It’s easily the greatest sports debate of all-time: MJ or LeBron? His Airness or the King? Air Jordan or The Kid from Akron? It will never end; it will keep changing until basketball sees one that is definitively greater than both or on the off chance LeBron wins five more championships and redefines his career. There is a lot of misinformation around this debate, largely due to recency bias, but we can’t strictly stick to facts here. That would be boring and it is impossible to accurately compare two players from different eras with different positions and one who was offensively restricted by an offense that the other would never have been subjected to (that’s Jordan in the triangle in case you were wondering).
So let’s start with a statement that sums up the greatness of Jordan. “Michael is a killer. If you give MJ an opening he’ll destroy you. Michael smells blood. Michael is going for their jugular. They’re on life support and Michael is pulling the plug.” That’s not something you hear very often. Jordan was simply different. He was the most competitive MFer in the league. Jordan was so competitive that when teammate Rod Higgins beat him in ping-pong once he bought a table and became the best ping-pong player on the team. This is a guy who would tip airport luggage workers and bet with his teammates that his bag would come out first. MJ also ripped the heart out of eight different very memorable teams: The Bad Boy Pistons, the Showtime Lakers, Pat Riley’s Knicks, Drexler’s Blazers, Barkley’s Suns, Shaq’s Magic, Stockton and Malone’s Jazz, and Miller’s Pacers, none of them ever the same. Jordan has had more iconic moments than any other basketball player ever. His 63 point-game against Larry Bird, “The Shot” against the Cavs in ‘89, the average of 41 points per game in the ‘93 Finals, the 72-win team in ‘96, The Flu Game, and the soul-crushing final shot in ‘98. There’s a good chance if you watched basketball in the ‘90s you remember where you were when some of those things happen. Before we get into LeBron and the head-to-head comparisons, here’s one more quality of Jordan’s: his charisma. When Jordan entered a room, people stopped talking and stared. His mere presence was enough to take over a room, be it six or six hundred people in that room. Jordan loses points for how in his early years he destroyed a few of his teams just by ruining his teammates’ confidence. He obviously eventually embraced his teammates and dominated the league. His attempt at a comeback also stings; he should have walked away after the ‘98 finals and that’s that.
So we’ve covered all of the things that made Jordan special, so what about LeBron? He wasn’t as pathologically competitive as Jordan, doesn’t have as many defining moments (although his chase-down block of Andre Iguodala is up there with any of Jordan’s), he has had more finals appearances but his results are a mixed bag (3 and 6 with a loss to a Dallas Mavericks team that they in no way should have lost to), so what does he have that Jordan didn’t? The answer is sheer athletic freakishness. LeBron is listed at 6’8 and 250 pounds and is considerably heavier and taller than listed. He also has the innate ability to shove some of the strongest athletes in sports out of his way like they were ragdolls. That was something only Wilt Chamberlain ever was able to do, and he was doing it to short white dudes who were essentially ragdolls anyways. Even Jordan wasn’t able to turn pregame shootarounds into an event like LeBron has. People will drive to an arena hours before the game starts just to watch LeBron goof around with teammates and casually throw down 360-degree windmills. LeBron has also expanded on Jordan’s turning of athletes into true celebrities, Jordan’s brand is considerably more valuable but LeBron’s is just about as influential.
Another major point in LeBron’s favor is his longevity, seventeen seasons this year with the end of his contract three years away. Jordan, in comparison, played thirteen years (if you forget those two Washington years, which should most definitely be forgotten). A common and damaging misconception in this debate that we need to disprove is that MJ had a vastly superior supporting cast, which is frankly not true. LeBron was truly saddled with some real stiffs in his early years. Edy Tavares, Okaro White, Jarvis Varnado, and Shaq’s bloated corpse all played minutes in years when LeBron made the Finals. Though MJ didn’t exactly have it easy with his early teammates either, Dave Corzine, Will Perdue, Gene Banks, and Josiah Barrington (who I may have made up, but you wouldn’t know and that’s the point)! In fact, His Airness only ever played with two high-quality players Scottie Pippen, a top 25 talent with a perfect sidekick’s pedigree, and Dennis Rodman, a top three rebounder of all-time and excellent defender who was unfortunately so erratic and crazy that Jordan and Phil Jackson had to have several interventions with him just to keep him from killing the team’s chemistry. The rest of his teams were journeymen, backups, and no-names. Compare these with LeBron’s more recent teams, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh at the same time, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love, and now Anthony Davis and Demarcus Cousins. If anything Jordan had it worse!
Both of these athletes have achieved basketball excellence but in the end, only one can be greatest. It’s MJ. Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all-time. Perhaps, if you were to take away the sheer meaning of what Jordan was and is, you could argue that LeBron is better at just playing basketball, but you can’t. Jordan is Jordan, he killed himself to win and in the end, he did, he dominated a sport to an extent that few have and fewer will again. In the end, he deserves the number one spot. It’s a sign that for most of his career LeBron has worn jersey number 23, yet 23 belongs to someone else in our minds. It belongs to Jordan, and so does this victory.