Jordan vs LeBron — A Data Analytics Challenge

March 2021, Maven Analytics team came up with a great challenge — Jordan vs LeBron. They added an insightful data set to their Data Playground with game stats for both Michael Jordan and LeBron James which include games from regular season as well as playoffs.

Description about the dataset.

The data set contains 2,776 records of career game-level data for Michael Jordan and LeBron James (through October 2020) during the regular season and playoffs.

The data is divided into 4 tables where 2 of them contain the career stats for both Jordan and LeBron and remaining 2 contain playoffs stats for both players.

Each record represents one game and contains attributes as listed below:

Career Stats

game               Season game
date               Date (yyyy-mm-dd)
age                Player's age (years-days)
team               Player's team
opp                Opponent
result             Win (W) or Loss (L) with the point differential   in parenthesis
mp                 Minutes played
fg                 Field goals made
fga                Field goals attempted
fgp                Field goal percentage
three              3-point field goals made
threeatt           3-point field goals attempted
threep             3-point field goal percentage
ft                 Free throws made
fta                Free throws attempted
ftp                Free throw percentage
orb                Offensive rebounds
drb                Defensive rebounds
trb                Total rebounds
ast                Assists
stl                Steals
blk                Blocks
tov                Turnovers
pts                Points scored
game_score         Statistical measure of a player's productivity for a single game
plus_minus         Statistical measure of a player's impact on the game, represented by the difference between their team's total scoring versus their opponent's when the player is in the game

Playoffs Stats

game               Playoff game
date               Date (yyyy-mm-dd)
series             Series name (EC = Eastern Conference, WC = Western Conference, 1 = First Round, S = Conference Semifinals, F = Conference Finals, FIN = NBA Finals)
series_game        Series game number
team               Player's team
opp                Opponent
result             Win (W) or Loss (L) with the point differential in parenthesis
mp                 Minutes played
fg                 Field goals made
fga                Field goals attempted
fgp                Field goal percentage
three              3-point field goals made
threeatt           3-point field goals attempted
threep             3-point field goal percentage
ft                 Free throws made
fta                Free throws attempted
ftp                Free throw percentage
orb                Offensive rebounds
drb                Defensive rebounds
trb                Total rebounds
ast                Assists
stl                Steals
blk                Blocks
tov                Turnovers
pts                Points scored
game_score         Statistical measure of a player's productivity for a single game
minus_plus         Statistical measure of a player's impact on the game, represented by the difference between their team's total scoring versus their opponent's when the player is in the game

The aim of this challenge was to answer the ultimate question. Who is the greatest basketball player of all time?

My task was to judge who among them was the GOAT and backing up my statements by analyzing and visualizing the data.

Loading data into Tableau

The data is divided into 4 tables, I performed UNION operation on the tables so that I can see all the tables in a single data source.

The Plus Minus attribute does not have any data for Jordan, so I ignored it in my analysis.

The data set doesn’t provide number of seasons both players played. To get his data, I first created a new calculated attribute, Season Group, which groups all the 82 regular games within a season.

The NBA regular season begins in the last week of October and ends in the middle of April. The NBA playoffs begin in April after the conclusion of the regular season and go on until the June, concluding with the NBA Finals.

Below is my calculation for season group attribute:

If MONTH([Date]) > 8 THEN YEAR([Date]) ELSE YEAR([Date])-1 END

There are few questions that I wanted to analyze:

1. How do their regular season per game and total stats compare? What about their playoff stats?

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.2

• You can notice from the above Figure 1.1, LeBron played a lot more games and scored a lot more points than Jordan. Using this data alone, one cannot conclude that LeBron was better than Jordan.
• Figure 1.2 also looks at their individual stats per game. You can see that Jordan had a better point average per game. Jordan’s per-game stats are better than LeBron for both season games as well as playoffs.

2. At what age did each player have their highest scoring season?

• Jordan started his career at the age of 21 and scored highest points of 69 for 1989–1990 season at the age of 27, he scored early in his career(within 6 years).
• LeBron, started his career at the age of 18 and scored highest points of 61 for 2013–2014 season at the age of 29.

Figure 2.1

3. How does their distribution of points scored per game compare?

Figure 3.1

• From the above Figure 3.1, you can notice, LeBron played more games where he scored points between the range of 0 - 33, whereas Jordan played more games where he scored more points between 34 - 69.
• From this chart, you could also deduce that while LeBron was more consistent with scoring points, Jordan had a higher frequency of high-scoring games than LeBron, and consequently was a match-winner more often

4. How have their win percentages trended by season? Who has a better win percentage in the playoffs?

Figure 4.1

• Jordan played 15 seasons, 13 with Chicago Bulls and 2 with Washington Wizards. LeBron played 17 seasons so far, 11 with Cleveland Cavaliers , 4 with Miami Heat and 2 with Los Angeles Lakers (current team).
• During the early stages of their careers , Jordan’s win percentage was low compared to LeBron. Jordan missed 64 games in his second season because he was injured. He retired for close to 2 years to pursue baseball. After his comeback, Jordan’s win percentage gradually increased to 87.8, depicted in Figure 4.1. LeBron did not achieve such a high win-percentage till now.
• In his last 2 seasons with Washington Wizards, after his second comeback, Jordan under-performed significantly. Lebron is still playing and has been performing much better. So it is unfair to compare them using this information.

Figure 4.2

• Michael Jordan, in 15 years of his career, appeared in 11 playoff’s wining the Championship 6 times. LeBron James, in 17 years of his career, appeared in 14 playoff’s winning the Championship 4 times.
• From Figure 4.2, Jordan’s career best was better than LeBron’s career best. Jordan’s performance in playoffs was consistently excellent and his team won the Championship continuously between 1991 and 1998 when he was playing.
• LeBron was consistent and played 14 playoffs. He was playing in the playoff’s for every year except 2004, 2005 and 2019 season. He appeared for 10 NBA Finals with 8 consecutive appearances from 2011 through 2018.

From my analysis, I recommend Michael Jordan as the G.O.A.T.

• Michael Jordan finished his NBA career with averages of 30.1 points. LeBron James is the current NBA’s best player has career numbers of 27.1 points.
• Michael Jordan in his career have scored 3 times 60+ points in regular season. LeBron James in his career have scored only one time.
• Jordan, has a much better free throw percentage of 83.5 when compared to LeBron who has 73.4%, which sustains the points per game statistic.

The Visualisations are available on tableau public

Thank you for reading the entire story. Please let me know what you think in the comments below.