Monday, November 22, 2010

Thoughts on LeBron and Jordan



So, I've entirely forgotten about this blog, which is really stupid because it's not like I talk/think about sports any less these days. So I'm going to try to start posting again. Today's topic: LeBron, Jordan, skills, and supporting casts. My thesis: Jordan's supporting cast has gradually become overrated, and it didn't do much to aid the development of his skills; on the other hand, the weakness of LeBron's supporting cast in Cleveland actually made him a more efficient scorer, while in Miami, the relative strength of his team will encourage his bad habits.

Read more...I don't like LeBron. This has nothing to do with his Decision. Well, OK, it has a little bit to do with that. But anyone who knows me knows that I've disliked his game for a long time. In a nutshell, I find it incredibly aesthetically unappealing, and I think it relies on two things I don't much care for: 1) his unique combo of speed, size, and strength - basically, his raw physical assets, and 2) the fact that fouls are called very differently these days than they were in the past. In an effort to increase scoring (ignoring the fact that free throws contests are boring), the NBA has throughout the years ordered officials to call more and more ticky tack fouls - fouls for incidental contact that don't even slightly impact the offensive team. That means that when someone like LeBron goes charging down the lane, the slightest touch will result in a foul call. Of course, if he initiates the contact and the defender is his holding his ground, it should be a foul on LeBron, but refs never call him for offensive fouls. So when LeBron is driving, he scores pretty efficiently since whenever there's contact, he has the muscle to get through and finish, and he gets free throws to boot.

That's fine - I can't really hate a guy for taking advantage of what he has and finding ways to score. But I reserve the right to find it really unappealing to watch. There's not a ton of skill involved in this kind of play.

My bigger issue with LeBron, though, is his utter lack of a mid-range game, and his insistence on jacking up threes early in the shot clock. It's one thing to score efficiently but unappealingly; but it's even worse to not do that when you can do it pretty much at will. At this point, it's clear that he's just not a good shooter, and he doesn't seem to be developing any kind of mid-range skills. So why doesn't he just drive on every possession?

I've heard the argument that LeBron's output is already stellar despite his lack of a supporting cast, and that the lack of shooters around him forced him to take jumpers, but I don't buy it. If anything, his lack of a supporting cast forced him to drive more often, not to take jumpers more often. When people put the ball in your hands and expect you to do something, that encourages taking it to the hole. But despite that, he still took far too many threes per game.

Now that LeBron has taken his talents to South Beach, where he's got another great scorer on the wing in Wade and a floor spacing big in Bosh, people expect LeBron to excel. I see the opposite happening so far, and it makes sense to me. LeBron is a passive player. He has never wanted to wear the crown. He doesn't have the fire. He doesn't have the drive to be great. He'd rather sit back and let someone else do the work while he jacks up jumpers. The fact that he had to be the man in Cleveland forced him to take it to the hole more than he otherwise would have wanted to. Now that he's in Miami, where the scoring onus is more balanced, he can sit back and jack up more jumpers - and indeed, that's what he's doing. It's admittedly a small sample size, but he's taking significantly jumpers now than he ever did in Cleveland. And his shot selection is as bad as ever. He's shooting 29% from 3pt range. His eFG% on jumpers is just 41.5% (for comparison: Kobe's is 43.6%, Carmelo's is 44.0%, Durant's is 44.1%). I don't expect these numbers to get a whole lot better, despite a supporting cast that is at least solid. This actually arguably makes LeBron part of Wade's supporting cast.

I'm not sure why, after seven years in the league, LeBron hasn't realized that he's not a good shooter, and I'm not sure why he hasn't figured out a way to score from midrange. The argument has been made that Jordan's supporting cast helped him develop his offensive skills. Certainly they helped him win titles. But did they actually make him a better player? I don't buy the argument that they contributed much to his development. For one thing, Jordan shot 52% - an unheard of number for a guard - in his rookie season, and he continued shooting well above 50% for a number of years before the Bulls won their first title. And those early Bulls teams were not good. In '87, he averaged 37 PPG - 37! - and no one else on the team averaged more than 14.5. The next season, he averaged 35 while no teammate averaged more than 13. Jordan was doing this all alone, right away, from age 21. LeBron, at almost 26, still hasn't figured it out yet.

The Bulls obviously eventually became a better team, as guys like Pippen and Horace Grant matured. But even later on, how good were the Bulls? Many point to the fact that the '93-94 Bulls won 55 games without Jordan and then took the Knicks to a 7th game before losing (and may well have won the series if not for that generous foul call on Hubert Davis' 3 attempt) as evidence that his supporting cast was actually an excellent squad in its own right. But further analysis shows that that team was overrated; their Pythag expected win/loss record was only 50-32, and two rounds of playoffs are of course too small a sample to draw any real conclusion from. The team was pretty good, but mediocre at best on the offensive end; it found success by playing at a plodding pace with stout D. Simple rating system (SRS) and Pythag both place that year's Bulls team as roughly the 11th best team in the league. Obviously still quite good, but not nearly as good as is suggested by those who argue that they should have beaten the Knicks and could have beaten the Pacers and thus that they really were one of the top three or four teams in the league that year. The '94 Chicago team was certainly better than anything LeBron had in Cleveland, but even at its peak, MJ's supporting cast wasn't about to win anything on its own. It's revisionist history to suggest that the Bulls sans MJ were still excellent. And in any case, again, Jordan developed and excelled well before the likes of Pippen and Grant were any good. Those late 80s Bulls teams WERE pretty close to the standard of the Cavs of the LeBron era. That didn't stop Jordan from taking over the league.

Anyway, this is a long and rambly post, but my points are: 1) Jordan put up seasons with an invisible starting cast that LeBron has yet to dream of, 2) Jordan developed unbeatable skills before he had a decent team around him, 3) the weakness of LeBron's supporting cast in Cleveland actually encouraged better habits from him, 4) LeBron failed to learn much of anything over his first 7 years in the league and seems to be taking steps backwards in terms of efficiency this season, and 5) LeBron might be the most amazing physical specimen the league has ever seen, but his raw talents should make him by far the best in the league, and he's not, because he's both lazy/unmotivated and not a smart player.