LeBron > Jordan GOAT Super AIDS Containment, solved #22999 post by Matt R. (addendum #23174)

Where in these quotes do Stephen A. Smith and Jalen Rose say that they believe Jordan is the GOAT because of the sum of his steals plus blocks in the 1987-88 season?

The entire thing is based off the Hawks game (posted above) and then the NBA's highlight reel of Jordan's 10-steal game that only showed 6 steals.

The entire schtick is based off this - he claims that he watched 5 games but where are they? Which games? He only specifies the Hawks game and the 10-steal game - that's it - and the 10-steal game could've easily had 10 steals but the NBA just didn't put all 10 in the highlight reel.

Regardless, a 5-game sample isn't enough to take anyone's award away and it amazes me how the 182% number is considered a big deal when many DPOY's were in the 150-160 range... 182 doesn't seem noteworthy for an abnormal player like MJ - the other DPOY's barely scored, while MJ was the goat scorer, so I wouldn't expect his metrics to be like the other DPOY's.

Basically, if you're going to take someone's award away and rewrite history, then provide a 20-game sample with timestamps for all 30 fake steals or whatever - put it on a webpage somewhere so anyone can verify the work and click on "fake steal #18" or whatever to see the fake steal #18... It wouldn't be that hard to do that.. This would be substantial enough to truly bring into question the DPOY........... But 5 games.... 5?... And you only really talk about 1?... This gets mainstream airtime and consideration to cancel a major historical achievement?... It's absurd and clear FRAUD - Jordan should put a team together to verify his stats like Jaren Jackson Jr. did - then he could sue Haberstroh for libel and slander for trying to change history based on a one-off.

fallguy,
There is actually zero doubt in my mind that there are errors in records for NBA counting stats. Zero doubt. Even for Michael Jordan. Especially stats where there is subjectivity involved such as assists, steals, and blocks.

What I find fascinating is that somehow people took this fact and turned it into a Jordan vs. LeBron thing. Fascinating imo.

It’s almost like you have a desperate cult trying to tear down MJ so they can prop up their lord and savior. And since he wasn’t able to win more than 4 rings by superteam hopping in 21 (21!!!) years, they have to resort to this. What’s next? Claiming Jordan couldn’t dribble with his left hand? I know it sounds really stupid and ridiculous, but would you put it past them? Their desperation knows no bounds right now.

The article says that for a 6-game stretch, 28 steals were recorded by stat-keepers but only 12 of them were real, so why would stat-keepers try to add nearly 3 steals per game over a 6-game stretch and think they could get away with it?... That's a ton of steals to think they could get away with by just adding 3 per game to MJ's totals - it's extremely absurd tbh... (16 extra steals over 6 games is 2.5 steals per game).

Why would anyone think they could get away with that?... It's because it never happened - the 16 "fake" steals are subjective calls and Haberstroh already pointed out the most notable one on Chris Broussard's show (posted previously itt) where MJ and a teammate tip the ball and MJ comes up with it... Haberstroh states that this should be a steal for the teammate (Mike Brown) but it's completely subjective - it looked like MJ did touched the ball as well and he came up with it - it wasn't some kind of robbery that required scrutiny and we don't even know who the steal was attributed to - it was just assumed that this was a robbery...

btw, people don't realize that his steals was just an extra - that isn't what made him a great defender.. He was a great defender because he fostered a culture of effort, which coupled with long-standing chemistry yields a great team defense, regardless of cast.. He also held most primary matchups like Magic, Drexler, Miller, Dumars, Isiah, Majerle and more to 35-43% shooting - he did this to nearly every primary matchup, while carrying the goat offensive load, aka GOAT.. So again, his steals and blocks were just a bonus or icing on a goat cake.

Finally, the article showed that many dpoy's had 50-60% higher steals & blocks at home, so Jordan's 82% means little and could be explained many ways aside from bad score-keeping - that's such a leap in the face of other possible conclusions.. i.e. MJ is the only goat scorer among a group of low-scoring DPOY's - his 2-way burden and energy requirements were so much higher, so he benefitted from the home crowd much more and probably gambled less for steals on the road to save energy.. Essentially, Jordan's abnormal energy management requirements from his 2-way burden are shown in the steals number on the road - this is just one possible reason why the only goat saw a slightly greater bounce at home than your typical DPOY, so there's no need to jump the gun and assume the record-keepers are cheating.

It's called 'Hulking up' and back then it also worked for Hulk Hogan.

I also have zero doubt that there have always been tons of mistakes made in record-keeping all the way until the SportsVu motion tracking software began in 2014 for the NBA - since then, the mistakes in the record-keeping are probably small.

And yes, it's amazing that they would take this broad fact about record-keeping in all sports and weave it into the lebron-mj thing... and it's all because lebron fell short of all the achievements, so they have to try to delete some of Jordan's... The next thing is they will try to invalidate a specific ring.. They'll pick one and go after it...

It's also funny how all this was coordinated - Lebron said that he was unhappy about the 2013 DPOY race on the podcast and a few weeks later there's an article to invalidate Jordan's DPOY - it's sinister... And it's a shoddy effort... Haberstroh took a 5-game sample and stated that score-keepers added 3 steals per game over a 5-game sample - that's his subjective argument.. the most noteworthy play was posted earlier - a close call either way... him and his team supposedly saw 15 more of those over a 5-game sample.. that's his evidence.. an absolutely garbage effort

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Recent Thread Cliffs

Haberstroh took a 6-game sample and stated that record-keepers added nearly 3 steals per game over the sample (16 "fake" steals).. He spoke about the most noteworthy play to Chris Broussard, which was posted earlier itt - it's clearly a toss-up.. Using this subjective nitpicking of close calls, he supposedly saw 15 more of those over a 6-game sample.. That's his evidence but he doesn't actually post it - he expects us to take his word... He needs to post the 16 "fake" steals on a webpage somewhere so fans could see for themselves.. I already posted one of them earlier itt, so it wouldn't take long at all.. Then release another 6 games next month and 6 more in the 3rd month, so we have 18 game sample over 3 months with 50+ "fake" steals - THEN he would have something.. But instead, what he provided is complete trash and obviously a fraudulent scam and a quite lazy one I might add.. Lebron said a few weeks ago that he was unhappy with 2013 DPOY voting and a few weeks later this article comes out with a 6-game sample of the same completely-slanted, subjective garbage that they accuse the original record-keepers of.

It’s impressively disingenuous - even for you - to attempt to decouple ‘sum of blocks and steals’ from MJ’s DPOY in 1988. But shine on you crazy diamond.

The Jordan 87-88 stocks article is a really interesting piece of research presented with an inflamatory context to generate clicks.

The evidence of there being as many steals in a game as there were turnovers despite there being multiple obvious dead ball turnovers that couldn't possibly have been due to a steal (like shot clock violations) is plenty to demonstrate that there was clearly some very dodgy recording going on and that it wasn't just a case of subjective decisions erring in Jordan's favour.

I think if there was no mention of Lebron in the article then almost everyone (basically everyone except twog) would simply accept the fact that the evidence definitely points to Jordan's stats having been inflated beyond the realms of what was reasonable in that season (but also if it didn't mention Lebron it would probably not have generated anywhere near as much interest and we wouldn't be talking about it). Whether that means he didn't actually deserve is the DPOY award would be the only debate but I think it's reasonable to argue that if he didn't lead the league in stocks, and have so many more steals than second place, there's a very good chance he wouldn't have won the award.

That sound like trump rigged election2020.
Fraud voting ( if there ever was a lot) was solely done by democrats …

Mj, we find some cooked numbers, well only mj benefited from inflated numbers.
Surely no one ever benefited for that as well in other cities?

FWIW mj finished 7 times in top 5 dpoy while lebron 5 times shrug
Mj finish 10 times in top 10 To lebron 6 times top 10 in dpoy ..
Mj 9 times first team defence to Lebron 5 times .

Even without dpoy it isn’t close on why mj goat over Lebron..

I don't think MJ is the GOAT because he averaged 3.2 steals per game in 1988.

LuckyLloyd,
Do you understand the difference between these two things?

1) Jordan steals+blocks numbers were possibly inflated in 1987-88
2) Jordan should not have won DPOY in 1988

It is my guess that, given the reasoning abilities you’ve presented repeatedly in this thread, you may think slightly elevated steals+blocks is the same thing as winning the DPOY award and it’s a one to one logical correlation.

FWIW

https://www.basketballnetwork.net/latest...

This isn’t a new thing and only reserve to mj .
BUT most importantly, mj had as well over 200 steal and 100 block in 1987 !
He finished 8th in dpoy !
so maybe just maybe those little inflated stats in 1988 didn’t had much to do when mj won dpoy taking into account how « far behind » he was in 1987 with similar stats for the dpoy award …

MJ almost certainly does not win the DPOY without those inflated steal and block numbers. It wasn’t as heavily scrutinized of an award back then and games availability was much lower. Box score watching was probably a huge portion of it and MJ stuffed the box score fraudulently. Again, not just subjective plays but invented turnovers.

Now should it seriously matter if he got 4th in DPOY that year versus winning for a GOAT case? No, not to anyone legitimate, but deranged people like Fraudguy have definitely cited it many times over the years as another reason why MJ is GOAT. My position would be MJ is a significantly overrated defender period, fraud stocks or not.

Regardless of all this, it’s pretty alarming the lengths MJ went to creating fake stats. And as I noted earlier, it’s not just him either. The entire era of these types of stats prior to every game being televised and national scrutiny probably needs to be taken with serious suspicion. Guys averaging double steals and blocks at home versus the road is a huge outlier and without easily accessible game footage and daily tracking to verify it seems extremely unlikely. Nowadays there isn’t a questionable stat given without 100 guys who bet on it tweeting about it, and obviously something as crazy as a team having most steals than the opposing team had turnovers could never happen in modern era.

And of course, if it turned out Lebron was colluding with scorekeepers to inflate stats it would be on ESPN for a month straight and one of the biggest scandals in modern sports. With MJ, no one cares.

LuckyStan,
In case you are honestly curious, and want to look at this using logic and reason, the DPOY award is subjective and decided by vote. Michael Jordan had 37 votes. Second place had 9 votes.

Bob Ryan, in the same article you’ve been referencing, was a voter for DPOY in 1988. He voted for Michael Jordan and stated his “stock” totals had nothing to do with it and said there was no controversy at the time.

Did you poll the other 36 people that voted for Jordan and ask them if reducing Jordan’s “stock” total by some amount would have changed their vote? What did they say? Did 28 of them change their minds?

By the way, if you’re curious, Jordan had 6.1 defensive win shares that season. The second place player in DPOY voting had 5.2. Defensive win shares do not contain steals nor blocks in its formula.

But anyway, something something shine on crazy diamonds or whatever it is you stans say these days.

Interesting that you went straight conspiracy on this, and not simply mistakes or errors when recording the stats. No, it’s not a rookie scorekeeper making a mistake in how he determines steals over the course of 5 games, or a homer with some hometown bias (that, as explained in detail in your own article, happens everywhere in every sport), nor a clerical error when transferring data by hand.

No, it’s the lizard people controlling the statkeepers by alien tractor beam. All orchestrated by Michael Jordan and his evil 6 rings, of course. I guess he just turned off the alien tractor beam in every other season of his career that he played in Chicago. Nope, not just variance in stat keeping errors. Definitely aliens.

Wait weren’t you the one that said that only LeBron fans “understand that there is variance”? Lolol

It wasn’t a rookie scorekeeper (don’t know why this was suggested, easy to look this up), and he had a very close relationship with MJ. Obviously not denying he probably had serious Bulls fandom as well which influenced him. Also not denying that other players from the era received benefits as well. The major point here should be that the subjective stats from this so-called great era were most likely heavily juiced due to lack of scrutiny.

Of course variance exists, it is theoretically possible over a small sample for a player to have that type of disparity and that is why you need video evidence. But the lack of game availability makes this impossible to do at scale as many of the games simply aren’t available. But based on the box score data/turnovers discrepancies and the limited games available, the conclusion here becomes quite obvious.

I also agree with the other poster earlier who stated that it was a very well researched piece of journalism but sadly had a bunch of clickbait elements to it in an effort to attract eyeballs. Basically the equivalent of those stupid Mr Beast thumbnails. Scrutinizing MJ/the eras stats heavily has nothing to do with Lebron. The author (Haberstroh) also posted the video evidence and expanded on other things, but it’s paywalled on his substack. I don’t really see the need to pay for this - no reason to doubt his findings.

Eh? I’ve never worked on an NBA scorekeeping crew but I am pretty sure it’s a team of a few people with one person leading. How did you easily find who this crew was for these games and what their experience was? Maybe one of them was out sick or on vacation. Who the hell knows but it doesn’t mean Jordan was in cahoots with the statkeeping mafia to give him a few extra steals against the Hawks one night in February.

There are many possible points where errors and mistakes can happen. Especially 36 years ago. I just think it’s hilarious, and telling, that the known phenomenon of stat keeping error and home bias was immediately and relentlessly used to tear Jordan down. Weird how that happens isn’t it? Waiting for the TikTok trend “WE DON WIT DA SCOREKEEPERS” and the claims that Jordan only averaged single digit ppg in the 80’s.

Mj had around the same stats in 1987 and finished 8th dpoy

1987: 2.9 steal (236) 1.5 blks (125)
1988: 3.2 steal (259) 1.6 blks (131)

If what you say it’s true , how mj finish so far off in 1987 for dpoy if it was that important for those stats ?
I mean worst is mj 87 finish with 37.1 ppg on top of those defensive stats and didn’t even get the mvp , he finished second !

So basically with inferior ppg (35) and slightly superior steal and 6 blocks more in 82 games he won dpoy and mvp in 1988 and nothing in 1987 !
How could he finish so far off in dpoy and mvp 2 in 1987 ?
Not even defence team 2 !?!
Doesn’t seem it support your claim about the importance of those stats does it ?

What probably happened , which happens it seem frequently , in 1988 they wanted to corrected the mistake they made in 1987 .

The award is pretty subjective like mattR said .
Mj was probably winning it even with less blocks and still .

Ps: mj made over 200 steal for 6 seasons .

It seems like both steals and blocks were stats that were easier to come by in the 80s/90s than in the years since? The all time leaders for both stats mostly come from the 80s and 90s.

In four of those 6 seasons Jordan had 100 or more steals on the road. He also had more than 100 steals on the road his rookie year.

There was precisely one season in Jordan’s entire career that he had this outlier home vs. road split.

I swear you guys don’t even read your own bullshit conspiratard articles you link. Of course you and mullen are going to extrapolate this into Jordan’s entire statistical career being fraudulent. Which is obviously what this Haberstroh guy was going for. LeBron Stans are so easy to manipulate and work into a “omg Jordan couldn’t go left” frenzy.

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Someone's comment on youtube that got a lot of thumbs-up:

so let me get this straight. Jordan who in the 86-87 season, averaged 2.9 steals and 1.5 blocks and DIDN'T make the all defensive team with totals 236 steals and 125 blocks for a guard. while Michael Cooper averaged 1.0 steals and 0.5 blocks with 78 steals and 43 blocks TOTAL and won DPOY.. Then the very next season Jordan averaged 3.2 steals and 1.6 blocks, with 259 steals and 131 total blocks?? And now we trying to say his DPOY was illegitimate???? GTFOH i can't with this dude bruh, i really can't

Btw, the article tried to explain this disparity between MJ and Cooper by saying that Cooper's defensive style was vastly different from MJ's... Really?... Did Cooper have a goat record of individual defense in the playoffs by holding nearly all his primary defensive matchups to 35-43% shooting?... In addition to this goat individual defense, was Cooper the goat help defender that MJ was or the goat leader?... The reality is that the media was fixated on the Lakers back then and gave them all the awards - Jordan had to break through that with undeniable defense to win the award - he should've won it in 87' as well.

^^^^ From many angles, this could easily look like the ball went straight to Jordan (steal for Jordan) and it's unclear whether Jordan's right hand helps deflect the ball along with Mike Brown's right hand, so this is not the egregious play that Tom Haberstroh makes it out to be with Chris Broussard in their interview - here's Haberstroh describing this play above (here).

Jordan had similar deflections that went to a teammate and the teammate got credit for the steal - it isn't fraud and it goes both ways - this wasn't a conspiracy... And again, it's unclear whether Jordan's right hand helps deflect the ball.. If someone wants to take the most negative look at every steal or assist, they could easily remove 1 or 2 in each category from literally any player..

I could go back and look at 5 games from Lebron's 2009 season with all that home cookin' and easily find 2-3 assists per game where the assisted player might've taken a 2nd dribble or might've made too many moves before the bucket - this would lower Lebron's APG and I could declare that he wasn't really a great passer....

Btw, Haberstroh says that the games he watched had 28 steals recorded by stat-keepers but more than half (16) were fraudulent - since we're supposed to go with this small sample, this would mean that Jordan averaged 1.4 steals on the season instead of 3.2.

Of course I read the entire article (cmon, basically catnip for an MJ skeptic like myself) the MJ fans are the ones that didn’t. Evidence of this would be your scorekeeper post suggesting it could have been a rookie - the article addressed this in detail. Had you read it in full, you’d not have suggested that.

I have not extrapolated that to anything other than his subjective stats were inflated, which I consider to be factual at this point. I also caveated it that it applies to many players from the era and not just MJ. Also not suggesting it applies to points, that is obviously impossible given that the score of the game would be incorrect and that needed to be tracked correctly. The issue is the turnover and steal/block aspect which doesn’t need to be and based on the evidence presented those numbers were inflated.

Is is a massive deal from a GOAT evaluation standpoint? Not really, it matters on the margins in that MJ was probably awarded 300-600 more stocks than he deserved over the course of his career. This influences things like BPM slightly. You’d also need to subtract the stocks of all the other players from the era too, and Lebron is really the only modern GOAT candidate. Im sure Kareem and Bill Russell had inflated stats based on the MJ stuff. Pretty skeptical of these massive block games for Russell/Wilt types too at this point.

It’s a bigger deal in the sense of that it’s fairly scandalous MJ pulled this off, especially given the circumstance. The block stats in particular are even sketchier than the steals to an extent - during MJ’s DPOY pushes in 87 and 88 he averaged 1.5-1.6 blocks a game which is an insane number for a guard who doesn’t rim protect. Once he wins his DPOY, he totally craters and averages 0.7-0.8 the next two seasons despite those being his age 25 and 26 seasons. That level of decline is quite suspicious.

Its something that does matter on the margins and given the careers of MJ and LeBron most people at least have them reasonably close all-time with the vast majority of people having them 1-2 in some order. It has to matter to an extent that there is factual evidence Jordan had phantom box score stats added, and then further extremely suggestive evidence that it happened for several years. Fraudguy is of course concentrating on the subjective plays - while the play posted above is clearly not a steal for MJ I’m sure this level of padding is done sometimes. The main issue is the invented steals, like the games where the Bulls had more steals than the other team had turnovers once you factor passes oob, travels etc. This level of cheating suggests something far more nefarious than awarding steals and blocks on “questionable” plays that at least are actual steals/blocks.