LeBron just a one-day circus now
LeBron James stood there, arms in the air, yelling. Hey! Hey! He was all alone at one end of the court because he had driven to the hoop and missed and didn’t get the call; he fell down and complained. But then the Lakers had the ball at the other end, and LeBron James was all alone. Hey!
Nobody saw him. The ball never came. LeBron James, basketball god, was ignored.
It used to be that if you were any good around here, eventually LeBron was what really mattered. He helped push the Toronto Raptors down the rebuilding path once upon a time, back when Chris Bosh left. And once the Raptors got good enough to aspire to something, they kept finding the king. He came to delight in destroying them. It was like he thought there were points for artistic merit.
And Thursday night LeBron returned to Toronto as a Laker, and … he doesn’t matter much at all, right now.
Oh, there is still a thrill when he walks into the building; he still gets cheered on the road, his accomplishments treated with reverence rather than derision, even here, even after everything. He cruised to 29 points, four rebounds, six assists, some freight-train genius.
At 34, he still had moments that left you shaking your head. A show.
But Toronto won 111-98 without Kyle Lowry and Serge Ibaka because the rest of L.A.’s production stinks, and LeBron is probably going to miss the playoffs for the first time since 2005.
The Raptors are worried about the pending East playoff bloodbath, about making sure the practice facility is Drake-branded, about getting healthy and in sync. Nobody outside Los Angeles competitively worries about LeBron for much more than a day at a time anymore. It’s so strange. “Obviously, we've lost a lot of hours of sleep over the years against this guy,” said Raptors coach Nick Nurse.
Indeed, LeBron is one of the biggest reasons the Raptors are where they are now. But after winning one for Cleveland and losing twice to Golden State, LeBron semi-retired to California.
He chose Hollywood and weather and a place to raise his kids, and the hope that the Lakers could add other stars in his sunset years.
“There’s nothing I need to get in this league that I don’t already have,” LeBron said to reporters in Boston, before the trade deadline. “Everything else for me is just like icing on the cake … there’s nothing I’m chasing, or feel like I need to end my career on.”
Then his buddy Rich Paul failed to extract Anthony Davis from New Orleans, and the leaks crushed all the young Lakers who were said to be in trade talks.
LeBron passed Michael Jordan on the all-time scoring list last week, and seemed to be the one guy in the building who truly cared. He can chase Kareem’s all-time games played and scoring records, but right now he’s one of the great actors, attached to a box-office bomb.
It’s weird, right? It’s weird. Other than Masai Ujiri, maybe Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan, nobody has done more to shape the franchise’s direction. He tortured them until they broke. Winning Game 5 in 2016 with the series tied and saying, “I’ve been a part of some really adverse situations, and I just didn’t believe this was one of them.” Casually spinning the ball before drilling threes, or pretended to drink a beer during a game during the second-round sweep in 2017. That year Lowry said, “I know I’m not a LeBron, and DeMar’s not a LeBron.” And DeRozan said, “If we had LeBron on our team, too, we woulda won.”
And then last year. Toronto was really good. Cleveland insiders speculated the Cavaliers would bow out gracefully.
But 2018 was LeBron’s Sistine Chapel of torment, and Toronto’s Mona Lisa of despair. When Nurse thinks of it now he doesn’t get beyond the last-possession choke in Game 1, and all those misses. In Game 2 LeBron took all the difficult mid-range jumpers the Rap- tors wanted him to take: turnarounds, off the dribble, swaying and splashing, over and over, every one a message: You can’t beat me. On his nationally syndicated ESPN radio show, Dan Le Batard cackled, “He’s laughing at them. It looks like so much fun for everybody involved except the Raptors.”
LeBron hit that infamous running bank shot in Cleveland to win Game 3, and Raptors team president Masai Ujiri had to be separated from his coaching staff as he yelled about being tired of excuses. DeRozan was traded, and Dwane Casey got fired.
“It was tough,” said Nurse, who replaced Casey. “I just think that we thought we were better than they were, or at least would play them better than we did, so that made for extra tension.”
Maybe Raptors fans should say thanks. LeBron was the gatekeeper to greatness, and he let the Raptors know just how much they didn’t measure up. DeMar brought back Kawhi Leonard, and Kawhi might even stay. There will be different challenges in the playoffs, different gatekeepers. Maybe the Raptors can do it.
They’ll try without having to worry about LeBron, but then, nobody worries much about LeBron anymore. Martin Amis once coined the phrase, the strange obscurity of stardom. That’s about right.