as i said in that thread, whether you like PER or not, presumably its strengths and weaknesses for a given player would remain fairly constant in the playoffs and regular season, so your relative performance should largely be dictated by how you actually play. whatever PER did to measure larry bird's game, apparently he wasn't doing it as well in the playoffs as a lot of other great players. i only looked at 75 of the best players ever, all of whom presumably logged very substantial overall and per game playoff minutes. he's being compared to magic johnson, not buck johnson. reason would also dictate that if their finals competition was so stout because so much talent was accumulated in 2 or 3 teams, then their pre-finals competitition was weaker as those teams would have their talent sapped by the concentration in the upper teams. at one point they were playing in a league where 16 of the 23 teams, including a 30-52 bulls team one year, made the playoffs. magic several times faced a western conference where the 2nd seed was 10 or more wins behind the lakers. maybe he was, but that doesn't mean he didn't fall off from the regular season more than other "best players on the court" did, like say magic. i remember looking at SRS for the celtics and lakers in the 80's one time and i believe the celtics tended to have better regular season SRS numbers than the lakers but came away with 2 fewer titles. maybe the lakers slacked off more in the regular season or maybe the celtics just weren't quite as good in the playoffs as the regular season suggested they should be.
Yes, he did. He dominated against those teams individually/stats wise. But, as everyone knows. No one can do it on their own.
LBJ may have the talent equivalent to the GOAT. However, his mental and his jumpshot, are no where close.
Jordan missed most of the season soyou really can't look at the regular season record. IIRC Chicago was favored. Just going off memory. Do you really see folks betting against Jordan then though? They almost got to the conf finals without him the prior year and he had already hit NY up for 55 to show he "was back". Jordan shot 41% that series and was 5/19 (26%) in the elimination game. That's bad. The team won so it doesn't matter, similar to Kobe going 6/24 in G7. That's what is often overlooked in these discussions....the help. LeBron, for example, has only played 2 years on a team where he could play like garbage and they still can win. If that. In those 2 seasons he has been to the Finals twice and won one title. Guys keep talking about this will to win. What happens to that will when the supporting cast doesn't include a HOF player, like it did for almost every dude to win a title? I'm not saying Jordan and these other greats didn't have that will, but note the help they had when they won. To Jordan's credit, I don't think he ever lost with a team that he should have won with. I can say that about pretty much every other great player in the GOAT discussion though. What I can't say is Jordan never played poorly when it mattered most. His team was just so much better than the opposition that they got away with it.
This. Anyway its hard to criticize MJ because hey, the guy's one of the best ever to play the game and more importantly most people can't separate fact from Spacejam. They just assume MJ=God, he scores 90 pts a game and shuts down all 5 players singlehandedly. What I'll say to MJ is the fact that he only made 7M a year for most of his career allowed his GM to surround him with an awesome cast, something that always get overlooked. Nothing Barkley said is worthy of attention. LBJ COULD be the better than MJ. LOLwut, why is that newsworthy? After his historic seasons I'm pretty sure LBJ COULD be better.
