The case for Michael Jordan
Six trips to the Finals, six titles, six Finals MVPs, and a decade in which nobody else won a scoring title. The argument for Jordan is about peak, and about never losing when it mattered.
Start with the number that his supporters always start with, because it is the one no other player can match: six Finals appearances, six championships, six Finals MVPs. Michael Jordan never played a Game 7 in the Finals. He never lost a series once he reached the last round. In a sport where a single bad bounce can swing a championship, that record has a kind of finality to it. The question his supporters ask is simple: if the greatest player of all time is the one you would most want with everything on the line, who has a better claim than the man who never lost there?
The scoring
Jordan's career average of 30.1 points per game is the highest in NBA history, and he did it across 15 seasons, including two with the Washington Wizards at ages 38 and 39 that pulled the figure down. In his prime it was higher still. From 1986–87 through 1992–93 he averaged between 30.1 and 37.1 points every season, and he won the scoring title in all seven. He finished with ten scoring titles. The next-best mark is Wilt Chamberlain's seven. Nobody else has more than four.
The playoff number is more striking. Jordan averaged 33.4 points per game across 179 playoff games, also a record. His scoring went up, not down, when the defenses got better and the stakes got higher. The 63-point game against the Celtics in 1986, the 55 against Phoenix in the 1993 Finals, the 38 through illness in Utah in 1997: the list of signature performances is long because the average was so high.
The defense
What separates Jordan from the other great scorers is what he did at the other end. He was named Defensive Player of the Year in 1988, a season in which he also led the league in scoring at 35.0 points a game and led it in steals. No other player has won the scoring title and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season. He was an All-Defensive First Team selection nine times and led the league in steals three times. The case for Jordan is not that he was the best scorer who ever lived. It is that he was the best scorer who ever lived and one of the best perimeter defenders at the same time.
AdYour brand here · sponsor slot articleThe run
Between 1991 and 1998, the Chicago Bulls won six championships in the six seasons Jordan played in full. The two years in between, he was playing minor-league baseball. His supporters point out that the Bulls did not win without him and resumed winning the moment he returned, and that the 1995–96 team went 72–10, the best regular-season record in history at the time. Across the six title runs, the Bulls went 24–0 in series. The teams they beat included Magic Johnson's Lakers, Clyde Drexler's Trail Blazers, Charles Barkley's Suns, Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp's SuperSonics, and Karl Malone and John Stockton's Jazz twice. These were not weak opponents.
The accolades
Five regular-season MVP awards, and a reasonable argument that he should have won more. He finished second in 1997 to Karl Malone in one of the closest votes ever, in a season in which he averaged 29.6 points for a 69-win team. He was a 14-time All-Star, an 11-time All-NBA selection (ten times First Team), Rookie of the Year, and a two-time Olympic gold medallist. In 1988 he became the first player to win MVP, Defensive Player of the Year, the scoring title, the All-Star Game MVP, and the Slam Dunk Contest in a single season.
The intangible
Every discussion of Jordan eventually arrives at something that does not show up in a box score. His competitiveness is the stuff of legend and of documentary. Teammates have described practices as harder than games. Opponents have described a player who looked for reasons to take things personally and then made them pay. Whether this belongs in a greatest-of-all-time argument is a fair question. His supporters would say it is the whole point: the greatest player is the one who, more than anyone, bent games and seasons to his will.
He never lost a Finals. Everything else in the argument is about how much weight that fact should carry.
What the other side says
LeBron's supporters respond that Jordan's 6–0 record is partly a product of circumstance: he did not reach the Finals in his first six seasons or in his last two, so his "never lost" record spans only the years he had a dominant team around him. They point to longevity, to the sheer volume of LeBron's production, and to the fact that LeBron carried weaker rosters to the Finals in years Jordan would have been eliminated earlier. They argue that comparing a 15-year career to a 23-year one on peak alone is choosing the measure that favours one side. The case for LeBron is laid out in its own piece.
Statistics are drawn from the NBA's official records and Basketball-Reference and are current through the 2025–26 regular season unless noted. LeBron James is still active, so his career totals change. Spotted an error? Tell us.