What the NBA GOAT Debate can Teach us About Generational Comparisons in America
LeBron James won his fourth NBA championship title this month when the Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Miami Heat in the league’s Finals series, adding fuel to the constant debate among fans about who is the best professional basketball player ever.
Fans of all major American team sports seem to love the GOAT (greatest of all time) argument, but the conversation often feels most heated among NBA diehards. Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and James are the names most commonly compared. Sometimes older fans add Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson and Bill Russell to the imaginary ballot.
Some people say the most championships equal GOAT status. Others look to total points scored. Stats appear to hold little weight for others who give the GOAT title to the player they simply like the most.
What if there really is no comparison at all?
After all, the players didn’t even play the same positions. Jordan and Bryant were scoring guards, Johnson was a tall point guard, Kareem and Russell were centers, and LeBron is a Swiss Army Knife disguised as a Mack truck. (He can pretty much fill any position.)
Collectively, you’re talking about players with vastly different bodies and skill sets. And you’re examining a group of men who played in the league across a long period of time, with Russell entering in 1956 and James still playing here in 2020. That last part is where I find my resounding personal answer in the GOAT debate.
You can’t compare Bill Russell’s 11 championships, beginning in an era when there were only eight total NBA teams, to LeBron James’s four titles in 10 Finals appearances in an era with 30 teams post-Jordan and post-Kobe. It’s not the same league or game, or even world, at all. There was no three-point line in the Russell era. And travel was minimal, with an NBA that stretched only from Boston to Minneapolis. Now there are teams from Toronto to Los Angeles.
Even if you’re part of the Jordan-Kobe-LeBron GOAT-comparison camp, Jordan faced an NBA that mostly allowed hand-checking on the perimeter (which a Wikipedia article on personal fouls defines as “contact by the defense on a ball handler that impedes a player’s speed, quickness, rhythm, and/or balance”) and featured a slew of Hall of Fame NBA big men. LeBron has played in a league that prizes the three-pointer, which in part has led to the devaluing of the center and the role of intense defense for all 94 feet of the court. Kobe rests in a hybrid era between Jordan and LeBron, seeing a little of both landscapes during his career from 1996 to 2016.
None of them occupied the same exact period in professional basketball. In the case of Jordan and LeBron, Michael (57) is old enough to be LeBron’s (35) father. They have lived and worked in different generations.
The same can be said for American society as a whole. I’ve often struggled with hearing about the kinds of professional experiences of my parents’ generation.
My parents were born in the early 1950s, so they commonly get lumped into the late stages of a group now spitefully referred to as “Boomers.” They benefited from an era that experienced unprecedented growth and prosperity following the outcomes of World War II. However, they also lived through the tumultuous Civil Rights struggle, Vietnam and the oil crisis of the 1970s.
The generation before them, which included my grandparents who were born in the 1920s, faced the stock market crash, the Great Depression and the aforementioned World War II. We could look at those crises as some of the worst in American history, but can we really compare them to the ones faced in the next generation or this one? Is economic ruin any better or worse than a volatile fight over human rights?
Such a comparison is apples and oranges, in my opinion.
We face the same struggle if we try to compare the generation of the group in which I fit, Millennials, and subsequent generations with our parents’ and grandparents’ eras. I grew up in the era of global terrorism that included the 9/11 attacks and wars/conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and many other nations, as well as the rise of concerns about cyber security due to developments in and reliance on technology. And now we’re living through a politically and socially divisive pandemic.
My grandparents are no longer alive to deal with today’s challenges and its rewards. They didn’t get to fully enjoy technology on the cloud and the more-connected world that has created, nor did they have to struggle through COVID-19. Then again, I didn’t observe bread lines during the Depression.
There is no equal comparison across decades, generations and time. In the case of the NBA, Jordan, Kobe and LeBron are all great players who can, as a group, share the title as the GOATs.
The same is true of society as a whole. Different generations try to debate each other on who had it best, who had it worst and which generation was more capable or successful. In reality, every era has its successes and its failures that will eventually become part of the same history book.
Matthew Tessnear is a North Carolina author who writes about mental health, food, history and sports from his perspective in the American South. He shares a regular series titled “What it’s Really Like…” here on Medium. You can follow him on Twitter @MatthewTessnear.
