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Michael Jordan vs. LeBron James is perhaps the single most widely debated topic in basketball. Everybody has an opinion, and most of them are valid. Jordan and James are entirely different players. They played in different eras for different coaches and with different teammates. There's not a definitive answer to which of them was better. Jordan was the better scorer. James is the more versatile overall player. Who you choose comes down to what you value in a basketball player. It's hard to come up with a wrong answer.
Yet one came recently from someone very close to Jordan. David Falk, Jordan's longtime agent, spoke at Sports Business Journal's 4se conference last week and delivered a take on the subject was built on an entirely false premise. Taking aim at James' habit of switching teams via free agency, Falk argued that Jordan's loyalty held him back from claiming the greatest of all time title in undisputed fashion. "I really like LeBron," Falk said. "But I think if Jordan had cherry-picked what teams he wanted to be on and two other superstars, he would've won 15 championships."
Now, let's get the obvious out of the way early: no, Jordan could not have won 15 championships. Falk is obviously exaggerating for effect here, but the specificity of his estimation actually creates a perfect starting point. No, there was no scenario in which Jordan was going to win 15 championships by hand-picking his teams because he only played 15 NBA seasons. And, as Falk well knows as perhaps the most powerful agent in NBA history, players don't get to hand-pick the team that drafts them.
James was drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers. If he'd had his pick of teams as an 18-year-old seeking championships, he likely would not have chosen the 17-65 Cavaliers. Of course, it was not his choice, and the Cavaliers were badly mismanaged in the years that followed. So, after seven years in Cleveland, James left for greener pastures.
This is usually how it works. A great player is chosen by a bad team. He is stuck with that bad team for a long time. If that team doesn't shape up around him, he leaves. The circumstances for Jordan could have been similar. Jordan, like James, was selected by a bad midwestern team: the Chicago Bulls. He then signed a rookie contract that was initially slated to keep him in Chicago for seven years, exactly as long as James' first stretch in Cleveland. This means that if Jordan's plan had been to leave Chicago, his ability to do so would have come at the same point in his career that James left Cleveland.
So, let's fast forward through the first seven years of Jordan's career. Where was he at the end of that seventh season? Hoisting his first NBA championship trophy. From the earliest point at which Jordan could have left as a free agent through the end of his Chicago Bulls career, he never went a full season without winning a championship. He won three in a row between 1991 and 1993. He retired and missed the entire 1993-94 season and most of the 1994-95 season. He then returned, won three straight and retired again. Jordan literally could not have won more championships by jumping around from team to team because he won every championship that was available to him in this window of his career, save the ones he was retired for.
Now, does this create other possible arguments in Jordan's favor? Sure. Did he leave championships on the table through his retirements? It's entirely possible. He missed his entire age-30 season and most of his age-31 season. Those are prime championship-winning seasons. He then left the Bulls for good after his age-34 season. There was still probably some meat left on the bone for Jordan both because he was an All-Star level player when he returned three years later as a Wizard and because James, notably, won his last championship in his age-35 season.
But using these seasons to argue in Jordan's favor is a strange choice because Jordan himself made the choice not to play in them. He didn't miss out on championships because the Bulls didn't put good teams around him. He missed out on them because he chose not to play in those seasons.
The entire reason James had to change teams was because the Cavaliers didn't put the right team around him. That wasn't an issue for Jordan, clearly, as he won six championships in Chicago with Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson supporting him. We can't say that Pippen or Jordan were entirely Jordan-creations, either, as Pippen finished third in MVP in the first season after Jordan's initial retirement and Jackson led the Los Angeles Lakers to five championships after Jordan's second exit. These are legends in their own right.
If Jordan was working with, say, Mo Williams and Mike Brown, as Cleveland-era James was, he may not have won six championships. As much as he'd probably hate to admit it, he's lucky that Jerry Krause was his team's general manager at this point in his career. Krause got him Pippen and Jackson and everything else he needed to win. James wasn't that lucky, so he had to make his own luck. He found the sort of teams that Jordan had organically.
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But put all of this aside for a moment. Let's pretend we live in a world where Jordan, like James, had needed to change teams to give himself a chance to win. Let's say he'd wanted to, in Falk's words, cherry-pick two other superstars to play and win championships with. Could he have even done so?
The answer here is probably not. That has little to do with Jordan himself and much more to do with the way the salary cap worked during Jordan's career. At that stage in NBA history, stacking several superstars through free agency was functionally impossible. Why? Because the max salary didn't exist. Part of the reason that James partnering up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in 2010 was possible was that all three were capped at 30% of the salary cap in the first season of their new deals. Three 30% salaries equals 90% of the cap. This is mathematically sound.
Wanna guess what percentage of the salary cap Jordan was making at his peak? Spoilers: you're underestimating it. In Jordan's final season in Chicago, the NBA's salary cap was $26,900,000, but Jordan himself made $33,140,000. That means, on his own, Jordan was earning 123% of the salary cap. Was he worth it? Absolutely. This is Michael Jordan we're talking about. But this isn't even possible anymore. It was at the time because there was no max salary. This gave teams re-signing their own free agents an enormous inherent advantage because their Bird Rights allowed them to go above the cap to re-sign their own players. That's what made these gargantuan deals plausible.
Could Jordan have just taken less money? Well, sure, but remember, just because he could have doesn't mean other teams could have afforded to bring him in alongside their incumbent superstars, because all of them were making enormous relative salaries as well. The most money any free agent can get in signing with a new team is 35% of the cap, and even that much can only go to players with at least 10 years of experience. But during Jordan's championship years, it was the wild, wild west.
According to Hoops Hype's salary database, between Jordan's first championship season (1990-91) and his last (1997-98), 26 players made salaries above 35% of the salary cap. at the time That list includes many of the stars Jordan might have otherwise teamed up with: David Robinson (five times), Patrick Ewing (four times), Reggie Miller (twice), Gary Payton (twice) and Alonzo Mourning (twice) all make multiple appearances on that list.
Let's use Ewing as an example here. At his height, he took up an insane 76% of the salary cap. When Jordan was a free agent in 1996, the Knicks pursued him as a possible partner for Ewing. However, they didn't have enough cap space to make him a competitive offer. So they tried to come up with a workaround. At the time, the Knicks were owned by a combination of Cablevision and ITT-Sheraton. According to Sam Smith of the Chicago Tribune, the Knicks planned to give Jordan their $12 million in cap space and then add more money on top of it through a marketing contract with Sheraton that would have put him in hotel commercials.
Today, this is known as cap circumvention and is illegal. Back then, it was the only remotely plausible way of building a superteam through free agency. Doing so, practically speaking, was just not possible during the Jordan era. I've explained why in more detail here. Stars at the time just made too much money.
I know what you're thinking. This must be an advantage for James, right? He had a way of building championship-level teams that Jordan did not. Well, again, that might be technically true, but remember, even if James had access to superteams through free agency, so did his opponents. This means that while he had to play against the nigh-unbeatable Kevin Durant Warriors, Jordan never had to play against a group of superstars that united in free agency specifically to beat him. In a sense, this actually gave him an enormous advantage. He already had a championship-caliber supporting cast led by Pippen, but it was significantly harder for opponents to come up with the talent needed to oppose him.
Most of them did so through the NBA Draft. Jordan faced 10 total All-Stars in his six trips to the NBA Finals, or an average of 1.67 and nine of them were drafted by the team he was playing against. Only Charles Barkley was acquired via trade. There just wasn't a plausible path for one of the teams he vanquished to add a Durant-level player as the Warriors did. Without doing so, none of them had much of a chance against Jordan, Pippen and Jackson.
So why are we going to all of this trouble to lay all of this is out. Is it to argue that James is, in fact, better than Jordan was? No. Again, that is subjective. There are several entirely valid reasons to lean toward Jordan. I even made one of them recently in a story that highlighted Jordan's forgotten and sorely underrated 1989 season. This just isn't the way we tend to argue about the two greatest players ever.
The debate tends to center around faulty arguments like this. Each side cherry-picks arguments or accolades or hypotheticals in the way that Falk says James does with his teammates, but most of them fall apart the moment you appreciate that the two of them played in entirely different NBAs. The rules were different. The skills they were taught to prioritize were different. Their teams and their opponents were different. Everything was different.
There's still a compelling debate to be found here. It should just be centered around their actual traits as basketball players and not bogus hypotheticals like this. Would you rather have a player who can play all five positions well or a player who plays one better than anyone? Would you rather have the greatest scorer ever or perhaps the greatest playmaker ever? These aren't questions that can be answered objectively, but they're what should ultimately determine who you think is the greatest basketball player of all time, not cheap shots that falsely prop one of them up at the expense of the other.