00:00He's done it again with his latest piece on LeBron James being the greatest player ever over Michael Jordan.
00:10You've really done it now, Mike.
00:13The beauty of this particular series, and we have a lot of different articles on this.
00:19We posted the first two today.
00:21Myself and Bill Bender, we have been arguing about this in staff meetings and private conversations.
00:30For probably close to a decade.
00:32So our editors decided we were going to take it public.
00:35And Bill has his article about Michael as the greatest online as well.
00:41And so it's both of us talking about this.
00:44But what's interesting about the conversation, Scott, is that usually when you're talking about Michael, everybody over a certain age automatically goes toward him.
00:55And if there's anybody arguing for LeBron, and I argue in the article that he's vastly underappreciated, even by his own contemporaries, that it's usually someone younger.
01:07Well, I'm clearly not young.
01:08But I have seen the whole careers of both of them and the whole career of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as well.
01:16And LeBron is the greatest I've seen.
01:18His career is a monument.
01:22Ten overall NBA finals, eight consecutive finals.
01:26I did talk to the great Austin Carr, and that was fun because he was kind of my first basketball hero when I was a young kid.
01:34And I talked to him, and he now does the Cavs games on television as the analyst.
01:40And he said that eight consecutive finals that they went to from 11 on, both in Miami and Cleveland, that no one will match that.
01:48And it's a vastly underrated stat when compared to MJ's six rings.
01:54Well, listen, I'm not going to argue with his talent or his numbers and stats and career and finals and the records that he holds.
02:07I've always said on this show that when he's done, he'll hold every record in the game.
02:12I mean, except 6-0 in the finals.
02:15Right.
02:18But one of the things that I talk about in the piece is how much different the competition is during LeBron's era than it was during Michael's era.
02:30Michael had the advantage of both the icons that he faced early in his career, Magic and Larry Bird cycling out of the game,
02:41and then essentially no one else emerging at that level during his period.
02:46You could argue that obviously Akeem Olajuwon was a great, great player, a Hall of Fame player.
02:51But no one during his period emerged as one of those icons like Shaq did later on in that decade and like many have since.
03:00LeBron had a much stiffer competition to go against.
03:04One of the things that's overlooked with Michael, and no one ever talks about this, Scott, and I will talk about this as much as I can.
03:10Is that the league added six teams in seven years during the prime of Michael's career.
03:17So they're digging way deep down in the talent pool to fill those teams because we didn't have the international explosion yet then either.
03:24We now have 35% international players and some of the greatest in the game, Nikola Jokic and Giannis, et cetera.
03:31We didn't have that during Michael's time.
03:34So they basically dipped down and made a bunch of CBA guys, what was CBA then and now G League guys, into NBA players.
03:41And so it wasn't as challenging for Michael to dominate in the 90s as it has been for LeBron during his career.
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