Miami Heat: LeBron James would have dominated in the 90’s too

Looking at the Numbers

When looking at the numbers, there are a myriad of them that can be used here to illustrate the point. The ones we will focus on here will be points per 100 possessions, effective field goal percentage, three-point percentage, and a few supporting stats.

When looking for a comparative set of figures here, you can go one of a few ways. While one way to go would be to compare against the league average per player for those statistics, you could compare them to the only player in the conversation with LeBron, his comp from that generation, and arguably the greatest player to ever play the game.

For our purposes, we will use Micahel Jordan. Here are the averages of his averages across that decade.

Jordan averaged 40.97 points per 100 possessions in the decade of the ’90s, while LeBron James has a career per 100 possessions average of 36.6 points per game and 37.4 points per 100 with the Miami Heat, the era, style, game, and body type of LeBron that I mentioned you would most likely see full time had he played in that decade.

While LeBron has averaged 10 assists per 100 throughout his career, Jordan only averaged 6.8. Whether you use his career figure or the Miami Heat figure, Lebron’s better than three assists more per 100 possessions would have accounted for those points not scored by the King himself, thus accounting for the difference in their impact on winning from a points perspective.

When looking at the next stat of question, effective field goal percentage, which accounts for the fact that three-pointers are worth more than two-pointers but packages them into one total shooting percentage, that works nicely to account for the offensive philosophical differences betwixt eras of the NBA.