Anthony Edwards is next in line as the Next Michael Jordan. Via Liam McGuire
NBABy Devin Raab on

The ascendency of the Minnesota Timberwolves has coincided with a rather bold comparison by basketball fans, which is that star guard Anthony Edwards might just be the next coming of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant as the next great NBA superstar.

On the surface, you could see this as an enormous compliment; Jordan and Kobe are held to such an esteem by NBA fans that it’s blasphemous to compare virtually anybody to them, so for Edwards to be linked to them at just 22 says the world about how impressive he is.

And yet, it’s because of how impressive Edwards is and how reminiscent he is of the greatest players ever that the discourse around him is primed to become unbearable for the foreseeable future. And that’s because getting compared to Jordan isn’t going to inoculate his game from criticism. In fact, it means the exact opposite.

Legacy comps for basketball players are very often a trap, a clandestine way for talking heads and malcontents to crush modern players while pretending that they’re implicitly praising them by broaching the topic. It’s a loophole the biggest personalities in the hot take industry discovered ages ago, that if you compare an athlete to someone or something else that’s older and better, you have plausible deniability to bash that present-day player when ordinarily there might not be much to be objectively critical of them about.

It’s why the biggest hot takers in sports almost always frame their discussions around the macro, around someone’s legacy or how much blame they deserve or if they’re overrated, as opposed to the micro of dissecting a player’s performance from the previous night: it’s because the macro is easier. It’s also why many of the biggest NBA hot takers can be fairly accused of not actually paying close attention to the sport they’re purporting an expert on: they don’t have to. The “current player X isn’t as good as Y” comp is a well you can keep returning to over and over again, and more than a few basketball analysts have made doing so the cornerstone of their careers.

Consider LeBron James, for instance, and how much unreasonable, nit-picking diatribes he’s received throughout his career by virtue of being compared to Jordan. LeBron is no worse than the second-best basketball player of all time, and yet for more than two decades, the primary talking point about him has been that maybe he’s not as good as the one guy on Earth who might’ve been better than him, and maybe he’s only better than 99.99% of all NBA players in history as opposed to 100%.

Through that incredibly specific, unfair framing, critics have been able to continually criticize LeBron and hold up his every failure as proof that he isn’t the GOAT – a distinction we’re repeatedly told is incredibly important. There was even a time when LeBron was the single most hated athlete in the America, a status he reached not by doing anything legitimately sinister but by leaving the Cavs to form a superteam in Miami, an act he was crushed for primarily because Jordan never did it.

The Jordan-LeBron discussion has been raging for more than twenty years, and at almost no point until recently was it anything more than any obviously premature discussion – due to the fact that Jordan had a whole career’s worth of accomplishments while LeBron’s wasn’t close to finished – and that it largely existed so talking heads could use the framing device as a cudgel to slam LeBron as often as possible.

LeBron’s had one of the single greatest careers of any athlete in history, and yet his prize for that has been to be the subject of a never-ending stream of TV segments about how he isn’t great as some people think he is. This is how it will be with not just Anthony Edwards too but also Caitlin Clark and Victor Wembanyama – all of whom have reached a level of prominence in which their careers will inevitably be scored on a constant, never-ending basis over whether or not they’re as great as the greatest players before them (with the trick being that of course they’re not yet, or else the conversation wouldn’t be happening in the first place).

That’s what’s so pernicious about these player legacy comps. It’s not that you can’t make one in good faith or that it’s unreasonable to look at a young player and say they’re reminiscent of an older player. (For example, people aren’t nuts to say that Edwards reminds them of Jordan, as Jordan himself says he sees the similarities.)

It’s that these comps have become a tool that the laziest and worst of the worst hot take spewers – the ones who spend their lives ripping on everyone and everything – can wield as a way to go after players, and that they do so with regularity now.

Player legacy comps are so prevalent enough that they’ve become the template for what a typical discussion about basketball looks like. Almost all of them are like what the Jordan-LeBron debate was like for most of its run too: pointless, miserable, existing more to downplay the hype of a current player than because the people engaging in it sincerely feel like showing endless reverence to players from thirty years ago.

Never will this be more obvious than it will with Caitlin Clark by the way, whose legacy will be discussed breathlessly by the same hot-take spewers who until recently wouldn’t have been caught dead discussing the greatest players in WNBA history on their platform. The same people who ignored the existence of Lisa Leslie and Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi and Cynthia Cooper for decades are now going to wave them in front of Clark at every opportunity just so they can question if she’s on their level. Will they be doing this because they genuinely, spontaneously decided to admire the greatness of Taurasi and Leslie and so on, or will it be because Taurasi and Leslie and Bird’s names are ones that can be co-opted as a way to needle and knock Clark on a regular basis? If you follow basketball, you know that’s a rhetorical question.

This is all to say that we as a whole need to stop giving so much oxygen to these discussions and remember that just because they’re everywhere doesn’t mean we have to participate in them or pretend they matter.

Maybe Anthony Edwards will wind up living up to the Jordan/Kobe hype. Or, maybe he won’t. What I do know is that we wouldn’t be able to fairly compare him to them until another 15 or 20 years or so anyway, so what exactly is the upside to having the regular arguments about Edwards’ legacy that we’re on the verge of having that will accomplish nothing but shroud how fun it is to watch him in the present? How is it anything but a colossal waste of our time for us to engage in this joyless, Cinema Sins-esque overview in which every active player must be cut down to size and made worse in our eyes again and again and again solely to accommodate the lazy take-shouting of personalities who probably don’t even watch the games and most of us don’t even like?

All that should matter to us is that Edwards and Clark and Wembanyama and so on are really really good right now and that so long as we’re following the journey of their careers and so long as we don’t know where their careers are going to wind up, we should simply enjoy the ride.

We don’t need to constantly compare the ride to previous rides or act like it’s the most important thing in the world to determine if the ride we’re on is great but maybe 0.1% less great than the ride we went on with a player from 40 years ago. Let’s, for once, just enjoy the basketball that’s in front of us in the present. Anthony Edwards in 2024 is fun and exciting and great to watch, and the best way to fix the way we talk about basketball is to accept that that alone is more than enough – no Jordan or Kobe comparisons needed.

The author of this piece can be reached @Velodus on X.