I view Bird as the best 80’s player. Back-to-back-to-back MVP’s, 3 rings and would probably be a consensus top-3 all time if he doesn’t get crippled by injury.
Bird definitely had the highest peak of any player in the 80's. It's a shame his body betrayed him and Magic gets more recognition as the better player. At their respective peaks I don't think there is even a question of who the better player was.
Magic's health betrayed him too. Bird and Magic both played 13 seasons in the NBA.
Biggest difference, IMO, is Bias' death. Lenny Bias doesn't die, the Celtics win two or more titles in Larry's later years and suddenly history's opinions on Larry might have changed.
Think of it. How much of history's opinion of the Lakers Showtime would have been affected if James Worthy had died shortly after being drafted?
Absolutely. And I suspect that it might have had devastating effects on Magic's legacy, even in the eyes of analysts. Magic's offence was primarily based on exploiting defences (only that it was done at an unprecedented level, the way he exploited the smallest of gaps with his passing made his team offences very resilient and effcient), so playing without an All-NBA calibre wing who can pull defenders away from him would hurt him quite a bit imo when you consider that exploitation isn't really classic creation that is done by pulling away defenders from you with your threat to score to create openings for your teammates - it's more dependent on teammates finding those openings, which takes skill and quality (the latter is for off-ball gravity).
This isn't to say that Magic would suddenly become a bum if he didn't play next to Worthy and ended up carrying a less talented Laker cast in the late 80s and early 90s, but I do suspect that he wouldn't have lead historic offences with those teams (although they still would've been elite), which hurts his value in my eyes when he's mainly considered as a floor raiser.