LeBron rises above three-ring circus
It was eight years ago this summer that LeBron James became the scourge of the sports world while announcing his intention to take his talents to South Beach. And if The Decision turned out to be a rare career misstep, all these years later you can wholly understand its motivation.
It was, along with being a public relations disaster, a choice fuelled by a lust for championships. James, at the time, was seven years into his NBA career. And although he’d just won back-toback league MVPs, he had yet to win a game in an NBA final. So the critiques of his inadequacies mostly revolved around his lack of team success.
“Apple just released the LeBron James iPhone. Only vibrates. No rings,” went one popular bit of internet humour around that time.
Perhaps understanding this vulnerability, Miami Heat president Pat Riley, in the midst of his free-agent pitch to James, famously brought along a bag full of championship rings. After looking at that jewelry, after weighing a future flanked by Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh alongside riding solo for his hometown franchise, James couldn’t deny the allure.
“I don’t want to be 31 with bad knees and no championship,” is what James told friends at the time, according to Sports Illustrated.
Now age 33 and playing in his eighth straight NBA final, James, in many ways, finds himself back where he was. No longer ring-less — he’s got three — and having proven amazingly averse to bad knees, not to mention seemingly all bodily hurt, he’s still carrying a Cleveland team without much reliable help. Down 1-0 to the Golden State Warriors in a series in which the Cavaliers are massive underdogs, you could argue that the only way James is going to increase his career tally of championships — the only way he’s going to edge closer to Michael Jordan’s imposing total of six — will be to depart again in search of a superior situation. And maybe he will.
But Thursday gave us the best advertisement we’ve probably ever seen about why, this time around, James shouldn’t chase championships as if his legacy depends on it. The whole idea that we should judge individual greatness based on team success has always been flawed. And Thursday’s Game 1 of this NBA final made it seem downright ludicrous.
It’s hard to imagine how a player could do more for his team than James did for the Cavaliers on Thursday night in Oakland. He scored 51 points on a beyond-efficient 32 shots. And in doing so he became the first player in the history of the league to find himself on the losing end of a championship series game while scoring 50 or more points. He dished out eight assists that produced another 19 points for his team. So he scored and assisted on 70 points.
LeBron James was at his peak in Game 1, scoring or assisting on 70 points. Only two others have ever done that in the NBA final.
Only two other players in history, Jerry West and Clyde Frazier, can say they’ve done the same while playing in the final. James can say he’s done it twice.
And speaking of the teammates he’s carrying, James would have had more assists had any of his running mates been a little more handy around an open shot. The Cavaliers not named LeBron shot a combined 32 per cent on uncontested field-goal attempts, according to player tracking data at NBA.com. Kevin Love missed nine of his 13 open shots. J.R. Smith and Jeff Green both missed six of eight.
And as for Smith — well, he’ll be best remembered for the shot he didn’t take, this after hustling for the rebound of teammate George Hill’s missed free throw with a few seconds remaining in regulation and the game tied. Game 1 should have been remembered for a great being great. Instead it was defined by an airhead forgetting the score.
Smith’s dribbling out of the clock was an all-time blunder. And hey, such things happen even to great players. Magic Johnson once famously dribbled out the regulation clock of a tie game in the 1984 championship series against the Celtics only to lose in overtime. For Smith, though, Friday’s boneheadedness was no career aberration. He forgot the score down the stretch of a regular-season game back in 2014. (“Honestly, I thought we were down two … Bad basketball IQ on me,” Smith said at the time.) And forgetting the score wasn’t Smith’s only Game 1 crime against common sense. He made a bad gamble in the moments before halftime that allowed Stephen Curry to drill a three-pointer at the buzzer. Oh, and then after his coach, Tyronn Lue, acknowledged to the world that Smith didn’t know the score at the moment of truth, Smith went on to insist to reporters that he, like, totally knew the situation.
All of which is to say: There’s only so much one player — even a great player — can do. The Cavaliers lost that game for a handful of reasons: because Smith didn’t know the score, because Hill missed that free throw, because the referees used video review to reverse an offensive foul on Kevin Durant with 36 seconds to play that left James assessed with a blocking foul and justifiably agog. They didn’t lose because James isn’t great.
That won’t stop the argument from being made. It was just last summer that Jordan was asked if he’d rank James ahead of Kobe Bryant in his all-time player rankings. Jordan said no: “There’s something about five that beats three.” As in: Bryant has five championships, James has three. Ergo, Bryant is better.
If you’re a hall of famer with six championships, maybe that’s the legacy-preserving argument that lets you sleep at night. For the rest of us, the measurement of greatness has to go deeper than simply counting rings.