On today's episode, Michael and Rohan open up the mailbag to break down and compare the very best seasons LeBron James and Michael Jordan ever had, before expanding the conversation and ranking the three greatest individual seasons from the last 25 years.
The following transcript is an excerpt from the Open Floor podcast. Listen to the full episode on podcast players everywhere or on SI.com.
Michael Pina: I thought it would be even more enjoyable to take a look back at the past 25 years, and you and I name our three best seasons that any player had in that span, non-LeBron, non-MJ. And this was a joy for me. There are so many great seasons, and you get to go back and do whatever type of research you wanna do.
Rohan Nadkarni: I may have missed the non-LeBron prompt part of that question. I may have somehow managed to overlook that.
Michael Pina: You missed where it said, "Not including LeBron or Jordan, what are the three most impressive individual regular seasons in the past 25 years in your opinion?" That's, that's ... you misread that?
Rohan Nadkarni: I somehow did, yes.
Michael Pina: I didn't, I followed the rules here.
Rohan Nadkarni: I'll just substitute it with 2017 Westbrook, so I'm good. And don't say you followed the rules, you came up with the outline, you invented the rules.
Michael Pina: Exactly, that's my power. O.K., so let me give you my No. 3 here. 2014, Kevin Durant. That is his MVP season. Here's the skinny on it. Plays 81 games, leads the NBA in minutes, scoring 32 points per game, the highest of his career, leads the NBA in usage, PER win shares, his true shooting that season is 63.5, the Thunder are a total juggernaut, they win 59 games. Russell Westbrook misses half the season after he has knee surgery a couple of days after Christmas, they eventually lose to the San Antonio Spurs—the team that spanked LeBron's Miami Heat in the Finals that year—in six games in the conference finals, but Serge Ibaka missed a little bit of that series so who knows what would've happened. I don't even know if technically that was his best season, but it was the most impressive. I don't know if he was the best player that he's been throughout his entire career that year, but what he did was the most impressive in that season. That was the Lee Jenkins year where he is, you know, I don't wanna be No. 2 anymore. There's really nothing else you can say about Kevin Durant that year. He went up a level in every single aspect of his game and hasn't come down since. So that's my No. 3 for best individual seasons.
Rohan Nadkarni: I like that. I didn't rank mine though.
Michael Pina: Yeah, that's O.K. No one's perfect.
Rohan Nadkarni: That's a good pick. He was insane. I remember when he won the MVP, TNT did a highlight mix set to Kendrick Lamar's "Now or Never" and I was like, this is awesome. Like, this is just the Venn diagram of my interest in a circle right now, this is so cool. His MVP speech, I gotta say, this is gonna sound insane. I've cried literally every single time I've ever watched it. And I've actually watched it several times, but there's a line he has in there where he's like, We moved into a one-bedroom apartment and we were hugging each other on the empty floor cause we thought we made it. And it's just, it's really beautiful.
Michael Pina: Yeah, it's been memed unfortunately, 'cause society can't have good things. But yeah, great speech.
Rohan Nadkarni: Yeah, it really is beautiful. 2014 KD was on my list, let me put it that way. I have like five or six seasons on my list. 2014 KD is high up there for me.
I think that was the first time people entertained the KD-LeBron argument, who's the best player in the league? And the fact that that was happening after LeBron's 2013 season says a lot about just how insane KD was that year.
