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Another day, another Michael Jordan/LeBron James comparison. This time around it's from Jordan's former star sixth man Toni Kukoc, who weighed into the debate with a balanced and relatively reasonable view – not a sentence which is used all that often in these discussions.
As part of a broader response, Kukoc said: “It’s hard to compare players that never played in the same era; that never played against each other…Michael obviously brought world basketball to another level. And from that point on, LeBron is what LeBron is now that he gave a chance for Luka to be Luka or Jokic be Jokic.”
Kukoc elaborated further, referencing the fact that modern-day players have greater access to information about how to prepare, recover from injuries, eat, etc. In their own eras, however, Jordan – or harking back even further, the likes of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Bill Russell – were “so dominant…they knew basketball in their little finger.”
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Toni Kukoc, of course, played for the Bulls between 1993 and 2000, playing in each championship in the franchise's second three-peat. In that time he established himself as a valuable teammate for Jordan, Pippen and co, and won the Sixth Man of the Year Award in their 1996 championship-winning season.
But despite the success he enjoyed with Michael Jordan, Toni Kukoc appears to have retained a well-rounded perspective on the GOAT debate. Often, such perspectives from former players appear largely based on which era they played in, but not so for Kukoc. These opinions are a dime a dozen and rarely do they add a whole lot of value to the debate, but Kukoc, for his part, has provided a relatively thoughtful response.
