The case for LeBron James over Michael Jordan in NBA’s GOAT debate

If you want to get to the core of the argument for LeBron James as the greatest player in the history of basketball, there may be no better place to start than with an exploration of the worst team in memory to reach the NBA Finals.

The 2006-07 Cleveland Cavaliers did not produce the poorest record for a Finals team in the league’s history. There are several that were just a smidge over .500, and three that had losing marks. The only reason, though, these Cavs managed to finish 18 games over .500 and win three playoff series is James was in their lineup.

The rotation “King James” carried into a playoff wins over the Wizards, Nets and Pistons had only one other player who ever appeared in an NBA All-Star Game, no one else who scored 11,000 career points, no one else who averaged 15 points in the regular season, no one else who averaged 5 assists, no one else who lasted long enough in the league to reach 1,000 career games.

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They needed LeBron so badly he scored the final 25 Cavs points of a Game 5 victory against the Pistons, a staggering performance that carried them to a 3-2 lead in the Eastern Conference finals series that would be closed out one game later. He averaged 45 minutes in those playoffs, along with 25.1 points, 8.1 rebounds and 8 assists.

“The first team he took to the Finals was not a good basketball team,” Cavs legend Austin Carr, who has been a member of their broadcast team for three decades, told Sporting News. “He was very good at just moving the chess pieces.

“You could always see that. I did some of his high school games, and he had the ability to figure out who belongs where and how to make it work.”

If we’re being honest, none of those other 2007 Cavs belonged in the NBA Finals. Guard Eric Snow had been an elite defender in his prime but was in his penultimate season and played just 24 minutes a game. Zydrunas Ilgauskas was 31, good only for 27 minutes on average, and his scoring dropped more than 3 points a game from the year before. Anderson Varejao would become an All-Defense pick eventually, but at this point was a part-time player. The closest thing Cleveland had to a secondary star was Larry Hughes, a top-10 pick nine years earlier who averaged 14.9 points and 3.7 assists. None of those guys is going to be traveling to Springfield unless visiting the Naismith Hall of Fame as a tourist.

Or, maybe they’ll attend as guests at LeBron’s induction ceremony.

(If he ever stops playing.)

They can stand on the stage as evidence of LeBron’s staggering greatness, which continues to be underestimated by all who mistakenly believe anyone, ever, has played this sport at a higher level than James.

You think “6” is the only number in all of mathematics? Please. Let’s start at the beginning and work our way to the top: three Ohio state championships at Akron’s St. Vincent-St. Mary High. Three Olympic gold medals. If we’re limiting this discussion to the NBA, there have been 41 playoff series victories, 184 playoff games won, 292 playoff games entered – all records. In 18 years of playoff games, he has averaged 28.4 points, 9 rebounds, 7.2 assists, 49.6 percent shooting and 41 minutes per game. He has been selected 21 times to the All-Star Game, been voted All-NBA 21 times and the league MVP four times. His 42,184 points are the most any player has scored, and his 59,041 minutes are the most anyone has played. His 11,584 assists rank fourth in league history, and he’s in the top 25 in rebounds. His teams reached the NBA Finals 10 times. And they won four NBA titles.

JORDAN VS. LEBRON: Key stats you need to know

More astounding than all of this, perhaps, is how unappreciated James is in his own time. When the Beatles were changing the world with Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and, my goodness, Abbey Road, at least the young people saw and felt and celebrated their too-short journey. Yeah, there were parents throughout America shouting about how all this was noise and Sinatra and Tommy Dorsey were so much better, but those who knew, knew. And they were legion.

There appear to be so few who comprehend what they’re seeing with James. He just completed a season in which he played the majority at age 40, and he averaged 24.4 points, 8.2 assists, 7.8 rebounds and 51.3 percent shooting. That’s No. 13 in scoring, No. 6 in assists, No. 22 in rebounding and, among players who averaged at least 15 points, No. 12 in field goal accuracy. By this age, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was down to 14.6 points a game. Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, Kobe Bryant, Magic Johnson and Jerry West all were retired by then, most for several years.

James was selected to the All-NBA team for the 21st consecutive season. Kareem made his last at 38, Chamberlain at 35, Jordan and Bryant at 34, Russell at 33.

“I come down to the age, explosiveness, expectations … but it also took me a long time to come to it. Because once you say that somebody is the best to ever do it, you really can’t take it back,” Cleveland sports broadcaster Ken Carman told Sporting News. “If I say, ‘All right, LeBron is the best ever’, I can't just decide two years later, ‘Oh, you know what? Michael’s really the best.’ Because then it seems like you’re flip-flopping too much.

“I was a holdout, because I wanted to make sure when I said it. Like, some day we’re going to have real arguments about (Patrick) Mahomes or (Tom) Brady, and I’ll be a holdout for Brady. So I held out.”

Now, though, Carman has seen what too many are missing.

It’s LeBron James.

“Yes”.

Let’s talk about the titles

It is fitting that the defining play of LeBron James’ career, the one of which there are at least a half-dozen YouTube videos showing or merely discussing the moment that have received more than a half-million views, was not about scoring.

“It’s The Block. It’s Game 7. He’s played every minute. It’s the last possible game, it’s the last possible minute, and he does an athletic feat of sprinting back – a split-second late, that’s a goaltending,” Richard Jefferson, then James’ teammate with the Cavs, said on J.J. Redick’s podcast in 2023. “The Block is the most amazing play.”

It’s The Block because James always has been so much more than a scorer. You say “The Block” in discussing James, there’s no doubt which play is being referenced, even though he’s rejected 1,434 shots including the regular season and playoffs.

The 2016 NBA Finals series between the Cavs and Warriors was tied at 3-3, and the game was tied at 89, and only 2 minutes remained. An errant layup attempt by Cleveland guard Kyrie Irving was rebounded and quickly turned into a 2-on-1 fastbreak, with Steph Curry finding wing Andre Iguodala filling the right lane and apparently in the clear for an easy layup. James ran from two steps behind on the opposite side of the court and soared to swipe Iguodala’s shot off the backboard, keeping the ball in play to be retrieved by a teammate. The Warriors did not score again, and the Cavs won the series on Irving’s 25-foot 3-pointer.

That completed a comeback from a 3-1 series deficit against an opponent that won 73 regular-season games and entered the Finals at 12-5 in playoff games. James posted a triple-double in the deciding game. He scored or assisted on 56 percent of Cleveland’s points.

“That Game 7 performance in 2016 coming right out of halftime – that’s as big as anybody can get,” Carman, who hosts the morning show on 92.3 The Fan, told SN. “It takes a guy who looks like he’s out of Greek mythology to will his team back from something like that. To see them rise up from the canvas was one of the most fun things.”

That 2016 title was the pinnacle of an astonishing run of success for James, which began controversially with his move to the Miami Heat as a free agent in 2010. “The Decision” could not have been handled much more gracelessly, and that episode remains a weapon of sorts used against him by, well, let’s just call them “haters”. It’s been 15 years. Those still bothered by what happened that night, or how it happened, want to be bothered.

From the 2010-2011 season through 2017-18, James reached the Finals as a member of the Heat or Cavaliers. That’s eight Finals in a row, achieved in a period when there were more than three times as many teams in the league as when Russell appeared in 10 in a row from 1957 through 1966.

“The eight straight Finals – people don’t even talk about that. All these historians and the people who are into statistics, they don’t talk about that,” Carr told SN. “To me, that’s the most significant accomplishment, I don’t care how many more championships he wins. There will never be anybody in any sport that will do that. To me, it’s his defining moment.”

Let’s talk about teammates

The year before James was drafted with the No. 1 pick in the 2003 NBA Draft, the Cavaliers compiled a 17-65 record. In his first season, they went 35-47. That represented an 18-game improvement, and that measurement stands as the most reliable indicator of his importance to the teams he joined. And left.

When Michael Jordan became a Chicago Bull in 1984, the team improved by 11 victories year over year. They got better. Just not as better.

An even more stark representation could be found in what occurred after each player departed his first organization.

In 2009-10, James’ last year before departing the Cavs, they won 61 regular-season games. The following season, with him in Miami, they won 19, though five of the other seven rotation players remained unchanged. That’s a difference of 42 games.

In 1992-93, before Jordan took a season off to play minor-league baseball, the Bulls were 57-25. In 1993-94, with him playing the outfield for the Birmingham Barons, Chicago plunged all the way to … 55-27.

The one example of Jordan’s impact being nearly as profound came within the 1994-95 season, when he ended his long hiatus on March 19 and the Bulls at 34-31. They finished the regular season with a 13-4 run. Over a full season, that would represent a 20-game improvement.

Which is exactly what James meant to the Cavs when he returned from Miami in 2014-15. As for the Heat, they improved by 12 games in James’ first season, then declined by 17 wins after he left.

This is what happens with LeBron James: Winning follows wherever he goes. Merely entering his presence can make losing players champions. Most obviously, there was the astounding case of J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert. In 2014-15, they were rotation players on a Knicks team that owned a 5-31 record just after New Year’s Day. The Cavs acquired them in a three-team trade, and they became rotation players on a team that ended the regular season with a 34-13 flourish and reached the NBA Finals. A year after that, they won the league title.

It was legendary Houston Oilers coach Bum Phillips who summed it up best, although he was talking about football and Don Shula at the time.

“He can take his’n and beat your’n, and take your’n and beat his’n.”

Works for LeBron even better.

Let’s talk about expansion

What is almost never cited in these discussions is the dramatic growth of the game over time, both within the U.S. and around the globe.

The year after James entered the league, in 2004-05, Charlotte was awarded an expansion team. The NBA since has existed as a 30-team operation, even as international participation has grown from 1.7 percent of the player pool in the 1980-81 season to 35 percent in 2024-25. There is no Sabonis or Marciulionis or Petrovic being restrained by politics from entering the league. Almost without exception, the world’s best players spend their prime years competing here.

A great player in the 1990s would have benefited from an expansion that added six teams to the league over a seven-year period without a corresponding explosion of international talent – which meant reaching roughly 25 percent deeper into the American talent pool to populate the competition. People remember how rugged the Pistons or Knicks were, but forget there were dozens of men in the league fortunate to be called NBA players.

James has been playing against the world’s best nearly his entire career: Yao Ming, Tony Parker, Pau Gasol, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, as well as American superstars including Curry, Durant, Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett.

“Michael Jordan came in with perfect timing for him. Magic Johnson was a little older, Larry Bird was older – those dynasties were older. And you got this young kid who could do a lot of things people had not seen before. You throw in the shoes, you throw in the jingles, you throw in ‘Space Jam’ and everybody wanted to be like Mike. I get that part,” said Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist James Causey, who wrote in 2024 of his belief James had surpassed Jordan.

“When LeBron James came in, I think he had much tougher competition. And had you ever seen a person come into the league and just dominate from the time he steps on the court until 20-plus years later? He’s still doing the same things. Sticking around long enough for his son to play? It’s incredible. I don’t think we’ll ever see anything like this again.”

Let’s talk about why we talk about this

In the days before the internet, before Google and Siri and AI, if you worked in a newspaper sports department, there was an excellent chance you spent some of your time settling bar arguments. The phone would ring, someone on the line would ask: Who had more strikeouts, Fergie Jenkins or Bob Gibson? Or maybe something less tangible, such as: Who was better, Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays? Those who made the call would have previously agreed to accept the opinion of whatever neutral, third-party arbiter answered.

Sports has thrived for generations on debate. It’s not something invented to fill time on all-sports networks. It’s what we do because we love to do it. And MJ vs. LBJ may be the apotheosis of the sports debate.

“I think it’s one of the age-old ways to get into a conversation. Guys talk about LeBron and Michael,” Carman said. “It’s almost the ‘How’s the weather?’ of conversation starters.”

James’ side of the conversation, though, is burdened by so many extraneous factors. A lot of those with the loudest voices grew up with Jordan as an icon, and so their position is rooted in nostalgia as much as basketball excellence. James has developed detractors for his willingness to take political stands, such as wearing a T-shirt prior to a game protesting the 2014 death in New York of Eric Garner.

Jordan famously explained to a friend his refusal to support a Black candidate for the U.S. Senate against North Carolina incumbent Jesse Helms – who advocated for segregation and later filibustered against establishment of the Martin Luther King Day holiday – with the phrase, “Republicans buy shoes, too.” He later claimed it was meant as a joke.

“LeBron never gets in trouble. He’s never been accused of doing anything wrong. He’s been married forever. He appears to be a great dad and raised three beautiful kids. I think people hate him because he’s so nice,” Causey told SN. “Michael Jordan had sort of a mean streak, and I think a lot of people take to that part. You’ve heard stories of him not signing jerseys, him treating teammates bad and all these kinds of things. I think a lot of people resonate to that bad-boy image.

“We’re living in a whole different era today, where people tend to like a person with that edge.”

James has been accused by his haters of “ring-chasing”. That’s exactly what you’d want a player to do, though: endeavor to win championships. Some just have the advantage of doing it without needing to change teams.

Jordan was provided the opportunity to work in Chicago with a Hall of Fame coach (Phil Jackson), Hall of Fame teammates (Scottie Pippen, and later Dennis Rodman) and a Hall of Fame GM building the team (Jerry Krause). When drafted to Cleveland, James had none of that. He’s only worked with one such coach (Erik Spoelstra) and GM (Pat Riley) in more than two decades.

And still, he wins. He stays on the court. He works at the game. He makes his teammates better, some of them against obvious odds.

No one ever has done what LeBron James has done, for as long as he’s done it.

“He continues to amaze,” “LeBron is such a freak of nature, and one of the greatest athletes ever to come along in any sport. He continues to do it and is still playing an extraordinary level now.”

It’s a show worth watching for as long as it lasts. All anyone needs to do is open their eyes, and their minds.