Lebron Vs Jordan: The GOAT by Data
Arguably one sport’s most controversial titles, the greatest basketball player of all time continually sparks more debate as Lebron James continues his career, rivalring the legacy of Micheal Jordan’s in the 90’s. Strong arguments can be made for both sides, and each has strong defenders, ready to spew statistical evidence with no reliable source besides “trust me bro”. With this project I seek to provide that reliable source. I will be using csv files containing all game statistics from both Micheal Jordan’s full career, and Lebron’s career up until the COVID lockdown in 2020. With this data, I will be searching for trends that may be underrepresented when debating each player’s career, and present a neutral case for the reader to decide who is the greatest basketball player of all time.
The careers of Jordan and Lebron are tough to compare, as both players competed in extremely different eras, with different types of basketball. Still, the same core statistics that equaled individual success in Jordan’s era were the same as in Lebron’s modern era of basketball, and thus would be a good spot to start my research.
To begin this analysis, I decided to filter down to those core statistics that correlate to basketball success, and show the averages of these stats for each player’s career. I retrieved the means of each player’s points, assists, rebounds, steals, and blocks throughout their career, being sure to drop NaN values for games missed due to illness or injury. I then created a bar plot that displayed the mean amount of each player’s respective statistics for the entirety of their recorded career. This kind of visualization allows us to get a strong idea of each player’s strengths and individual performance.
From this chart, the first thing one will probably notice is that Jordan averages around 3 more points per game in his career than Lebron. We know that Jordan and Lebron have very different playing styles, and this is clear in the data. Jordan was known as a ferocious scorer and defender, thus resulting in higher averages for points per game along with steals and blocks per game. Lebron is a bigger player than Jordan was, and his playing style is more in the fashion of a facilitator than scorer, even though he does a fine job of scoring the ball when the opportunity is there. Thus his rebound and assist totals are higher than Jordan’s, and one could argue that Lebron may be better at helping teammates excel than Jordan was.
Obviously, a lot more than just career averages can be used to analyze the greatness of an athlete, so next I wanted to analyze each player’s progression throughout their career. I did this by plotting the point totals per game for each player’s career, then looked to see if I could find any positive or negative trends within the plots.
On the left side we can see Jordan’s career progression, and on the right, Lebron’s. We can see that Jordan’s statistical peak occurred somewhere around the age of 25, with a slightly negative trend throughout the rest of his career. There are also two large gaps in Jordan’s data, both visualizing stints of retirement which he would eventually return from. In Lebron’s data, he also appears to have peaked statistically quite young in his career, but his data illustrates a slightly less substantial negative trend and maybe even a second peak in scoring numbers around the age of 32. It is also worth noting that Jordan’s graph is on a slightly larger scale than Lebron’s, and it can be argued that Jordan had more success earlier in his career in terms of scoring than Lebron.
Still, more than individual success is important when it comes to defining the greatest of all time. Team success, especially in the postseason, is a strong determining factor of one’s greatness. Players can fill stats sheets with all kinds of absurd statistics, but none of that matters if a team cannot win. I tried to find playoff data I could use to analyze each player’s success, but any type of win totals would be skewed because Jordan played at a time when series’ were five games instead of seven. Instead I just decided to do a simple win percentage calculation, totaling all of Jordan and Lebron’s respective playoff appearances and wins, then dividing them to get a win percentage. The results were almost identical, with Jordan coming in at 66.5% and Lebron at 66.2% prior to the COVD lockdown.
Given all this analysis, there still seems to be no definitive answer of who the greatest basketball player of all time is. There is no statistic that can prove the superiority of one player’s game over the other, and it is truly subjective to an individual’s understanding of what makes a player the best. I was hoping with this data analysis, I would find an interesting stat that would make a strong argument for one player over the other, but each time a player had an advantage in one area of analysis, the other would make up for it in a different category.
If we were to base the greatest player of all time off of scoring, we could conclude from this analysis that Jordan reigns supreme. He significantly suprasses points scored per game compared to Lebron, even though Bron has recently passed him up in total career scoring due to the longevity of his career. Beyond scoring though, one may argue that Lebron was the better player because of the impact he had on teammates and overall team success through assists and rebounds. The playoffs also give no advantage to a certain player, though one could argue Jordan performed better in NBA finals games, winning all 6 of his appearances as opposed to Lebron, who has a 3–6 record in the NBA finals.
At the end of the day, the greatest player of all time (at least for now, given that Lebron is still playing) is subjective, and solid arguments can be made in the defense of both players. To solve such subjectivity in a conversation like this, I think the best way to settle this debate is by appreciating the greatness of both players, and realize the differences between basketball then and now, and how much each player has done to evolve the game to their standards.