Michael Jordan Faced Better Competition Than LeBron James

As we watch Michael Jordan vanquish each of his contemporaries in ESPN’s “The Last Dance” — which wraps up with its final two episodes on Sunday — it’s hard not to imagine the best of today’s game lacing up against them. What if LeBron James had played against these guys?

The tone of that question goes one of two ways. If you believe the late 1980s and early 1990s were the golden era of the NBA, you’re asking it derisively. LeBron against the REAL MEN of Jordan’s era? No chance. If you aren’t that nostalgic, you’re asking it gleefully. LeBron against those basketball Neanderthals? It’s about to get ugly for them.

Unless there’s a secret time travel portal out there, we can’t test either hypothesis. The best we can do is measure the relative strength of the teams that Jordan and James faced in their many playoff runs. We’ll use net rating, or the difference between each team’s points scored and allowed per 100 possessions. That data can’t settle the MJ-LeBron debate entirely, but it can give us insight into whose roads to victory were tougher – albeit with some caveats.

The average team Jordan faced in his 37 playoff series posted a regular-season net rating of +4.58, which translates into somewhere between 53 and 54 wins using a Pythagorean win percentage calculator. The average team LeBron faced in his 45 (and counting) series posted a regular-season net rating of +3.97, which roughly equates to a 52-win team. (The difference shrinks when removing Jordan’s three first-round playoff defeats to much superior opponents, but it still exists.)

That’s not a massive difference, but it is a material one. To put it in LeBronian terms, it’s only a bit less than the difference between the 2013 Pacers team that pushed LeBron’s Heat to seven games in the Eastern Conference finals (+4.5 net rating) and the 2016 Hawks squad that James’s Cavaliers swept mercilessly in the second round (+3.7 net rating).

The gap widens when considering only series victories. Jordan’s average playoff victim went 52-30 in the regular season with a net rating of +4.06. LeBron’s, on the other hand, went just 49-33 with a net rating of +2.82. That’s the difference between the 1992 Knicks, one of two teams to extend Chicago to seven games during Jordan’s title runs,¹ and the 2017 Celtics, who fell meekly to LeBron’s Cavs in five despite possessing home-court advantage.

This doesn’t mean that MJ’s opponents would beat LeBron’s if they were to play head-to-head. But it does show that Jordan’s victims were generally better in the specific season they faced the Bulls.

So why does MJ come out on top? There are two obvious reasons. One is that Jordan’s teams were much better than LeBron’s. Jordan’s Bulls averaged more than 58 wins a season with a net rating of +7.29, while James’s average club won 55 games. Jordan’s Bulls were also the Vegas betting favorite in 91 percent of their series beginning in 1988, the first year those odds are available,² compared with just 76 percent for LeBron’s. You’ll never believe this, but better teams tend to win more in the playoffs than worse teams.

Were Jordan’s teams better because Jordan is that much better than LeBron individually? Maybe. Were they better because Jordan had teammates that fit better alongside him? Maybe. It likely helped Jordan that he stayed with one franchise that built around him throughout his playoff career, as opposed to James, who hopped around from Cleveland, to Miami and back to Cleveland. But even LeBron’s Heat teams that were supposedly loaded with stars had a lower average net rating than the Bulls did over Jordan’s entire tenure.

The second obvious reason explains why LeBron both got to the NBA Finals more often and lost more often once there. Yes, the East really was stronger in MJ’s day.

The average East playoff team in Jordan’s era was much better than the average East playoff team in LeBron’s, even though Jordan’s Bulls were also better than LeBron’s Cavs and Heat. If anything, this table undersells the difficult East that Jordan (usually) defeated. Jordan’s average Eastern Conference finals opponent was nearly a point better in net rating than James’s.

The flip side is that James’s NBA Finals opponents were much tougher than Jordan’s. MJ never faced a finals foe as dominant as the 2015, 2016 and 2017 Warriors and only once bested a team better than the Spurs that swept James’s upstart Cavaliers in 2007. But James also faced four of the five worst finals opponents of the bunch, at least based on regular-season net rating.

There are two silver linings for LeBron defenders:

James had the best overall playoff series victory of the two: The 2015-16 Warriors had a net rating of +10.7, more than a point higher than the toughest team Jordan beat. In fact, James has three of the five most impressive victories by this measure, though Jordan occupies 11 of the next 13 spots on the list.

LeBron’s teams outperformed their regular-season benchmarks more than Jordan’s teams in the playoffs: Jordan’s playoff series followed a familiar script –- he won when he had the better regular-season team and lost when he didn’t. James, on the other hand, more often won with a worse team than Jordan, or at least came closer than expected.

To calculate this, I found the net rating for each series the two stars played. Then I subtracted the regular-season net rating differential between their team and their playoff opponent. A high positive number suggests that James or Jordan “overachieved” with their series result. A high negative number suggests the opposite.

Look at all the times LeBron’s teams pop up at the top of the list.

The flip side is that he also lost more often — or came closer to losing than expected — with better teams.

This method is a bit misleading because James’s later teams had a tendency to conserve energy in the regular season. Still, James ripping apart his toughest East opponents instead of just beating them is a feather in his cap. James turned it on more in the playoffs than Jordan — at least by this method.

(Makes you wonder how the same star who pushed the great 2008 Celtics to seven with a horrid supporting cast could also lose decisively to a Spurs team in 2014 that was closer to his team’s equal than the final series margin would suggest, as well as fall to three teams from 2009 to 2011 that were worse than his.)

Otherwise, though, Jordan did in fact face tougher opposition than LeBron. This alone shouldn’t settle the debate over who’s the GOAT, but it at least gives Jordan backers more supporting evidence to use.