Having watched four generations of American professional sports, it’s really obvious to me that athletes should be judged by “dominance” which is implicitly based on the other athletes of the same era as a reference.

There might he a better hockey player one day than Wayne Gretzky, but I’m fairly confident in saying there will never be anyone as dominant

There is some sport-specific subtlety there too, which I’m too tired to map out right now, but it roughly goes like this: Michael Jordan was not as good at basketball as Gretzky was at hockey from a statistical perspective, but anyone who watched them knows he was just as, if not more dominant. This may be explainable through some sort of modal analysis of the sports’ talent pools - Gretzky was a ridiculous outlier.

In a weird way, MJ can be greater than WG in relation to his peers, but Gretzky was better at his sport - relative to peers - than Jordan!

There’s this weird aspect of sports that you can’t quantify, and is a large part of the allure.