Culture
Who is the GOAT: LeBron or Jordan? Current players weigh in
Some debates deserve a stage of their own.
So while our (anonymous) NBA player poll was released Monday, with a record 142 players weighing in on some of the most interesting questions surrounding their league, we decided to dive even deeper into the age-old GOAT discussion because there’s a fascinating voting trend that simply must be explored.
While Michael Jordan won the “Greatest of All Time” category for the third consecutive time, his once-massive lead over LeBron James has shrunk significantly with every passing poll. This time around, James almost took the mantle. The data speaks loud and clear…
- 2019 (the first time The Athletic conducted the poll): Jordan earned 73 percent of the votes, with James second at 11.9 percent (a gap of 61.1 percentage points)
- 2023: Jordan earned 58.3 percent of the votes, with James second at 33 percent (a gap of 25.3 percent)
- 2024: Jordan earned 45.9 percent of the votes, with James second at 42.1 percent (a gap of just 3.8 percent)
But why has Jordan’s lead shrunk so much? We wanted to let the players themselves explain.
The consistent rationale among LeBron voters, both old and new, is that his longevity is the ultimate difference-maker between the two. He’ll be 40 years old on Dec. 30, yet is still great enough to be widely considered one of the best players in today’s game. While Jordan was epic in his 14-year career, from his 6-0 record in the NBA Finals to his five Most Valuable Player awards and his incredible two-way play, many players shared the view that James’ ability to remain elite for more than two decades puts him over the top.
Jordan, to review, retired twice (in 1993 and 1998) during his storied career and played 14 seasons in a 19-year span. When he was James’ age, in the last of his two forgettable seasons in Washington, he was putting up good numbers on a bad Wizards team that went 37-45 in both of his postseason-less campaigns. James, meanwhile, has saved some of his best work for last:
- He broke Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time scoring record on Feb. 7, 2023
- He led the Los Angeles Lakers to the Western Conference finals three months later
- He led the Lakers to an (inaugural) In-Season Tournament title in December
- He became the first player to be named to a 20th All-Star team in February
- He was one of three players to average at least 25 points, eight assists and seven rebounds this season (the others were Nikola Jokić and Luka Dončić)
Out of respect for the GOAT incumbent, we’ll begin by highlighting this nuanced opinion from a Jordan voter who believes MJ’s influence on the entire sports world — not just basketball — is a deciding X-factor.
“The greatest ever is LeBron James, (but) the greatest of all time is Michael Jordan,” the player said. “The difference is stats. When you talk about impact, Michael Jordan. When you talk about stats and numbers, LeBron. Mike has the most impact, so that makes him the greatest ever in all aspects because he doesn’t just impact basketball. He impacts people who look up to him in tennis and football. But you won’t hear that about LeBron. … LeBron changed the game, but more so how it’s played. Jordan changed how it’s viewed. And that’s a big difference.”
Yet as the many LeBron voters detailed below, it goes much deeper than that for them. The microphone is theirs:
“I think what Jordan did in (14) years is crazy, but you’d have to add a whole lot of other things (for him to catch up with James). I think we got MVP fatigue with ‘Bron. I think he should have like seven (MVPs, rather than four). I think ‘Bron should have D-Rose’s (Derrick Rose) MVP (in 2010-11). I think he should have KD’s (Kevin Durant) MVP (in 2013-14). I think he should have James Harden’s MVP (in 2017-18). There’s a lot of MVPs he should have had.”
“Who would I draft in an all-time draft? That’s the way I look at it, you know what I’m saying? Some people look at it like, ‘Who do I want taking the last shot?’ Blah, blah, blah, all this other sh–. But in an all-time draft, I’m choosing LeBron. Why? I get 20 years of greatness, and I get somebody who plays one through five (point guard through center). And let me just say, the person I choose No. 2 would be Shaq (O’Neal), the most dominant player of all time. So in my GOAT debate, I would go 1-2 like that. And this is coming from a Kobe (Bryant) fan.
“Winning, era-wise, is tough. And obviously, you’ve got Mike as the killer. But then, how does he (adjust to the rise of) the 3-point shot? There are questions if we take off the Teflon MJ cloak. If you took players from right now and put them back then, we’re faster, stronger, more skilled. We’d kill them. It is what it is. Part of the reason Michael was Michael was he was the first of this generation’s athletes: 6-foot-6, 40-inch vertical, which back in the ’80s was insane. But we’ve got rookies and role players doing that nowadays. ‘Bron is 6-foot-9, 260 pounds, with a 50-inch vertical. That’s probably what it’s gonna look like in 2045. And then we’re gonna be looking at it like, ‘I don’t know if I could play with those little kids.’ (Nowadays) in high school, people are taking off from the free-throw line and windmill dunking on people. When I was in school, barely finishing a windmill was a thing. … Now, it’s like these kids are windmilling on kids, doing it in eighth grade. It’s part of evolution. And even with basketball, once people see sh– is possible, they try to do it. When I was a kid, Kobe barely did the through-the-legs dunk. That’s what we aspired to do. Now people are looking at Zach LaVine and the free-throw line 360 and other wild sh–. … It’s part of how this sh– grows.”
“(LeBron) for sure. I think him being able to literally do everything and win (titles) with so many different organizations (the Cleveland Cavaliers, Miami Heat and Lakers) and also having the most points in his career, along with figuring out how to have longevity in his career. Everybody’s looking to have longevity, and he figured it out. He figured it out at the highest level. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“LeBron James is without a doubt the greatest player to ever touch a basketball. What he brings to the court, and for long he has, that’s my thing.”
“I’d say LeBron. Just to be able to do it for 20 years, it’s insane. I think it’s more of a longevity thing that you have to look at there, and (how) still every year he’s playing at the highest level. With the highest expectations (placed on him), he had everything to lose in terms of coming into the league. It would’ve been very easy for him to underachieve and not meet those expectations, I think he’s far surpassed them, all of them, somehow. … Being on the floor, the closer you are to the game, the more of a sense (you get) for how great LeBron is, how he sees things, how he talks. His impact on the game, his gravity on the game is felt.”
“(LeBron), easily. He’s the best at everything, His longevity, his consistency, his availability. And he’s won.”
“For me, personally, growing up, (James) has just been the pinnacle. Being a Midwest kid, I remember him being in Ohio at (St. Vincent-St. Mary High School), and I’m hearing about him as a young kid. And just seeing him come up and seeing him do everything that he’s done since he’s been in the league has just been amazing. It’s a testament to him and all the hard work. It’s not normal what he’s doing. At all.”
“Longevity, consistency for 20 years-plus.”
Required reading
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; top photos of LeBron James and Michael Jordan: Justin Tafoya, Nathaniel S. Butler / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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