Introduction

It has always been a very common thing to draw comparisons. This is even more true in sports, where people love to compare teams or players to find out who are the best ones. If there is a debate that regularly shakes the basketball planet 🏀, it is about the GOAT. It divides as much between generations as between styles of play. It tries to settle who is the Greatest player Of All Time, or more succinctly the GOAT 🐐.
Indeed, more and more Basketball fans and journalists are doing their best to answer one very specific question: Can LeBron James dethrone Michael Jordan as the GOAT?
This one now belongs to the pantheon of sport debates, alongside Messi vs Ronaldo ⚽, or Nadal vs Federer 🎾. As you will have understood, given the passion towards this debate, the stakes are high. We will therefore try to present the most relevant facts. This will provide you an armada of arguments for your next verbal joust over this subject.

Also, if you are a newcomer to the NBA planet, you may want to visit this website which is a good DataViz introduction to the fundamentals of the NBA.





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Careers

First thing first, let’s focus on the obvious: trophies and achievements. At first sight, Michael Jordan is the most awarded player, especially with his 6 NBA titles. More impressive, he piled all those awards in only 13 seasons with the Bulls (while James is playing his 18th season), as his 2nd comeback with the Wizards for the two last seasons of his career are considered to be a lap of victory. Proof of that, he announced two weeks after the 9/11 that his entire salary as a player (he was also president of the Charlotte Hornets/Bobcats franchise at the same time) would be donated to 9/11 victims’ family.

Below are also a few facts and records achieved by Jordan and James over the of course their amazing careers.

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Player with the most all-time NBA Scoring Titles (10)
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Oldest player in NBA history to score 40 points in a game (at 40)
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Player with the highest scoring average in a NBA Finals (41.0 vs Suns in 1993)
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Only player to win MVP, Scoring Title & DPOY in the same season (1988)
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Only player in NBA history to earn more money than his entire team (1988)

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." – Michael Jordan

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Youngest player to reach every thousand point milestone from 1,000 to 35,000
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Player with the most all-time playoff points & wins (7,491 & 172)
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Made the cover of Sports Illustrated at only 17 and was called the Chosen One
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First player to record a triple-double against every NBA team
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Only player in NBA history to average a triple double in the NBA Finals

"I like criticism. It makes you strong. You have to be able to accept failure to get better." – LeBron James

Statistics

A simple look at the achievements is not enough since they played in different eras, with and against different players. Let’s have a look at their respective statistics to try to measure their impact on the court.

A quick look at the average points per game by season shows us that during his prime (still not taking into account his last two seasons), MJ was a way better scorer than LeBron James. Even though LeBron's numbers are amazing, Jordan's ones are just outstanding and actually are an all time NBA record.

Going more into details, we can see that Jordan takes more shots per game and is slightly less efficient than James. Also, the crazy numbers of triple doubles (double digits statistics in at least three categories such as rebounds, assists and points) and double doubles of James shows that he is much more versatile in offense. James tends to score a bit less then Jordan, but he contributes in a more global way to the offensive phases. This confirms the trend that we first saw in the bar chart race video where James had much greater Assists and Rebounds numbers than Jordan.

Let’s have a look at the short maps of James and Jordan’s careers. LeBron's style is very athletic which involves a very high presence under the rim. However, LeBron is far from being limited to that as he has a very developed 3-points game, in line with the modern area gameplay where 3-points shots have a critical impact on winning games and championships. Overall, James is extremely versatile and can score from literally everywhere.
In Jordan’s case, we can notice that his 3-points game is less developed (probably because of the playing style back then). However, we can see a huge presence at mid distance on both sides of the rim, which confirms the beliefs about his famous signature move, the mid distance fade away.
Even if both players have their own playing style and specificities, we can see that they are above the league standards at literally every single position, which shows how amazing scorers they are.

LeBron James                                                                        Michael Jordan

Toughness

Let’s now try to tackle a major issue in comparing players who played at different times by measuring the toughness and adversity they faced. For that purpose, we will focus on the "notable" players Jordan and James faced during finals they won. We will use the most selective NBA rewards (All of Fame, All NBA & All Defensive teams selections) to define wheter a player is "notable".

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Jordan actually won the 6 Finals he played (some say he was the killer instinct). But for James, it’s more complicated: he won "only" 4 Finals while he played 10. But thanks to our statistics, we can observe that the competition faced by LeBron James was more intense (on average) at the Finals he played. Indeed, James has had to play against two of the best teams in NBA history (if we exclude the Bulls of Jordan of course !) : the Steph Curry’s Golden State Warriors and the San Antonio Spurs led by the most outstanding (and charismatic) trio of all time. Even though this statistic is a bit speculative, we can argue that James faced stronger competition than Jordan, which might explain why he lost so many finals.

Conclusion

That’s it! We hope we could provide you with several meaningful information to help you make a decision on this famous clash. The choice of the statistics and figures we used was purely subjective, and we could have used many other ones. In the end, any statistic can be contradicted by another one and this is probably why this debate is eternal… and maybe that’s why we love debating so much! What really matters is that we enjoy this beautiful game and what these 2 amazing players have to offer us!