One NBA player lords over LeBron James.

Carmelo Anthony rules Cleveland's hoops King.

"I know he hates losing to me," Anthony said with a laugh.

This is how the AP writeup of last night's Cavs-Nuggets game began. But let's see who should be laughing. True, the Nuggets destroyed the Cavs last night. It was ugly. But the Cavs were without many of their main rotation players: Gooden, Gibson and Varejao. The Nuggets were pretty much at full strength.

I find it hard to believe that some people still consider Carmelo a better player than LeBron, but apparently they're out there. So I calculated the WP48 (wins per 48 minutes) of each player (see the Wages of Wins link to the right if you don't know what this means).

LeBron: .166
Carmelo: .464

And what we find is that in this case, the AP writer is correct (didn't see that one coming, did you?). LeBron played a horrible game, highlighted by his 5 turnovers. Looks like he shouldn't have been the one to sit alone at the end of the bench in the 4th quarter.

Of course, this is just one game. So before we jump to conclusions here is each player's WP48 score after the first 41 games of the season:

LeBron: .331
Carmelo: .101

These numbers are representative of each player's entire career. LeBron has been a far more productive player than Carmelo. It's really not even close.

For fun, here is Darko's WP48 this season:

Darko: -.075

Yes, that's a minus sign.