[June 6th marks the NBA’s 75th birthday, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of basketball figures and stories. Leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post on the bball stories, histories, and contexts you’d highlight—share ‘em in comments or by email, please!]
On two layers to
the best basketball player debate, and an unexpected twist.
In many ways,
the debate over whether Michael
Jordan or LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of all time seems
to come down to a very familiar refrain: championships
vs. stats. That’s the same metric that has often been used to adjudicate
another famous basketball debate (Russell
vs. Chamberlain), as well as some of the more famous ones in football (Montana
vs. Marino and Brady
vs. Manning). It’s a particularly compelling sports debate because it extends
the focus from just the two individual players in question to broader arguments
about whether team
victories or individual achievement are more effective measures of
greatness—of course the ultimate goal in team sports is to win a title, but how
much can any individual contribute to that, and how much should we penalize
those whose teams just weren’t quite good enough? Plus, LeBron has made it to a
ton more championship series than Jordan and just hasn’t quite won them all—if
he had gotten those few extra bounces and won them all, would we even be having
this debate? Are Jordan’s stats comparable enough that he would stay in the
conversation regardless? And so on (and so on and so on…).
There’s another
possible side to the greatest basketball player debate, though: the character
and communal presence of each man. I wrote about Jordan’s
relative lack of community engagement here, and about LeBron’s
impressive activism here (which has only increased in recent years with his
opening of a wonderful
new school and his voting
rights activism). Obviously activism isn’t the only measure of character,
but in this case it does seem to line up pretty well with that side of the two
men as well: Jordan was notoriously nasty and petty as a player, gave one of
the most arrogant
and vindictive Hall of Fame speeches ever, and has spent much of his retirement
gambling like he’s in a Scorcese film; while LeBron has married
his childhood sweetheart, given back to his community at every turn, and
basically turned the other cheek to ridiculous levels of vitriol and
hatred from fans almost everywhere other than his own cities. Obviously
activism and character are separate from athletic performance—but once we
introduce championships into the mix, we’ve already moved beyond the individual
accomplishments of players in any case, so I see no reason not to think about
whether other factors might contribute to how we measure overall greatness.
And once we
start considering other such factors, the whole debate has the potential to
take a surprising twist. After all, neither Jordan (#5) nor LeBron (currently
#3) are at the top of the all-time
NBA scoring list; that honor goes to the great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And if we’re
talking about social and cultural presence and impact, I don’t know that any
professional athlete can compare with Kareem—from his early days in film to his
ongoing career as a writer and novelist,
and especially to his consistently thoughtful
and impressive contributions to public
debates, Abdul-Jabbar has left his imprint on American popular culture,
politics, and society in numerous ways over the last five decades. That’s not
enough to ensure all-time greatness of course, but again, Abdul-Jabbar is also
the NBA’s all-time leading scorer and was unquestionably one of the greatest
players by any number of such measures. So at the very least, I’d say that his
combination of on-the-court greatness, championship
contributions, and social presence and activism puts Abdul-Jabbar on the
very short list of all-time greats, and perhaps should make him, rather than
MJ, LeBron’s fiercest competitor for the throne.
Last bball story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other bball stories, histories, or contexts you’d share?
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