The Quest for the GOAT

Solving the never-ending debate of the greatest basketball player of all time

- Jennifer Rana -

Who is the GOAT?

For decades armchair athletes have been debating, who is the the greatest basketball player of all time: LeBron James, Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan.

But who really is the GOAT? Based on our analysis it is clear who the best player of all times is and we can finally put these debates to rest.

The Data

We based our findings off of various datasets from Kaggle.com.

NBA Players stats from 1950-2017
Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James stats through 2019

Back to Basics

First we looked at some basic aggregates to see if a top player emerged.

Michael Jordan

15 seasons
1072 games
6 NBA championships
5x NBA MVP
14x NBA All-Star
32,292 career points
30.1 PPG

Kobe Bryant

20 seasons
1,346 games
5 NBA championships
1x NBA MVP
18x NBA All-Star
33,643 career points
25 PPG

LeBron James

20 seasons & counting
1,378 games
4 NBA championships
4x NBA MVP
18x NBA All-Star
37,371 career points
27.1 PPG

What does this mean? Still no clear winner based on these initial statistics.

Let’s Get Advanced

We turned to various advanced statistics for more clarity and chose to look at each players Box Plus-Minus(BPM) throughout their careers.

BPM is a metric that:

is derived from a player’s own statistics (points, rebounds, and assists, etc.), along with their position, and overall team performance
estimates a player’s contribution to the team when that player is on the court in points above the NBA average, which is 0
Example: a BPM of +5 means that per game, the team is 5 points better with the player on the court than with the average NBA player