Both Stephen Curry and James Harden have had individual seasons in which they've attempted that many 3-pointers. The average NBA team attempted 12.7 3-pointers per game in Jordan's final season with the Bulls. James himself has attempted more than triple the number of 3-pointers that Jordan did, but that is largely due to league-wide trends. James has thus far scored 4,968 more points from behind the arc than Jordan.Īlmost all of that can be attributed to volume.
Volume is where the difference starts to add up. James was the more accurate 3-point shooter, making 34.4 percent of his career attempts to Jordan's 32.7 percent, but that gap is relatively meager. James has made 621 during his time as a Laker alone. Here's a startling statistic: Jordan made only 581 3-pointers in his career. Shooting: Jordan came before the 3-point revolution Give him all of those years back and he likely sets a record that James would still be chasing. At his peak, Jordan was scoring roughly 2,500 points per season. He retired for good at 35 and skipped his age-36 and age-37 seasons. However, we should note that he missed his age-30 season and most of his age-31 season due to a mid-career retirement. That head start was out of Jordan's control. That gap closed with time, but it explains the head start James got. LeBron grew up in an era more favorable to high school stars, but he also had significant physical advantages over a young Jordan. He averaged over 27 points per game as a rookie, but remember, at the age of 21, James averaged 31.4. Even if he'd made it to the NBA at 18, he would have needed years of development to grow into a superstar. Jordan grew into a top prospect with time, but arrived at North Carolina as a skinny teenager with a broken jump shot. 1 overall pick for years before he was ultimately eligible to declare. By that point, James had already been proclaimed "The Chosen One" on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Jordan didn't play varsity basketball until his junior year of high school. Even if there was more of a precedent for Jordan to follow, he wasn't exactly a sure thing at that stage of his career.
#MICHAEL JORDAN STATS ON WIZARDS PROFESSIONAL#
Moses Malone was the only player to successfully make the jump from high school into professional basketball when Jordan was a teenager, and even he did so in the ABA rather than the NBA. Jordan technically could have tried to start his career straight out of high school, but it wouldn't have been advisable. All told, that means that James has arguably had seven extra seasons of superior physical ability to work with. Two of those Jordan seasons came when he played for the Washington Wizards, after his second NBA retirement when he was well past his physical prime. We covered one of the basic explanations for Jordan's career numbers in the first paragraph. In short, circumstances aligned for James in a way that they didn't for Jordan. So how did that happen? Why didn't Jordan, universally considered the greatest scorer in NBA history, break Abdul-Jabbar's record? Well, there were a few factors at play. Furthermore, he will now presumably tack-on a few more thousand points before he hangs up his Nikes for good, turning a record that most thought would probably never be broken into one that will never be broken. Yet it's James who became the top man on Tuesday. He finished his career roughly 6,000 points behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It's somewhat surprising, then, that Jordan didn't ever seriously challenge for the NBA's all-time scoring record. But if you need a bucket, you'd take Jordan without thinking twice. James is the better passer and rebounder of the two. At his peak, Jordan averaged over 37 points per game. Jordan averaged 30.1 points per game across 15 NBA seasons compared to "only" 27.2 for James in his 20. LeBron James and Michael Jordan are the two greatest players in NBA history, but when compared strictly as scorers, Jordan is almost inarguably the superior talent.
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