Skip Bayless recently appeared on the ‘All The Smoke’ podcast with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, discussing his top ten NBA players of all time. Bayless provided an interesting list that unsurprisingly featured Michael Jordan at the top, and to keep the unsurprising nature of it going, he ranked LeBron James at No. 9 in a controversial take.
“I think we can all agree on No. 1 (Michael Jordan). I got Magic at 2, I think I had Shaq at 3, Kareem at 4, Duncan at 5, Bill Russell at 6, Kobe at 7, Larry at 8, LeBron is 9th, and Wilt is 10th.”
Picking Jordan No. 1 over LeBron is completely fine given Jordan’s peak accomplishments will always outshine LeBron’s overall longevity, but to rank LeBron as low as No. 9 is just baffling. Even if one is an ardent LeBron hater, there is no factual basis to rank him below the top three, with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar potentially the only player who can outmatch LeBron on accomplishments.
Shaquille O’Neal is a four-time champion and had arguably the most dominant three-year stretch in the NBA for anyone not named Michael Jordan from 1999 to 2002, but that doesn’t make up for James being atop the NBA for 25 seasons while matching Shaq for titles and winning more Finals and regular season MVPs than him.
Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant, Magic Johnson, and Bill Russell have more championships than LeBron, but James beats all of them in most individual categories.
The closest competitor for James here would be Tim Duncan, who won two of his five championships by defeating LeBron in the Finals (2007, 2014), but you can argue James peaks higher as a more complete offensive player with greater individual accomplishments.
Kobe Bryant won three of his five championships as Shaq’s co-star, so to rank both of them ahead of LeBron is a little disingenuous. Larry Bird won three championships over his career but LeBron outranks him on the basis of individual accomplishments, and statistics, and this applies to all names on this list including Jordan, longevity.
Bayless has shared this ranking before and explained why he chose to put LeBron at No. 9 behind the aforementioned players.
“Before 40,000 points I had LeBron 9th on my All-Time list,” said Bayless. “After 40,000 points, I still have LeBron 9th on my all-time list. Playing longer does not make you better or more valuable. LeBron James is not better than Larry Bird, he’s not better than Kobe Bryant… both Bird and Bryant were better shooters and much, much better closers than LeBron James.”
Bayless’ subjective opinion can’t be argued with but James does have better all-time clutch stats than Kobe while the sample size for Bird isn’t nearly as big as what we’ve seen from James. Considering LeBron has played a decade more NBA basketball than Bird, it’s not fair to ignore his never-seen-before longevity for intangibles like clutch habits.
Bayless has previously said that another title win would only improve James to No. 8 on his list, meaning he would move ahead of Bird in Skip’s eyes. To put a championship qualifier on that is already asinine given the body of work we’ve seen from LeBron, who’s averaged 20+ points in all 22 seasons of his career as the No. 1 option on his team.
We can argue over who the GOAT is till the cows come home, but I firmly believe that any list not featuring Jordan, James, and Kareem as the top three is inherently disingenuous or biased against these stars, whether it’s personal or from a lack of knowledge.
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