Public Policy Polling (PPP) is a high-volume, mathematically weighted, automated polling service that nailed the results of the 2012 presidential election. For the most part, their work is centered on matters of great import, campaigns, politics, public policy and the like, but occasionally, they will delve into lighter, frothier fare.
They’ll ask whether hipsters are annoying enough and their lifestyle so grating that they should be punished with their very own tax. (27%), or if a secret race of “Lizard People” have, unbeknownst to the sheeple, managed to wrap their scale-covered fingers around the highest levers of political power (4%).
On Thursday, they released the results of a poll in which NBA fans were asked “Who do you think is the best basketball player of all time: LeBron James or Michael Jordan?” The answer is pretty much what you might expect:
There’s no such division when it comes to who NBA fans think is the best player of all time. 77% pick Michael Jordan on that question to only 14% who think it’s LeBron James.
Where the responses delve into the realm of George H W Bush Is Actually A Shape-Shifting Reptilian Truther Videos is the follow up: “If LeBron James and Michael Jordan played one on one in the year 2015, who do you think would win?”
In fact despite his being 52 years old, 34% of NBA fans think Jordan could beat James one on one now – as in the year 2015 – to just 54% who think James would win despite being in the prime of his career.
Which ... what? That’s preposterous. Michael Jordan, despite all his otherworldly athletic gifts, has spent his post-retirement years (as he should) growing comfortably round, growing weird mustaches, hitting the links and chomping on stogies, and occasionally reigniting his trash-talking glory days by firing off a few barbs at President Obama.
Yes, Jordan did recently boast that he could take James one-on-one were he still in his prime, but there’s zero chance that even a borderline-sociopathic competitor like His Airness would be deluded enough to think he could do more than bang home a few creaky, crafty old-man jumpers a la Papa Shuttlesworth were he to match up with King James right now. After all, the fact that Jordan can still dunk was enough of a point of pride that he tweeted it to the world, crowing, “This still happens.”
The only explanation that I could come up with is that the phrasing of the question is a tad unclear. Yes, playing “one-on-one in 2015” is clearly meant to indicate that the Michael Jordan we’re talking about is 52 years old. But this kind of debate – could Player X from another historical era of the game beat contemporary Player Y – usually operates under the assumption that we’re dealing with a theoretical hole in the fabric of reality such that Clayton Kershaw could travel back in time and try to fire a fastball or two past Babe Ruth.
I spoke with Justin Mayhew, a communications specialist with PPP, to ask if there was any way for them to assess what percentage of respondents might have misunderstood the question. He explained that it was an automated poll and therefore that wasn’t possible.
I told him that it took me a couple of passes to be sure what age we were talking about for their MJ-LBJ tilt, to which he said, “We kind of liked how the question was a little ambiguous. Because I think a lot of people still think that Jordan could beat him today.”
A few hours after PPP released their results, ESPN posed the same question online making it perfectly clear how old Jordan would be. This is a completely nonscientific poll, but as of midnight Thursday, they’d gotten an eerily similar result, with 35% saying that a guy that hasn’t played a pro game in 12 years could topple the best player of his generation.
Clearly, I was wrong. This doesn’t have anything to do with poor reading comprehension skills. Dive deeper into the data, though, and you’ll see that Jordan is getting the bulk of his support (48% to 41%) from voters aged 30 to 45, those that grew up worshipping Jordan when he was running roughshod through the league.
That makes sense. It’s not just a question of Jordan’s enduring legacy brainwashing an entire demographic. It’s that fandom by definition is inherently ridiculous (and yes, fun and good) endeavor, and one that’s deeply driven by nostalgia. We all want to think that our wasted time watching games was given in service of something special, even something sacred, something that has never been seen before and will never be replicated.
These barstool debates are so vehemently argued and so pervasive – a third of Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball was dedicated to arguing his definitive hierarchy of NBA greats – because of the profound desire to confirm that our childhood heroes were just that, heroes, even to the point where a large chunk of the population will die on a middle aged MJ-sized hill.
More to the point, for all of the smarter, better, data-driven methods and methodologies that have been created to understand the games people play, who will win and why, underneath it all is a bunch of kids hollering at one another that Superman would totally lap the Flash in a race.
That’s a good thing. It’s tribal and clannish and, and yes, those raw emotions can easily be twisted to the point of actual violence, but the anti-rationality of it is also profoundly innocent and endearing. There is no fandom without it.
But to be clear, LeBron James would definitely beat 52-year old Michael Jordan like a gong. Unless ... Yes ... as fantastical as it might seem, that’s it. You see, Mike’s going to come out on top because he is in fact a Lizard Person
Stay woke.
