LeBron James has moved his career VORP total to 104.46 and now narrowly leads Michael Jordan's 104.44 for most in NBA history. It should be noted that VORP can only be calculated since 1973-74, so Wilt Chamberlain's career is not included (nor are the first four seasons of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's career). VORP was created by Daniel Myers, in conjunction with Box Plus/Minus. Descriptions of the statistics and how they are calculated can be found here.

A comparison of some of their career regular-season advanced statistics can be seen below:

As you can see, LeBron has been a slightly more efficient shooter, a slightly better rebounder and a significantly more prolific passer. Jordan, on the other hand, took better care of the ball, had greater usage, and had an edge in steals. Still, while LeBron has a slight 7.3 to 7.0 edge in Offensive Box Plus/Minus, it's his decisive 1.9 to 1.1 edge in Defensive BPM which gives him the edge in VORP despite playing about 4,000 fewer minutes than MJ. This is largely the result of LeBron playing for superior defensive teams throughout his career. When Jordan was winning titles in Chicago, they were elite defensively, but that was not always the case earlier (or later) in his career. Another factor, according to Myers, is that "Jordan's offensive stats look to the regression more like a pure offensive player than LeBron, possibly because they are more guard like. And guards usually have a bit less value on the defensive end."

While VORP is a cumulative stat, BPM is a rate stat which serves as the foundation for VORP. LeBron's 9.2 BPM seems to dwarf Jordan's 8.1 BPM. However, Jordan's BPM is weighed down by his geriatric years in Washington. A more fair comparison might be Jordan's 13 seasons in Chicago compared to LeBron's career (he's currently in his 13th season). As you can see, the numbers are more comparable, with LeBron owning a 9.2 to 9.0 edge in BPM and a 104.5 to 99.8 edge in VORP thanks to his 1,175-minute advantage in playing time (remember, Jordan missed the majority of the 1985-86 and 1994-95 seasons):

VORP and BPM are not the only advanced metrics we have on the site, however. In the eyes of Win Shares , LeBron still has a lot of work to do in order to catch His Airness. And Jordan himself is only fourth all-time. MJ is, however, the all-time leader in Win Shares per 48 minutes (while LeBron is 6th). Here are their career Win Share statistics compared, followed by a comparison of LeBron to Jordan's 13 seasons in Chicago:

We're agnostics in the greatest of all time arguments, but we wanted to share this information with our users as we noticed that VORP now has a new King.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2016 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Advanced Stats, Announcement, Basketball-Reference.com, History, Leaders, Statgeekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.