Skip Bayless has made a living out of firing hot takes left and right and demeaning LeBron James while lauding Michael Jordan and has been saying that this NBA Championship will have an asterisk next to it for months.
Bayless continues to believe that this trip to the NBA Finals has been LeBron James’ easiest yet because of how much rest he got and the fact that – according to him – he didn’t face any team that could represent a legit threat to the Lakers.
Now, he compared LeBron’s 2020 trip to the Finals to Michael Jordan’s first ring, saying that it’s the toughest in the history of the game:
“1991, Michael Jordan’s first path to a ring, just might’ve been the toughest path in the history of the NBA, because it started with Patrick Ewing’s Knicks and this was a different era. This was ‘football-basketball’ and these guys were loaded with tough, football-style basketball players. Patrick, Mark Jackson, Charles Oakley, John Starks. It is tough, you’re gonna have to fist-fight your way through that team, and that was just the first round” Bayless started.
“Then it was Charles Barkley’s Sixers in the second round, then the Bad Boy Pistons would just put Michael in the ring but he got in the weight room finally (…) and he swept a team featuring Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, Bill Laimbeer, and Dennis Rodman. He swept them in the Conference Finals,” he continued.
Bayless continued to elaborate his point by stating how impressive it was that the Chicago Bulls came back to win 4 in a row vs. the Los Angeles Lakers back in 1991:
“Magic Johnson, James Worthy, Byron Scott, and Sam Perkins, (…) they were still lethal and he blew through all of them. They lost Game 1 at home to those Lakers and then won 4 in a row. It’s as rocky and tough road as anybody has ever faced and that was just for the first ring,” Bayless concluded.
While Skip may have a point here and Jordan had an objectively tougher path to his first ring, that’s still no reason to say that LeBron and the Lakers have had a cakewalk to the ring this year. That’s not true and disrespectful to the other teams.
One day, hopefully, we’ll stop comparing players and eras and we’ll just sit back and enjoy the greatest players to ever do it.
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