Sometimes it seems that the debate of whether LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of all time is divided in a generational manner. The easy temptation is to say that most who give James the nod in this debate are Millennials and members of Gen Z, while those who are older would vote for Michael Jordan or possibly someone such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
But a growing number of elders are publicly coming out and saying that, in their opinion, James is the greatest of all time.
One of those is Isiah Thomas, the Hall of Fame point guard from the 1980s and early 1990s who led the Detroit Pistons to back-to-back NBA championships. He revealed this opinion during an interview with Kory Woods of MLive.com (h/t Sports Illustrated).
“I think when you look at, like I say, he’s touched and he leads in almost every statistical category,” Thomas said. “He’s passed Kareem in scoring. I think he’s got the most playoff points. Not only that, when you look at the assist column, I know where I stand on the assist record. I think he’s passed me; I think he’s passed Magic [Johnson] on the assist record. I mean, so when you talk about passing, scoring, rebounding, we’ve never had a player in the NBA that has touched every statistical category and leads in some of these statistical categories that we’re talking about. There’s never been another player like him. Now, everyone has their favorites, but if the numbers don’t lie, the numbers don’t lie. And he definitely passes the eye test. So to me, he’s the best that I’ve ever seen from a team standpoint and also as a basketball player.”
It should be noted that Thomas and Jordan have had lots of bad blood between them for some 30 years. One has to wonder if that could be something that has colored Thomas’ opinion of who the greatest player in NBA history is.
On one hand, James is 4-6 in the NBA Finals, which is something his critics incessantly point to. But other than that, his resume stacks up favorably with the league’s other all-time greats, and it will make this debate very interesting for a long time.