Those teams would not have been very good without both Scottie and Micheal. Not at all, that is funny to even say that. I think some of those wins came because the league overall sucked pretty badly.
That said, as far as individual performances Lebron has played and defended every position on the floor this season...think about that for a minute...
And again, Jordan, Bird, Magic...a lot of players would not have won MVP if it depended on how good other players on their team were. Lebron is playing the best basketball in the league right now. I think its going to be close, but I have a feeling that people will vote against Lebron more than for anyone else...
Saying the league sucked back then is a little bit of a stretch, I think. There was a lot more of a brute style of play back then, but it's not like there weren't supremely talented guys. There was just a different mentality back then, and arguably an even stronger cohesive team bond (generally). Yeah, this was during the time of acquiring a lot of expansion teams (most recently Vancouver and Toronto) and a lot of people were saying that the talent in the NBA was being watered down. But some of the top teams, like Indiana, Utah, Houston, and Seattle were all extremely well-oiled machines, stacked, and very talented individual players.
But I do think that teams in the mid-80s to 90s was the toughest era to play in because of not only the physical play, but because of the caliber teams there were back then. Lakers, Celtics, Pistons, Knicks, Sonics... even the Cavs, Bulls, and Jazz were young and good. The Sixers I remember had some pretty stacked teams as well.
And let's not forget that Jordan also won the MVP award 3 times in that era... it's hard to say that he didn't deserve it just because the Bulls would have still been decent without him. There were years where he was definitely the best player in the NBA and still didn't win it. 1993 (Barkley) and 1997 (Malone). And in 1997, Malone won it over Malone despite the Bulls having the better record. I'm not so sure he deserved it, but the case was that he was much more vital to his team's success than Jordan was. If Malone didn't play then the Jazz would have been terrible defensively and would have been entirely too shaky offensively. Without Jordan, the Bulls still would have been very good defensively, and would have had Toni Kukoc to help fill the void offensively. And Pippen was very much capable of averaging nearly 25 points per-game if Jordan was not around (much like Wade here in 2011 for Miami if James was gone).
But, yeah, I agree. You can't win the MVP award if you don't have decent enough teammates to win an x-amount of games... that's just simply because 1 player vs. 5 can't win games for you. And the MVP award is measured in large part about how many wins you were responsible for getting your team to win---pushing them over the edge.
