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Originally Posted by RainMaker

Rodman was providing no spacing. He played on either side of the paint on the baseline. The team statistically played better on the offensive side of the court with him off it. He had a negative OBPM every year he played in Chicago.

What I'm referring to is that helping too much off of Rodman would have been a technical foul. A player with Rodman's offensive ability today would be much more negative to the point of being unplayable in a playoff series whereas with those rules he was alright (you say the team did slightly better without him, but they were still the best offensive team in the league with him in - OBPM is pretty basic when it comes to describing a player with as unique a skillset as Rodman). You see Cleveland trying to attack this problem the other way and failing against the Warriors because Kevin Love isn't nearly as good offensively as Rodman was defensively and is a slight negative on defense to boot.

Lebron played with two other Hall of Famers in their prime. Jordan never had a third option as good as Chris Bosh. You can argue the Bulls fit together better, but pure talent you can't.

Saying Wade was in his prime is a joke. He was equally as good as Pippen the first year LeBron was in Miami (unfortunately whoever the team's 4th-best player was then would probably fail to make a list of the 150 best players in the league, which makes the whole 'talent' argument quite spurious if you believe basketball isn't 3-on-3), and then fell off a cliff after that.

Other than that, your main argument here is that top 10-20 player Chris Bosh put up big numbers on a mediocre team previously in his career before joining LeBron as a free agent whereas top 10-20 player Horace Grant was drafted by the Bulls (with a top-10 pick, mind you. The last/only time LeBron played on a team bad enough to get such a high pick, he was younger than Jordan was as a rookie). Don't see a reason to penalize LeBron because his team couldn't find other good players.

I also don't think Kukoc was an All-Star caliber player. Nice role player but we saw what happened when he had to be a #1 option.

LOL you're talking about a guy who was a 6th man! What do you think would happen if JR Smith (and there's a huge drop-off from him to whoever the Cavs' 6th-best player would be) had to be a #1 option? I could go farther down the line where guys like Ron Harper and BJ Armstrong were well above-average players and guys like Norris Cole and old man Mike Bibby were D-league level.

The Warriors are definitely better than anyone Jordan played in the Finals but you're really undervaluing those Jazz teams. The 96-97 team was really good and beat some great teams in the West. Plus I'd argue the East was much harder in Jordan's era than it is today.

The Spurs teams are much better as well considering they won just as many regular-season games as the West teams Jordan faced even when liberally resting players. Check the stats 'prime Hall of Famers' Wade and Bosh had in the finals those years.

The East being stronger argument doesn't have much to go on other than that LeBron has more viscerally destroyed opponents in the playoffs to the point that people consider those teams garbage after the fact - teams like the Bulls, Pacers, and Hawks in recent years wouldn't have won as many games as they did without playing well against powerhouse teams from the West. Seems counterintuitive that LeBron would be better in some peoples' eyes for performing slightly worse in the playoffs and letting the other team win a few more games. I just looked up a random championship year and in 1993, the Bulls went down 0-2 to the Knicks. In those 2 games Jordan shot 10-27 and 12-32. In the 12-32 game he had 1 assist and 3 turnovers, and the Knicks' 3 perimeter players all had good games offensively. People have really selective memory when it comes to things like that and how almost every year there are some teams in the East that look good during the regular season and are thought to be likely to knock off the Heat/Cavs.

The two years Jordan retired, the champion came from the West. Hell, in '94-95 the 6 seed from the West swept the 1 seed from the East. The Cavs (with Irving and Love injured) put up a better fight against the Warriors than any West team did 2015 and literally only need to win 1 Finals game for the same to be said about them this season.

Originally Posted by RainMaker

And I'd disagree on the rules benefiting Jordan. While newer defenses are tougher, hand-checking was a huge benefit to defenders. Also stars did not get the foul calls that they do today. Jordan would be going to the line 15+ times a game under today's rules.

Hand-checking is still as much a benefit to defenders today because it happens just as often now as it did then (it was banned before the 2nd Bulls three-peat, and as a Clippers fan I can tell you that Chris Paul hand-checks players as much as he can get away with doing). It should be pretty obvious that players as talented as Jordan and James can beat an individual defender almost at will and team defense is much more relevant. Its effectiveness is overstated by people who don't play basketball and don't realize that you need to be within arm's length of someone to hand-check them - not exactly the wisest strategy to press up against two players who were much more feared as drivers than as shooters.

You could probably go a step further and say that Jordan's team employed the only player in the league even comparable to individual defenders today such as Kawhi and Andre Iguodala, both of whom won Finals MVP awards for doing enough defensively to prevent LeBron from singlehandedly beating their massively-favored teams.

Other than that, are you implying that LeBron would only shoot like 3 free throws a game if they called it like you think they did in the 90s? He sure doesn't shoot a whole lot of them these days and is well-known as one of the best (if not the absolute best) in the history of the game at finishing through contact, so it's unclear why one would think he's gaining some unique advantage through the officials.