Why? Because we don't have nearly enough LeBron threads on here this morning.

Thought this was a pretty solid article from Basketball Reference. For the record, MJ is the GOAT in my minds and this doesn't dispute that, but it is closer in the Finals than some may think:

LINK

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As a human being on the Internet, you are no doubt aware of the fact that LeBron and MJ experienced different degrees of success in their time in the NBA Finals. MJ went 24-11 in his 35 games, winning all 6 titles that he played for. LeBron, on the other hand, is 13-20 in Finals games and 2-4 in series.

Their records speak for themselves, but that's also a pretty surface-level way of looking at it. LeBron was swept in 2007, but that team's second best player, by Win Shares, was Zydrunas Ilgauskas, a far cry from the Jordan's Hall-of-Fame sidekick Scottie Pippen. Should he get extra credit for that? Or what about last season, when the LeBron's Cleveland Cavaliers won two games against the Golden State Warriors with Timofey Mozgov as their second best player due to injuries to Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving?

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LeBron averaged 26.4 points per game, 6.9 assists per game, and 9.6 rebounds per game. For Jordan, those numbers are 33.6 PPG, 6.0 APG, and 6.0 RPG.

Either way you slice it, those are some epic numbers, but let's put them into context. Only one player has ever averaged a 33/6/6 over the course of a full season and, no surprise, it was Jordan himself. In the 1989-90 NBA season, MJ put up 33.6 PPG, 6.9 RPG, and 6.3 APG. Even more impressively, he did it playing only 39 minutes per game, as opposed to the 43 he would average in the Finals for his career. LeBron's 26/9/6 line is only slightly more common; it's happened eight times in NBA history, including three by Larry Bird and four by Oscar Robertson.

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Then there's the question of their opponents. While it's true that players can only play the teams in front of them, it's also a fact that LeBron has faced more difficult competition in the Finals than MJ did. Using Simple Rating System, a measure of team strength, LeBron's Finals opponents have been, on average, 7.31 points stronger than the average NBA team. In contrast, MJ's had an average SRS of 6.84.

However, the difference goes beyond a simple average of the opponents. LeBron faced three teams (2007 Spurs, 2014 Spurs, and 2015 Warriors) that were better than the toughest team MJ had to play (the 1997 Jazz). All three of those teams had an SRS over eight; MJ only faced one team with an SRS that high in his entire playoff career and that team, the 1986 Celtics, swept him.

If you exclude the three juggernauts, LeBron's 2-1 record against the same level of competition as MJ looks a little better. On the down side, the one in that record, the 2011 Mavericks, had the lowest SRS of any team that either player faced in the Finals.

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Doing the math, LeBron's Finals raw BPMish is 13.6, while Jordan's is 14.4. Even excluding team context and the final score as much as possible, MJ looks like the better player. But it's closer than you thought, right?

So let's return to the question in the headline. By team success, raw numbers, and advanced stats, the case is pretty clear: Michael Jordan was the better player than LeBron James in the NBA Finals. However, is the gap as lopsided as their MJ's 4-ring advantage would indicate? Considering how close LeBron's individual production has been to MJ's, and given that it's come against a higher caliber of opponent, it seems clear that King James deserves more credit than he gets.

tl;dr - Jordan is a better and more efficient scorer, but LeBron has been a much better facilitator and has the edge in assists and rebounds. LeBron has played against better teams than Jordan but his loss to the Mavs is inexcusable. In fact, that 2011 series drags him down on everything significantly. Perhaps he would have been better off losing in the conference semi-finals as far as his legacy is concerned.