By COLE ARCHER
LeBron James has just further established himself as an all-time great after defeating the Boston Celtics with arguably his worst championship roster yet (I am looking at you Daniel Gibson and Anderson Varejao)
We rave on and on about how incredible it is to lead a team this far with such underwhelming talent. After all, George Hill will be the starting point guard for an NBA Finals team come this week.
We will also attack James for what could very well be a 3-6 finals record after he potentially falls to a loaded Western Conference team. It makes me wonder if LeBron would have been better off not defeating Boston at all and instead of ending his finals appearances at its current eight. After all, many consider Michael Jordan a better player than LeBron due to the ring count yet he couldn’t reach as many NBA Finals appearances as LeBron has already.
3-6.
That is all that we will remember when pitting LeBron against Jordan and that is the problem with the G.O.A.T. conversation anyways. Determining a player’s skill set can’t be so black and white. LeBron is never playing Michael Jordan one on one unfortunately and even If they did, what would it prove? That MJ is the better one on one player? LeBron fans would argue that his value lies in his contributions to a team as a whole if that were to happen. LeBron fans will bring up statistics until the end of times just as Jordan fans will bring up finals proficiency until they rest in their graves.
Being the greatest of all time ultimately depends on how you interpret what it means to be the G.O.AT. If cultural impact and the will to win defines a better player, then Michael Jordan may just be your pick. If you think LeBron has the superior skill set and that he is worthy of the highest video game overall of any player to ever grace the hardwood, then he may be your G.O.A.T.
If LeBron can miraculously pull off an NBA Finals win this June, does he all of a sudden become a better player than if he loses? Of course not. LeBron’s skill set will be the same no matter how this series ends.
3-6 sounds bad. It really does and I am not going to deny that a record like that would not represent greatest of all time in anything, but circumstance is a real thing. We can’t look at that number with face value. Subjectivity will forever lie in the “grey area” of life.
So how do we determine the greatest of all time? It may just be different to everyone.
Is an artist’s value shown through record sales or through the music that they make and if it is the latter, how can you prove that music is better than other music anyhow? If your answer lies in the former, then to keep your logic consistent, you must be willing to admit Katy Perry is a better artist than your favorite underground band or rapper. I know you wouldn’t want to admit that.
All the hype and love is on LeBron now. Don’t let that change two weeks from now.
Photo Attribution: By Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA (LeBron James) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Categories: NBA
Sportschasers 
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