I'm not a basketball fan, so not only do I not have a horse in this race, but I'm also not going to be citing any stats or the like to really take any sides.
But it IS worth keeping in mind the overall impact each player had on the sport at the time they were playing. Yes, MJ helped his team win a lot (but he also had the benefit of a good team around him, so it wasn't entirely single-handed), whereas Kareem was so good and so singularly beyond everyone else on the court that they literally changed the rules of the sport to handicap him.
Granted, if you had a time machine and could grab all of your top-tier players and put them on the court at the same time and compare them directly, someone like MJ might be more objectively superior... but on the flip-side, the fact that someone like Kareem seems as if he was more subjectively superior to everyone else he was playing against at the time makes his skills far more impressive overall.
Good take.
Also, as training, recovery and dietary regimes, as well as science around sports all get more advanced, players in general are getting better all the time. Especially since basketball has grown, and continues to grow greatly in popularity. ---
