and he could also play in the post all night if he wanted to. He's nuts.
> Lebron is probably the most versatile and overall talented player to play in the NBA. No argument there.
. - That said, the production stats don't do MJ justice. This guy was capable of leading the league in scoring and winning DPOY at the same time. He reigned some of his individual production in as he matured to play with the team and...just win. And the prime of his career was exactly that. No more scoring titles but his teams won - a lot. They dominated. When push came to shove, MJ would just beat you. He could have tried to score 50 a night like James Harden if he wanted to, but instead he did whatever needed to be done to win. And you saw that in 6-0 in the Finals with 6 Finals MVPs. MJ just steps on your throat and wins. I've 100% got the bias of not really watching pre-80's NBA, but I've got MJ as the GOAT.
> First off... despite all that competitive fire, MJ never beat anybody without Pippen & PJax. Secondly... DPOY is the most subjective NBA award there is. Kobe was getting All-Defense selections like 5 years after he deserved even being mentioned. That's what the NBA and their media machine does to prop up their poster boys.
. - Jerry Krause did a great job pulling that roster together, he also sabotaged it in the end. I mean who tf announces at the start of a season, after b2b rings, that you're going to fire your coach and want to rebuild? Who does that? Man had a petty ego and was dysfunctional in the end. NBA stars can be notoriously difficult to keep happy and keep on board, but it's hard to imagine anyone doing today what Krause did then.
> That's where people are being mis-led. There is more than enough articles still on the internet quoting Phil himself that cast doubt as to whether it was Jackson who first told Krause he was leaving no matter what, rather than Krause edicting that PJax was a goner. Krause was simply the messenger. - That was a great docu-series. Just great.
^^^^ Good points, SR. Your serve....- Agreed re: regular season wins, not trying to draw too much out of it other than to argue against the idea that MJ didn't have strong Finals opponents. I think the quality of MJ's opposition is understated, he played 60+ win HOF-run teams in the Finals. They were good teams, the Shaq/Penny Magic, the Hakeem Rockets, Barkley, Stockton/Malone - these were probably championship quality teams that just ran into prime MJ. He just always beat them in 6 games or less and maybe made it look too easy. Yeah, the peak Warriors were an all-time crazy stacked team - but were only 2 of Lebron's 9 Finals opponents.
- Yeah, Reinsdorf is at least as guilty as Krause for letting a 6 rings in 8 years core just fall apart. We can't know if Reinsdorf was pulling the strings behind the scenes or just stood back and let it happen, but he certainly framed it all in the most favourable way possible for him in this series. Which is hilarious. End of the day he was the man in charge, responsible for Krause and everybody else under him in the organization. If the Bulls had wanted to run it back with 1 year deals for the core guys, they at least could have tried. Reinsdorf could have made sure they tried. He didn't.
- Man those Grant Park speeches were weird. What a weird way to end that run, everybody knew there was behind the scenes dysfunction at that point.
- I don't understand the "Star Player A never won without Sidekicks B & C" arguments. Yeah, for sure. That's true of every title team ever, it's not really an argument for or against anybody. Lebron needed at least a healthy Kyrie and Love to win a title, he couldn't do it with Dellavadova and Mozgov. Again I think maybe Lebron's biggest problem was he could get undermanned teams to the Finals, then he's criticized for losing. I don't hold that against him, but he also lost Finals with multiple All-Star side kicks. MJ never did, give him a decent roster and he won every year in his prime. Can't say that about Lebron, Durant, Curry, Duncan, Kobe, or any star since. Or most of them before. MJ's 6 titles in 8 years was truly dominant, nothing like it in the modern era. I think that's the main argument for MJ's GOAT status, that just adding up individual stats & awards doesn't capture.
Last edited by S.R.; Tue May 19, 2020, 12:52 PM.
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golden wrote: View Post
All-time scoring leader is a side-kick? That was so casual. lmao. And what about the defense, when big men manning the paint actually mattered?
Magic Johnson or Kareem? Who's the Lakers transformative player?
Paul Pierce is top 15 all time in points. Is he one of the greats? how about Vince Carter who's 19? those guys must be better than Bird right? Bird is not even top 30.
Kareem played 20 years in the NBA. Of course he's going to rack up points lol. Again, you have to know the history of the game.
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The Great One wrote: View PostWith Kareem, people just look at the numbers, 6 championships, all time scoring leader etc etc. So it's easy to say he's the GOAT lol. You have to know the history of the game. Kareem couldn't win a title with the Lakers before Magic. Magic was the Lakers transformative player. Kareem was his sidekick.
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With Kareem, people just look at the numbers, 6 championships, all time scoring leader etc etc. So it's easy to say he's the GOAT lol. You have to know the history of the game. Kareem couldn't win a title with the Lakers before Magic. Magic was the Lakers transformative player. Kareem was his sidekick.
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