LeBron’s never been better — scary good
When we look back on this moment in time known as the NBA’s superteam era, it’ll be one of those stats that sticks in the mind. En route to clinching the Eastern Conference championship in five games on Thursday night, it was notable that LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers achieved three of their required four wins at Boston’s TD Garden. It was truly incredible that not once in those three games in Boston did the Cavaliers trail on the scoreboard. Not for a minute. Not for a second. Not even close.
The competitive chasm between Cleveland and the East’s second-tier teams proved itself to be approximately as wide as the smile on Toronto coach Dwane Casey’s face as Casey watched the Cavaliers dismantle the Celtics even more dramatically than they undressed the Raptors in the Eastern semi. Yes, the Celtics actually won a game against Cleveland, catching James on his only off night of the post-season to date, which is something the Raptors failed to do in their secondround drubbing. But Boston, which was without the services of star player Isaiah Thomas for all but 56 minutes of the series, absorbed its four losses by an average of 25 points a game. At least the Raptors, who were without franchise point guard Kyle Lowry for all but 69 minutes against Cleveland, kept the average margin of defeat to a more respectable 13 points a night.
In the end, though, neither team’s failure to provide meaningful resistance to Cleveland’s march to a long-awaited rubber match with the Golden State Warriors came down to coaching. It was ultimately about the sheer dominance of a team built around basketball’s singular megastar. And come Thursday, when the NBA final commences after a Super Bowl-esque week of championship hype, that megastar will face his toughest test yet.
So it’s Cavaliers-Warriors, exactly as expected. This will be the first time in NBA history that the same two teams will meet in three straight finals.
It hasn’t happened in one of the other big-four North American sports since Jean Beliveau’s Montreal Canadiens met Gordie Howe’s Red Wings in back-to-back-to-back Stanley Cup finals in the mid-1950s. And hey — at least the NHL of that era had six teams. The present-day NBA had two of consequence all season.
Even still, James remains the Chosen One. Even at age 32, as he prepares to play in his seventh straight final, James is performing as well as he’s ever performed during a six-week playoff run. He’s shooting an astonishing 42 per cent from three-point range and 57 per cent from the field in the playoffs — the best marks of his career. He’s averaging nearly 33 points a game on about 21 field-goal attempts a night — his most efficient postseason work yet. (The rare place you find a flaw in his arsenal is at the free-throw line. He’s shooting a 71 per cent from there in the playoffs; the league average this season was 77 per cent. So far in these playoffs James has missed 36 free throws. Golden State’s starters, who are shooting a collective 83 per cent from the stripe, have missed 41 combined).
Even so, on Thursday James passed Michael Jordan to command sole possession of first place on the all-time playoff scoring list — which is not to say he passed Jordan in anyone’s ranking of all-time greatest players. It’s a conversation that’s slowly becoming more compelling. Jordan’s supporters, for instance, can point out that the Chicago Bulls great scored his career playoff total in fewer games than James. James’ proponents can point out that their man did it taking fewer shots than Jordan.
James, for his part, sounded as though he was simply blown away to be mentioned in the same sentence as His Airness. It was charming to hear James recall the lengths to which his younger self once went to mimic Jordan, from wearing shortshorts that showed his spandex undershorts, to sporting one wristband on the forearm, to folding his knee sleeve just so. But superficialities aside, James has never been a Jordan clone, never had Jordan’s assassin-like single-mindedness as a scoring machine. It’s James’ unselfish vision of the importance of the team game that remains his most admirable strength. And now that he’s executing that vision with the help of the most reliable jump shot of his career — well, it’s scary-good stuff.
“It’s been part of the plan since I really started taking this game serious, to say how can I get the youth to feel like passing the ball is OK, making the extra pass is OK, drawing two defenders and no matter if you win or lose, if you make the right play, it’s OK,” James told reporters late Thursday night. “Scoring the ball is so heralded in our sport. I want the fundamentals of the game to be as great as they can be. And if some kid or a group of kids from the West Coast or the East Coast or the Midwest or the South and everything in between all around the world can look at me and say, ‘Well, I made the extra pass because LeBron made the extra pass,’ or ‘I got a chase-down block and I didn’t give up on the play because LeBron didn’t give up,’ that would mean the world to me.”
You can make the case that James’ all-round greatness hasn’t simply inspired a generation of youngsters — it has been the impetus for the creation of his toughest impediment to a fourth championship ring. The Warriors, like every other would-be NBA contender, have been operating for most of the past decade with James’ peerless nature in mind.
Still, James has more than once positioned his team as the underdogs, dubbing them “the best team in our league for the last three years.” And there are those who agree with him. Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight website puts the Warriors’ probability of winning the series at 90 per cent. And others see it as very likely, too. In Las Vegas on Friday, $100 plunked down on the Warriors to win the title promised to pay about $39. That same $100 correctly wagered on a Cleveland repeat brought a projected return of $220.
As the Raptors and the Celtics will tell you, the latter somehow doesn’t seem so foolhardly in a league in which the best player on the floor so often commands a game’s course.