Get over your nostalgia. LeBron James is better than Michael Jordan.
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” 1817
We sports fans are a shortsighted breed. Drawn in by emotional reactions to greatness, unhinged by displays of seemingly superhuman achievement, we build idols of men and call them immortal. Our worship disconnects us from reality. This is how grown-ass humans with real and meaningful things to do spend significant hours pontificating and debating—shouting, even—about which of our icons are, and will forever remain, the greatest of all. As often happens in the offices of Sportsnet magazine, where grown-ass humans debate and pontificate for a living, members of our staff recently engaged in a boisterous discussion about one “King James” in relation to the entity known as “His Airness.” The exchange lasted nearly an hour, though the participants were oblivious to measures of time, volume and other sensibilities. The outcome remains collectively unsettled, though all remain quite certain of themselves. That bit up top—about Ozymandias, king of kings—was one of my final arguments. A desperate draw from an undergraduate Romantic-period poetry course, alluding to the notion that greatness is inevitably fleeting. Nothing is untouchable. No one is immortal. Not Ozymandias. Not even Michael Jordan. Shelley surely had greater ambitions than entering a debate about the best player in a sport that didn’t exist when he lived, but such is the nature of these discussions. We’ll do anything to make a point. Walk into any sports bar and you’ll hear the same barrage of heated arguments. (Perhaps minus the allusions to dead poets.) After rolling their eyes, several of my colleagues went to get coffee. I hit Google to make sure I had the poem right.
Here’s the thing. This debate will go on for years, but at some point I will win it. LeBron James was the youngest player in NBA history to reach 10,000 points (at 23), and the youngest to reach 20,000 (earlier this season, at 28), and he’s already one of only 13 players with more then 20,000 points and 5,000 assists. Barring catastrophic circumstances—a career-ending injury or a switch to the NFL—James is set to become the greatest basketball player the planet has ever seen. Made at any time over the past 10 years, that statement would have been a reach, if not outlandish. But James is in the midst of one of the greatest seasons the game has ever seen. Coming off his first championship last June, he led the Miami Heat to a league-best 66-16 record, which included a 27-game winning streak. He averaged 26.8 points, 8.0 rebounds, 7.3 assists and 1.7 steals per game. He shot a career-high 56.5 percent from the field and 40.6 percent from beyond the arc. He finished second in voting for defensive player of the year while picking up his fourth MVP award—that’s just one less than Jordan won in his entire career. And while Jordan’s empire continues to flourish long after his retirement, there’s no way to calculate what LeBron can build upon the marketing platform Jordan created for the modern athlete. That’s for the coming years to dictate. Today, he just hammers away at Jordan’s statue with every thunderous, mind-boggling play.
The Jordan doctrine dictates that the greatest basketball player to grace the court came to the league in 1984 and rose to untouchable glory through the ’90s. Never had we seen a player this exceptional before; never would we see one again. Jordan ripped apart conventional notions of what’s possible and what isn’t. “I think it’s just God disguised as Michael Jordan,” Larry Bird said after the rising superstar dropped 63 points in a 1986 playoff loss to the Celtics. Jordan went on to sketch some of the most iconic moments in basketball history during a career that included six championships, six Finals MVPs (most ever), five league MVPs and a record 10 scoring titles (including seven consecutive, also a record).
When he played his last NBA game on April 16, 2003, Jordan had put 15 seasons in the record books. He was on the bench at the end of the third quarter as his Washington Wizards were being crushed by the 76ers in Philadelphia when the home crowd of 21,257 started chanting, “We want Mike! We want Mike!” Jordan smiled, embarrassed, resting his forehead on his hand, before finally re-entering the game partway through the fourth. Cameras circled him as he walked onto the court—it was a spectacle, not a game. This was a ceremonial tribute to greatness. The 76ers intentionally fouled him in the final two minutes so he could hit two more free throws and do his trademark backwards jog one last time. They fouled again, so Jordan could be substituted to the roars of the masses. One young boy distilled the moment with a homemade sign: “Michael Jordan: Simply the Best Ever. Thanks for the memories.” It wasn’t a dismissal of Magic or Bird, or Wilt or Russell. It was just that Jordan had ascended beyond them, as decided by a generation of fans who witnessed a level of greatness that seemed unsurpassable.
Just a couple of months after Jordan stepped off the court for good, James was taken first overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers. The comparisons were immediate. By then, the 18-year-old forward from St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio, had already been anointed the “Chosen One” on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Largely because of the Jordan phenomenon, James faced media attention no player that young had ever experienced. National cable networks picked up his high-school games. Hundreds of LeBron items were sold on eBay, and bidding for his rookie card reached $224.50 before he’d even played an NBA game. He signed a $90-million shoe deal with Nike a month before he was drafted. James embraced the hype, having “Chosen1” tattooed across his back—literally carrying his anointed status on his shoulders—and No. 23 sewed onto his Cavs jersey. The media called it the “Second Coming.”
But the hype was also a burden. James suffered from the inevitable, and premature, comparisons to Jordan through his early years in the NBA. He was unable to bring a title to Cleveland despite single-handedly leading the Cavs to the NBA Finals in 2007 and winning the league scoring title in 2009. He became a villain when he jumped ship for Miami in 2010, announcing his move in a televised PR blunder called The Decision. Most basketball fans cheered the following season when James and his sidekicks Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh failed to win it all. But the hate wasn’t to last—not for a player so talented. Last season, James led the small-ball, injury-ridden Heat to the championship and finally earned his first ring. His incredible play—45 points and 15 rebounds in a must-win game in Boston, a triple-double in the close-out game in the Finals—restored his tarnished image.
And that’s really the only fair place for a true comparison to begin. Everything before that—all the arguments, the headlines, the premature hero worship, the unfair villainization, the criticism for being too soft or not clutch—it was all irrelevant buildup to the point where the real Jordan vs. James discussions could start. That time is now. After coaching James on Team USA at the London Olympics, Jim Boeheim told ESPN that James is already in the conversation for greatest all-time. “I always felt Michael Jordan was the best player I’d ever seen,” he said. “I didn’t think it was close. I’m not so sure anymore.”
To this point, when you evaluate their careers side by side, Jordan and James are alarmingly similar. Jordan captured his first title at 28, a year older than James was when the Heat won last year. Some argue it took James nine NBA seasons to get his ring while it took Jordan only seven. But Jordan spent three years developing at North Carolina, while James entered the NBA straight out of high school, so it’s only fair to factor in those first three seasons as developmental. Jordan won the NCAA championship as a UNC freshman; James sold out arenas in high school and was a national star before he graduated. In the NBA, both were criticized—Jordan for not shooting well enough, not passing enough, not making his teammates better; James for not closing in big games and for opting to join forces with Wade and Bosh. Both were doubted. Both were denied until they neared their respective peaks and the haters could no longer hold them down. Both have created some of the most transcendent moments in basketball history. Jordan has the ’88 dunk competition and a career-high 69 points against Cleveland in 1990. At just 22, James was building his own highlight montage—scoring the final 25 points for Cleveland in a double-overtime playoff win against the Pistons in 2007, pushing his team to his first Finals appearance just five seasons into his career. It took Jordan seven years to pull that off.
And if you compare Jordan and James the season after they won their first championships—1992–1993 for Jordan, and this most recent campaign for James—the “Chosen One” actually comes out on top. James’s remarkable season, which included an uncanny six-game streak of averaging more than 30 points while shooting better than 60 percent from the floor, saw him earn a 31.6 player efficiency rating (PER)—a stat that quantifies a player’s productivity on a per-minute basis by combining box-score stats into one number (the NBA average is 15). The season after his first championship, Jordan had a PER of 27.7. (In their age-24 seasons, Jordan and James both posted a PER of 31.7—tied for the best season in the modern era, and tied for second all time behind Wilt Chamberlain’s 31.8.) “His Airness” was a winner until the end of his days with the Bulls, but he started suffering a drop-off in efficiency rating much earlier in his career; he never had a PER higher than 30 after his seventh season—meanwhile, James is reaching new statistical bests in his 10th.
Breaking the seasons down further shows specifically how James is edging the ghost of Jordan past. LeBron outshot MJ, putting up a .603 effective field goal percentage, which adjusts for threes being more valuable than twos, topping Jordan’s .526. James outdid Jordan on the boards, too, grabbing 13.1 percent of all available rebounds while on the floor to Jordan’s 9.5 percent. James assisted on 36.4 percent of the Heat’s field goals while he was on the court—in ’91–92, Jordan was in on 25.7 percent.
Watch James long enough and it starts to feel as though you and your buddies created him as a cheat player in NBA Live—maximum size, maximum skill, maximum everything. At six-foot-eight and 250 lb., James is the most versatile player in the league—faster than most guards and more powerful than most big men. Bill Simmons, ESPN analyst and NBA über nerd, once compared James to a combination of Magic, Bird, Dr. J, Isiah Thomas, Scottie Pippen, Bo Jackson and yes, Michael Jordan. And that was before James was 25 years old. Before he had won a championship. Before he even came close to his peak. You can see it every time he chases down and blocks a helpless victim from behind, or in his unfathomable grace in the open court—how does a man that large move so swiftly? Or in the way he sees the court like a point guard, but dominates inside like a power forward. Oh, sorry, did you spot a weakness in his game? Thanks for noticing—now James will eviscerate it. Can’t post up? Can now. Can’t shoot threes? Try him. In an era of score-at-will superstars like Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Durant, James’s two-way game is unmatched. And he’s just getting started. “I don’t know my ceiling. I don’t stop trying to improve my game,” James said as he collected his fourth MVP trophy earlier this month. “I want to continue to maximize what I have.”
In the midst of his incredible season, James—having dropped the No. 23 jersey in favour of No. 6 in 2010—defined the conversation himself. “I’m not MJ, I’m LJ,” he tweeted. Set aside the fact that they don’t even play the same position. (And, to be fair, James plays them all—Jordan could do a lot of things, but he wasn’t about to play post D on any seven-footers.) Unlike the litany of Baby Jordans to come before him, LeBron’s potential stands outside of Jordan’s parameters. Whereas Kobe Bryant’s determination and damn-them-all confidence reminded us of Jordan, James’s game has evolved into something we’ve never seen before. It’s not just about being better than Jordan; it’s about being something else. Something new.
Undoubtedly holding up the coronation of King James is the fact that, even in retirement, Jordan remains omnipresent. He still has his empire, and that empire is crushing James’s. According to Forbes, Jordan rakes in an estimated $80 million annually from corporate partnerships with Gatorade, Hanes and Upper Deck, among several others. Included in that haul is his partnership with Nike: The iconic Jordan brand, one of the most recognizable in the world, is said to earn Jordan more than $60 million a year. Meanwhile, it’s reported that James’s corporate partnerships bring in something closer to $30 million. He was the top seller for active players with signature shoe deals last season. Still, according to some reports, Jordan outsold him six to one in the U.S.
In that arena, it’s unlikely that James will ever be able to capture the kind of domestic and global mindshare that Jordan did, and that’s largely because the marketplace is more cluttered now than it was when Jordan played, says Paul Swangard, managing director of the
Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon. For example, he says, Jordan wasn’t competing for attention with international stars the way James is with Tiger Woods,
Lionel Messi and Rafael Nadal. But James has had his eyes on capturing global icon status for years, and if he’s proven anything on the court, it’s that anything’s possible. “I think he still has upside,” says Swangard. “A few more championships, a team that continues to focus on his brand both domestically and abroad—the sky’s the limit for a guy who could arguably go down as the best player to ever… play his position.”
Swangard paused before finishing that last sentence, hesitant to place James in the category of best player, period. He shouldn’t hesitate. Another title this year, and a string of seasons like the one he just had, and this conversation will continue to shift. All icons move aside eventually—remaining legends, but affecting us less viscerally through the decades. Today, schoolyard basketball games are filled with dreams of being James, Anthony and Durant. As the years turn over, you’ll find fewer and fewer looking to be like Mike. That’s the poetry of it. All things fade—“Look upon my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.” Those words, Shelley said, were
written on a crumbled statue of the mighty Ozymandias in the desert where his Egyptian kingdom once thrived.
You can almost hear that coming ovation, maybe a dozen years from now, when James takes his ceremonial final free throws. You can imagine the signs in that arena, held high in the reverent roar as the King takes his seat one last time: “LeBron James: Simply the Best Ever. Thanks for the memories.” It won’t be a coup of Jordan’s much-deserved throne—just another rightful ascension, once again decided by a generation of fans who witnessed a level of greatness that seems unsurpassable.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.
