NBA Analysis: Is Carmelo Anthony a Better Scorer than LeBron James?

No one will disagree that LeBron James is a better player than Carmelo Anthony. However, people certainly seem to think Carmelo Anthony is at least in the mix for top small forward in the league. In fact just two seasons ago when LeBron James took home the MVP award and was named to the All-NBA first team Carmelo Anthony finished sixth in MVP voting and was placed on the All-NBA second team.

Every time we compare Melo to LeBron, Melo pretty much comes up short on every count. The only place Melo comes out ahead is in offensive rebounds per game. While these are valuable they don’t come close to making up for the rest of the game differences between the players.

The one area that Melo seems to get a lot of credit is scoring. He’s called a “pure scorer” that can “score at will” and is “the best offensive player in the game”. It’s very odd for all of this praise to get heaped on Melo when his shooting numbers are not anywhere near LeBron’s. However, the Basketball Reference Play Index Plus gives us an ability to check out what people are talking about. Let’s look at LeBron vs. Melo in regards to shooting when we take location into account. I’ll be using 2010 as that is the season where LeBron and Melo were arguably most similar in regards to popular perception.

Get the rest of this article over at Wages of Wins Journal.