I read a really good analysis by one of my homies the other day concerning the debate over who better Jordan or James.  This is along the same lines as the classic debate over who is the greatest basketball player of all time. The G.O.A.T as its known in basketball parlance. I have listened to all sides, I have heard the opinions of experts who could quote you every stat in the book about the sports going all the way back to Cousy, Havlicek and Russell. I have also heard the opinions of those whose basketball knowledge is not much older than Air Jordan Xs. Since the Jay Graves Report, link below, used concise stats to support the notion that AT THIS STAGE OF THEIR CAREERS (emphasis added and intended) LeBron is a better player than Jordan, I want to flesh out the argument and go further.

First, a would be debater must take into account that the phrase “greatest of all time” is subjective. It is based upon subjective factors that must be addressed. What exactly do you mean by “greatest?” What is the measuring stick? If its purely points, Kareem will probably always hold that crown as the next highest point scorers are either out of the league (Jordan, Wilt, the Mailman) or close to it (Kobe). LeBron at his position will very likely not play enough years to amass that kind of point production, additionally, he’s not a gunner like Kobe is. You can’t use wins as there are people in the top ten that are blessed simply by being on superior teams for long periods of their careers. There are those that use the three peat as evidence of Jordan’s greatness, well the Celts reeled off 8 straight. Even the decidedly lower rung Lakes rang up one three peat. Let’s see, there are the MVPs, Jordan with five, tied with Bill Russell (who also has 11 rings, one of which as a player coach NO ONE has done THAT again) but he still trails Kareem with six. I won’t even go into All Star MVPs as that’s all for show. I won’t even go into Finals MVPs because we all know the “star” of the winning team will get that even if he has shitty performances. Olympic gold medals, who cares, there are decidedly second level players that have multiple golds.

Finally, we get to the seemingly most potent argument made by the Jordan vs. James debaters. Jordan has six rings and never lost in the Finals, Bron Bron only has two, and has lost two. That can never be a true test of greatness, as lets see, Jordan is tied for TENTH on the list with his six rings. That is six out of the FIFTEEN years he played. Bill Russell tops the damn list with 11 out of 13 years played. Not 11 out of 13 trips to the finals, that means that BR won the championship all but two years he played. For Jordan to touch him he would have to have an astonishing 13 rings. If you use that logic, Robert Horry is “better” than Jordan, LeBron and Kobe as he has seven rings. That’s just one contemporary player so the argument can’t be said “it was a different league then.” Stats can be used to support any type of argument from best shooter, to best rebounder but best “player” is a different argument, one that does not lend itself to stats alone.

Now that that’s out of the way, lets move to the more subjective things. Greatest of all time arguments are a relatively recent thing. No one ever really compared players to each other until the advent of Jordan. Bird and Magic were seen as rivals but no one ever asked who was better as they were both cold as Artic ice water. You couldn’t ask which one you would take first as you couldn’t go wrong with either one. Jordan was the first mega-media athlete. If anyone remembers, you have to be at least 50, when Magic won his first title, we didn’t watch it on ABC or on ESPN. We watched it on TAPE DELAY. I remember I had to beg my mother to stay up late to watch the game as it didn’t start till like 10:30 pm. Games out west would be over at 12:30 in the morning back then. It worked because there was not 24 hour nationwide news source either, so unless you knew someone who lived in L.A., you didn’t know the score. After the league began marketing the East coast, West coast rivalry (incidentally where the 2-3-2 Finals format came from), Hollywood v. Blue Collar Boston, people began to notice this game of basketball. Jordan built on that. Somewhere between those two eras, including the overlap, the game exploded in ad revenue, endorsement money and popularity. So an argument can be made that the NBA and marketing firms created the “Jordan is best” aura. That drove the public perception that Jordan was all that. Want further evidence, a poll done by ESPN, was released TODAY that asked who is the most popular athlete. King James 3^rd, Black Momba 4^th, who holds the top spot . . . wait for it, waaaaittt for it. MICHAEL DAMN JORDAN. What did Jordan average last year? Zeroes across the board. How many wins, zip. How many playoff games, zilch. The man has not played in the league in over a decade. HOW is he the most popular athlete in the world? Because of marketing and perception. You cannot be the best athlete if you’re NOT A FREAKIN ATHLETE any longer. Most people who bleed Bulls red because of Jordan, are Jordan fans because the NBA made it possible for them to be Jordan fans. You saw in real time damn near every game he played except when he was playing lowly teams like Milwaukee or Kansas City (yeah they had a team at one time). You were force fed MJ on everything from television to cereal, to horrible movies, to cartoons. This illusion led (forced) you to believe that he was a basketball GOD and no one is on his level. What the public didn’t see was that MJ was probably the most polarizing major athlete in sports history inside the sport. You either liked him and he liked you or you didn’t. He was arrogant, petty, childish and a complete ass outside of the public eye. Don’t believe me, YouTube his acceptance speech at the HOF ceremony. Studmuffins flew in a guy from his old high school basketball team that was chosen the year he was left off the varsity squad, JUST to humiliate this guy. Dude, you 50 damn years old, let that shit go. You said to people who were paying attention that “look, he made the team and I didn’t, I became the best in the world, he’s a mechanic or something.” You come across as vindictive and petty for no reason at all.

Now lets get to the real. There is no “greatest” player of all time. The greatest player of all time never played in the NBA. There are six, seven billion (with a B) people on this planet, statistics say that you can never say that because no one even knows who all the players are. (just like you cannot say that life only exists on Earth because we’ve never found life anywhere else) Every hood has a player that nobody can touch. I mean EVERY hood has that guy that fights start over picking him first for the pickup game. Every suburban gym has that white guy with Bird range, Nash handles and Nowitski footwork. I remember reading an article in Sports Illustrated I think it was, years ago about a guy that a reporter had heard about and went to see that played ball barefoot and who shot a basketball like Payton Manning threw a football. Thing is, according to the reporter, this guy NEVER missed a shot PLUS he never shot a layup, he didn’t miss from the key, the wing, the elbow, he didn’t even miss from halfcourt. Supposedly, this was not some Dude Perfect bullshit but within the course of an organized game. Everyone knew the guy, no one knew where he lived or what he did to feed himself. He’d just show up, kill and leave. Best player I ever saw IN LIFE was a guy named Charles Merriweather. In case anyone thinks this is a fictional person, this guy won the Indiana State High School Championship in 1979 as a quarter miler. Google it. We used to call him Iz, short for Israel. Iz’s problem was not being a stellar athlete, his problem was with cocaine and sticky fingers to feed the desire. I saw this guy play in prison. The guy was 6’6” tall, ambidextrous, with a 40 inch vertical. He could go left or right, take you in the paint and abuse you or pull up and shoot over you from 30 feet with accuracy, if you like Kevin Durant, that was Iz. I’m a basketball follower not a fan, I like MJ but I’m real enough to know that if he played for New York or Boston, I probably would not have liked him as much, as I rode with the Bulls all the way back to Artis Gilmore. I know players and I can evaluate them on their relative merits as players not personalities. I agree with my guy Jay, when Jordan came out, he couldn’t go left and he didn’t develop a reliable jump shot until he got within sniffin range of the NBA Finals. Like my homie said, people conveniently forget that Jordan won the NCAA ‘ship as a freshman but never won another even though he played for NC for two more years. That was Worth and Perkins’ team, he was just a round in the mag.

I used to tell people that Mike Tyson wasn’t the “baddest man on the planet.” There is some WHITE guy working in a warehouse somewhere that would beat the breaks off Mike, he just wasn’t a boxer. (remember when everyone thought Kimbo Slice was all that and a bag of wavy Lays till a big fat white guy smashed his ass on national television) The point is this, if you take Jordan and swap his spot with say Julius Erving, we’d be having this argument about Doc and LeBron. To those who don’t truly follow the sport, we never saw the REAL Dr. J. That guy played back in the seventies before television covered games. That guy played in front of hundreds, not millions around the world. By the time Doc got to the point where he was on the national stage he was a shadow of his former self, but still good enough to make championship runs and dunk on boys. Playing on concrete floors beneath a thin veneer of wood destroyed his knees so he couldn’t jump out of the gym like he could when he was younger. That guy would have to be in the conversation for G.O.A.T. Then again, how could not talk about The Big Dipper, this cat AVERAGED 50 points and 25 rebounds a game and STILL remains to this day the only NBA player to average 30 points and 20 rebounds over the course of his career. Jordan, Bryant or James never came close to that. Additionally, this was a time when the three pointer didn’t exist, take away three point baskets from today’s players and the all time scoring list looks decidedly different. Then there’s the Big O who you don’t hear the NBA talking about due to political differences (Google it). He is important to Black History in general because when he won the Indiana High School basketball championship while at Crispus Attucks High School, it was the first time anywhere in the United States that two all black teams had met for the championship. He beat my high school Gary Roosevelt in 1955, but I digress, had to get my G.I shout out in. The Big O averaged a triple double for the whole season. No one has ever come close to that. You can argue different era all you want, yes players are faster and bigger now, but mostly they are raw talent, they don’t have nearly the skillset that older players had honed by years on the neighborhood courts, four years of high school and four years of college. New age players, they can dunk, they can shoot, that’s all. They play sorry defense, they don’t rebound. We make a big deal if LBJ gets 5 or 6 rebounds at 6’8”, Fat Lever led his TEAM in rebounding for four seasons, he was the damn point guard at 6’3” The reason why most have careers that last less than five years is not because they can’t get on the court, its because they can’t be put on the court. In this era, you can’t even touch a player. In the old NBA, you could be slammed to the court with such ferocity that someone should go to jail. What happened, you got up and played on. Today, its a two game suspension for anyone who would dare to touch the leagues money makers.

The long and short of is, when you talk about who the greatest of all time is, it depends on who you ask and who they saw play. I’ll tell you this, before you run off parroting what you heard on ESPN or talk radio, before you listen to Stephen A. Smith, research the early NBA. Look at the guys who made it possible for Lebron or Mike or Kobe to become multi-millionaires in the first place. Then come talk to me about the best ever.

Drops mic and walks from stage, drippin blackness.

http://www.thejaygravesreport.com/