By Corey Pollnow

Over the past week ESPN used Michael Jordan’s 50th birthday as a gimmick to draw ratings and viewers which inevitably spurred the never ending debate, who’s the Greatest of All-Time?

Is it Jordan, Magic Johnson, Bill Russell, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Oscar Robertson, Wilt Chamberlain, LeBron James or one of the other all-time greats? You can choose a player and form an argument in many ways – rings, statistics, the eye test, technicality, athletic ability etc.

The buzz heading into All-Star weekend was focused around an interview where Jordan said:

“If you had to pick between [Kobe and LeBron], that would be a tough choice,” said Jordan. “But five [rings] beats one every time I look at it.”

James has been on a crusade in his past seven games; he’s averaging 32 points, 7.4 rebounds, 6.6 assists and is shooting 69 percent from the field in his past seven games and it has certainly added fuel to the Jordan versus James fire.

My cynicism directed towards the greatest of all-time debate is solely because of time. Comparing Jordan to James is illogical for two reasons: James hasn’t finished his career and the two men played in different eras.

James said it best in a tweet to his 7.3 million followers:

“I’m not MJ, I’m LJ.” He’s a different kind of player than Jordan.

The game has evolved and so have its players. Jordan played in an era when hand-checking was fair game, as was putting a forearm on your opponent. The rules were stricter on illegal defense prior to 2001, when it was outlawed. James plays in an era where defenses are more complex, the paint is more cluttered and players can gang up on a star player. Players today are more athletic in comparison to Jordan’s era, but players like Steve Nash, Michael Redd, Shaquille O’Neal, and Grant Hill had their careers extended because teams like the Phoenix Suns are on the cutting edge of medical science.

There is no formula to determine who the best player is. John Hollinger, currently the Vice President of Basketball Operations for the Memphis Grizzlies, who was also an analyst for ESPN, created a formula, Player Efficiency Rating, to quantify a player’s performance. It’s the best tool we have to determine if one player is better than another, but it has flaws, the most obvious being the failure to take into account a player’s defensive ability.

People will often cite the eye test to determine how good a player is, but the eye test is really a memory test and our most recent memories tend to sway our opinions. Many of us weren’t fortunate enough to have memories of Chamberlain and Robertson playing, therefore we tend to be biased to players who recently played the game and that we are familiar with.

If you want to use measuring sticks as the basis for greatness, Robert Horry was a better player than Jordan because he has one more ring than Jordan. I think most sane people will disagree with that statement, but that’s how one can play devil’s advocate.

To pinpoint one era or player as the greatest is naïve and near sighted. Rather than spewing hogwash statistics and debating whether Jordan’s “hang over game” (according to Jalen Rose) was the greatest performance of all-time, sit back and enjoy the nuances of different player’s games because basketball is a form of art, and there is no right or wrong way to create artwork.