All this has nothing to do with Lebron running from guarding Kevin Durant. That is not very "King" like
Exactly if his teammates messed up in game 1 of the regular season they could expect a heated convo with MJ. He wouldn't allow them to be inferior versions of himself. I never said he was the nicest teammate. Just a a better teammate in the sense that he always got the best out of them and wouldn't accept less
I guess we just disagree about Jordan being "handed" 6 titles. He fought tooth and nail for the first 3 against a league with talent comparable to the Bulls. The tail end of the 2nd 3peat he definitely had a stacked team compared to the rest of the league but thats what happens when you build your own thing. Other players want to get in on what you have going for the easy rings. You know what Jordan did with that stacked team won the championship EVERY SINGLE TIME. Cant say the same for Lebron on his stacked teams. All I'm wondering is why Lebron's teams always underperfom? Why is it always his teammates fault? Why hasn't he been able to get the most out of role players? It's because he's ran off any coach with any ideas of a system. Used his power to replace them with yes men or turn them into yes men. He never sacrificed part of his game to make the team better as a whole. None of Lebron's teams played to their potential. Not a single Lebron led team has played the "beautiful game". It's always been about him trying to solo carry even when he has all star level talent next to him. Thats the reason he doesn't have 6 championships despite playing on stacked teams for the better part of a decade.
I dun think there is anyone else who has the same talent and the same drive..... Kobe IMO was a lesser version. You are talking about 99.9 percent of players who are not that way.
Ya I wasn't even the one who brought up Jordan the other guy did lol. All i was saying originally is Lebron is a front runner who will take the easy way out every time and he got butthurt trying to say he's greater than Jordan and making all kinds of crazy excuses as to why Lebron couldn't match his accomplishments.
Bro Jordan was on defensive 1st team all the way until 1998, he only stopped being on defensive 1st team when he was 39 and played on the Wizards team. I kinda agree KD is better than 2014 but you should at least try to bring up some facts to backup your claims otherwise whats the point of a discussion? Just 2 people throwing empty statements at each other?
Because Lebron's teams suck when he's not on them - we've seen that in how they performed pre- and post- Lebron. Jordan's absence is really helpful because we get to see how good his team was without him. Simply put, his teammates were just far, far better. We have hard evidence of that. Lebron's teammates weren't making the ECF without him, even in a miserably weak Eastern Conference.
but who did that for the bulls? pippen was already there. rodman was traded because the spurs considered him a headcase. kukoc was drafted. that's their 4 best players. i don't remember everybody else, but i can't imagine kerr and longley weren't playing for whoever gave them the biggest contract considering they were role players in the primes of their careers. i don't know how ron harper got on the team. maybe he took a paycut. 2011 is his only real fault. that's still why i have him below jordan, because i could never imagine jordan choking like that. every other season of his career there was nothing more he could do. has even done some things jordan didn't do like beat a 73 win team, lead 2 very deficient teams to the finals, have a 37.4 PER in a playoff run. in each of the last 4 finals, lebron has scored or assisted on at least 54.8% of cleveland's field goals. jordan in '91 and '97 is the only other one to do that. and jordan's best (56.3%) is dwarfed by lebron's best (66.8%). the fact lebron scores a lot of 2's while assisting on a lot of 3's helps this stat somewhat, but it's still crazy. doesn't mean he's better than jordan, just that he does jordan-like things fairly frequently. i thought role players were the ones he got the most out of and it was stars who suffered? what's the narrative we're going with? i don't see anyway to argue he doesn't make 3&D role players look better. if anything, that's his specialty. got delly a $40M contract. it's hard to say lebron's teams underperform when 2015 cleveland almost beat a 67 win team without their 2nd and 3rd best player, next year they beat a 73 win team, and the following year they almost swept the east and ended up with the best offensive rating in playoff history. i think he did blatt dirty, but that's one coach in 15 years. and blatt certainly hadn't proven himself to be anything amazing, just not bad enough to get fired i think. who are all the other coaches? most people's opinion of mike brown is pretty low and lebron let him coach. 2nd and 3rd year miami and 2nd and 3rd year cleveland both seemed to have very fluid and potent offenses (again, best offense in playoff history last year). not sure what beautiful offense was to be had in his first cleveland stint. team's constructed like that can be successful, but rarely play beautiful offense (and lebron still had them highly ranked). the warriors and dwade aging 5 years right before the 2013 playoffs are the main reason. if lebron basically played with a slightly lesser dwade (which is how i'd rank pippen) for the majority of his prime and had good role players and a legendary coach, and almost every team he met in the playoffs was a 1 prime HOF'er team (that still got beat when MJ wasn't the one beating them), then lebron might have 6 as well. and we'll even say he choked away a finals and it was only 5. but it'd still be 5 to MJ's 6. i mean so few new players rose up through the ranks that MJ's 2 titles against an actual 2 prime HOF'er team were against guys who were just as old as MJ in '97 and '98 (and who were pretty terrible playoff performers). lebron has had 7 finals against duncan/parker/ginobili plus arguably the greatest coach ever (who even had young kawhi to cancel out the other guys getting older), steph/klay/draymond, or steph/klay/draymond/kd plus a HOF caliber coach. it's not like we didn't see prime MJ lose to teams much better than his.
But Lebron PICKED these teammates you guys continuously bash. He encouraged management to bring back JR. He insisted Cleveland pay Tristan Thompson. He handpicked Ty Lie. Before that he talked Wade into coming over. If hes the "King" then he gets majority criticism. You cant have it both ways fam
even then, who is a better closer than lebron outside of MJ? MJ is the best closer in league history. it's essentially impossible for anyone to be better. but lebron is certainly in the ballpark. not that you said this, but for critics who think he has to be better than MJ at every facet of the game, instead of merely better at some and worse at others, he was never going to be the GOAT. the 2011 finals are one of the few times anyone could ever say lebron didn't close. before 2011 he already had several game-winners (and 1 actual buzzer beater) at that point in his playoff career. he actually spent the 2011 playoffs up to the finals just draining late-game jumpers on both the bulls' and celtics' elite defenses (no one ever remembers how ridiculous the heat's game 5 win over the bulls was with lebron and wade scoring 8 each in the final 3 minutes of a 16-2 comeback from down 12). and since 2011 he's been as flawless as you can hope to be in big moments/big games, including 4 buzzer beaters.
so what would you have done? just let tristan walk then? either you pay him some large amount of money (let's say lebron got him $2-3M/yr more, you're still paying him a lot right now), or you don't get the 2016 title. there wasn't other cap room to spend. tristan was a huge part of them winning a championship. and could have been part of another one if the most ridiculous free agent signing in history didn't happen. and he still ended up being pretty valuable in these playoffs even as a shell of himself. i mean you're basically trading a better cap situation 3 years in the future for a championship and a shot at another. and if lebron hadn't been there, what else would they have done? they just won a championship. JR was a fairly important part of that. they had no cap room and no way to replace him if he walked. every team in the world is bringing him back. these weren't situation where cleveland had X dollars in cap room and lebron spent it all on scrub free agents. they were situations in which the current member of the team had a ton of leverage to get resigned. it was never going to go substantially differently. signing JR for $10M a year instead of $14M wasn't going to fix anything for cleveland this year except give dan gilbert a lower luxury tax bill. i don't think ty lue is that great but do you think david blatt was that great either? it's not like he ran off pop.
Closing is the most CRITICAL part of greatness lol. If you dominate the whole game & are too scared to take the last shot, then you're not that great. That "King" title no longer hold any weight if you're afraid to guard Kevin Durant lol
Closing won't matter if you dominate all aspects of the game who's the better closer Shaq or Kobe? Who was the bigger factor in winning their 3 peat in LA? Who's the better closer Tony Parker or Tim Duncan? Again who was the best player on the Spurs? At the end of the day the last shot is just 3 pts at most. If you can get 4 offensive rebounds you can miss all the last shots you take your entire career and you would still be up 5 pts. I get that Kobe and Jordan are your boys but you overrate the last shot so much. If the last shot is the most important aspect to you then your GOAT should be Big Shot Rob. He is the best closer in the history of the NBA he has like 7 rings to show for it. Do you think Robert Horry is a superstar? Why would Lebron be afraid to guard KD? That's such a joke ok Lebron doesn't want to guard a well rested KD since he has to carry the entire offense, he wants to win the game not engage in 1v1 duel. If both of them are well rested and going against each other and Lebron avoided him ok then you have a point but that's not the case at all WTF.
to put it in perspective, i believe kobe has 3 playoff shots he made in the final 10 seconds to win or tie a game. across 20 years of basketball (it might be 4, i'll check later). and what were those 3 shots? game 2 against detroit to send it to OT. the lakers lost the next 3 games and the series. closing didn't save the day. the other 2 happened in the same game. game 4 against phoenix 2006. one shot to send it to OT. one shot to win in OT. the lakers lost the next 3 games and the series. so the 3 clutchest shots of kobe's playoff career and they led to precisely zero series wins because the differential in everything else was simply too great. that doesn't mean clutch shots are pointless or that they've never swung a series, just that they can have surprisingly limited impact.
A bunch of incoherent babbling. Bottom line, Lebron's lack of balls to finish the game, on the highest stage, is why he'll never be mentioned amongst the top 5 again. He's the best statchaser in NBA history The whole world saw this.... ""
A bunch of incoherent babbling. Bottomline, your GOAT should be Robert Horry, Jordan and Kobe shouldn't even be in the conversation. Btw lack of balls to finish the game? Where were you round 1-ECF? LeClutch has more clutch points than Kobe: https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2015/5/11/8584749/lebron-james-michael-jordan-game-winning-shots
Lebron apologists always have a million excuses as to why his teams never performed to their talent level. Anyone that needs that many excuses while playing on stacked teams where he chose his teammates just might not be as great as you think.
Because people think LeBron can do everything. He is human just like all of us. Can't do everything, but he still carries majority of the load. Can hate on that...
So you expect him to create the offense, guard the best player on the opposing team, lead the team in scoring, play D, and lead the team in minutes without getting gassed. Give a me a break, KD doesn't have the same load that lebron is carrying and you know that. Even if lebron defended that play, KD would've gotten the shot off because of his length. Jordan or Kobe would've never carry this team that far into the playoffs, let alone win one game against GS. Let's be realistic
No. Ppl expect Lebron to close games and be GREAT like the alleged GOAT you make him out to be. If you have Steph guarding you, SCORE ON HIM. If Durant's going off, how about you tell your teammates to let you guard him down the stretch. How about you take a shot in overtime? I don't want to hear anymore excuses for why Lebron disappears in the biggest momments
