If you were disappointed that LeBron James‘ feud with Charles Barkley didn’t feature someone comparing LeBron to Michael Jordan, then I have some good news. Former Bulls GM Jerry Krause decided to let everyone know that Jordan would never ask for help, something that LeBron has received some flack for doing over the last few weeks.
Krause appeared on The Vertical podcast to discuss, among other thing, LeBron wanting Cleveland to go get some additional reinforcements heading into this postseason. Because it is required that everything LeBron does gets compared to Jordan, Krause had this to say.
“I’ll say this about him, he never came to me and asked for other players. He never came to me and asked me to draft a player. He never came to me to ask me to trade for a player. Never once did that happen. Part of it was he thought he was so darn good he thought he could win without them, I’m sure of that … Michael was smart enough to understand the organization and he understood what we had to do as an organization … He never complained to me.”
This is something that happens all the time: LeBron does something that is considered controversial to some degree, people discuss it, someone mentions that Jordan would never do something like this, and we suddenly get caught in a Jordan vs. LeBron debate that is impossible to answer definitively.
Saying this strips a lot of context away from the two players and how their rosters compared to the rest of the league. Namely, it forgets that the Bulls always had the league’s best roster when Jordan was around, while James has to go up against a Golden State team that has four of the 20 or so best players on the planet. It’s really hard to definitively say that if Jordan would have the same amount of patience if was going up against a team with, say, Hakeem Olajuwon, Karl Malone, Gary Payton, and Penny Hardaway. There’s absolutely a chance that he would have been unflinching and wanted to go to war with his team. There’s also a chance that he would have said “hey, we need some help or else this team is going to beat us because they are loaded.”
One of these days, LeBron will do something and it won’t get compared to how Jordan would have hypothetically reacted to the same situation. Unfortunately, today is not that day.
(Via New York Post)
