*Includes players listed as “guard/forward” at. He was also an elite perimeter defender - with a RAPTOR plus/minus of +2.2, which ranks fourth among players that Basketball-Reference lists as guards or “guard-forwards” since 1976-77: RAPTOR’s greatest perimeter defendersīest RAPTOR defensive plus/minus ratings for NBA guards* with at least 15,000 minutes played since 1976-77, including regular season and playoffs Player Jordan was the engine that powered the offensive success of the Bulls’ dynasty.īut that’s only half of what made Jordan so great. And indeed, Chicago had three seasons - 1992, 19 - where its offense cleared the league average by 7 points per 100 possessions. 5 When your best player is taking on a historic share of team possessions while also averaging nearly 1.2 points on each of those possessions, you’re going to have a historically great offense. That made Jordan one of the better playmakers in the NBA, even as he simultaneously led the league in scoring 10 times during the 11 seasons he played between 1986-98.Īll of this helps explain why Jordan’s Bulls finished in the top five in offensive efficiency every season from 1989-90 to 1996-97, except for the two Jordan spent playing baseball. MJ assisted on nearly 25 percent of teammate baskets when he was on the court, on top of his scoring responsibilities. And with apologies to the Human Highlight Film, Jordan was asked to do a lot more on offense for the Bulls than Wilkins was for the Hawks. Only two qualified players in NBA history had a career usage rate of at least 30 percent with a turnover percentage under 10 percent - Jordan and Dominique Wilkins (rivals in a couple of iconic 1980s dunk contests). Jordan’s most underrated offensive strength of all might have been his ability to generate high-quality shots (for himself and others) without turning the ball over. The midrange and post games have fallen out of favor in the modern NBA because they are not as efficient as a drive-and-kick, three-crazed offense, yet Jordan leaned heavily on those now-shunned tactics to build his résumé as the greatest player ever.
MICHAEL JORDAN STATS FREE
And he still managed to get to the line roughly once out of every three shots he took from the field, making 84 percent of his free throws. As a result, Jordan is an outlier on the furthest boundary of the usage-vs.-efficiency curve for all-time players:ĭespite the difficulty - and inherent inefficiency - of Jordan’s shot selection, he still managed to make an impressive 51 percent of his career 2-point attempts, notably higher than such similarly midrange-focused players as Bryant (48 percent), Carmelo Anthony (47 percent), Russell Westbrook (47 percent) and even Dirk Nowitzki (50 percent). But he also had a career true shooting percentage of 56.9 percent, much higher than the league average of 53.5 percent over the years of his career. Over his career, he averaged 30.2 pace-adjusted 4 points per 36 minutes, easily the most of any qualified player since 1977. Why was Jordan so great, though? How did a 6-foot-6 shooting guard from North Carolina, who wasn’t picked first OR second in his draft class, come to dominate a league whose best players had disproportionately been big men over the three decades before he arrived?įor one thing, Jordan mixed scoring volume and shooting efficiency better than just about any player in history. His reputation as the GOAT was not merely a media creation or the product of ring-counting - it has withstood the tests of both time and science. Yet Jordan’s numbers have held up to challenges from LeBron James, Kobe Bryant and numerous others in the generations that followed in his footsteps. It’s impossible to know what, say, Pete Maravich would have done in today’s NBA, but his advanced stats are surprisingly mediocre when you look back on them. Sometimes when you analyze historical legends with modern metrics, the results can leave you disappointed. Jordan is RAPTOR’s GOAT ??īest RAPTOR plus/minus ratings for NBA players with at least 15,000 minutes played since 1976-77, including regular season and playoffs And when we crunched the historical numbers for our RAPTOR player ratings (which go back to 1976-77), we found that Jordan is also the modern leader in RAPTOR plus/minus, 3 in addition to having the best mix of career and peak value. He owns the greatest single-game performance ever 2 according to ’s Game Scores. But MJ has the stats on his side: He remains the NBA’s all-time career leader in Win Shares per 48 minutes and Player Efficiency Rating, both of which can be computed going back to 1951-52. Was Jordan actually the greatest ever? It’s something of a loaded question, the kind of which has launched a million RealGM forum debates.