King allowed a clunker
Will return in force for Game 4 tonight
CLEVELAND — Hope you enjoyed your complimentary LeBron James hiccup, Celtics fans. It might be the last one you see for a while.
What, you think basketball’s reigning Greatest Player is going to allow a second consecutive 11-point game to stain his postseason résumé?
You think the Celtics have found some secret sauce that’ll nullify LeBron for the remainder of this suddenly interesting Eastern Conference finals?
As Celtics coach Brad Stevens put it after his team’s miraculous 111-108 Game 3 victory Sunday night at Quicken Loans Arena, “Right when you think you figure something out, he just kills you. I don’t want to act like we’ve figured anything out.”
And LeBron James might just kill the Celtics tonight in Game 4. Well, maybe not them, since we are guaranteed a Game 5 Thursday night at the Garden. But Stevens basically is acknowledging what happened to LeBron in Game 3 was partly because of a diligent, refuse-to-quit effort by the Celtics, and also because the guy simply had a bad game.
But because he is who he is, bad games don’t get quickly and neatly wiped off the table. We’re not talking about LeBron McGillicuddy. We’re talking about LeBron freakin’ James.
So when he has a bad game, and when he gets heckled by a fan, and then when he has a testy exchange with a Cleveland radio host, it turns into so much more.
LeBron didn’t blast or tear into or scream at Kenny Roda, who works for Cleveland radio station WHBC. Roda asked a follow-up question about LeBron’s poor performance, and the King’s response, admittedly icy, was, “I was just pretty poor. What do you want me to say? Seems like you only ask questions when we lose. It’s a weird thing with you, Kenny. You always come around when we lose. I swear.”
For all anyone knows, Kenny Roda spends his spare time throwing eggs at LeBron James’ house. (But only following a Cavaliers loss because, you know, that’s the only time Kenny shows up.)
So there sat grumpy LeBron after Game 3, giving the verbal stink-eye to a local radio guy who had the temerity to ask a question about . . . a loss.
Sorry, LeBron haters, but in the grand scheme of things, this is no big deal. Oh, to be sure, it was a bad look for him. After leading the reigning NBA champs to 10 consecutive playoff wins before Sunday’s loss, and then getting pouty when someone asks him about it . . . weak. But it got the big play because this is LeBron we’re talking about, and the NBA didn’t help matters when its official postgame quote mechanism cleaned up the response as follows: “No, I was just pretty poor. I mean, what do you want me to say?”
LeBron did not speak with the media following the Cavaliers’ practice session yesterday, but teammate JR Smith did speak. And he spoke about LeBron. Asked to comment on James’ Game 3 performance, he replied, “Play confident. That’s my only thing. People of his stature, well, there’s only like three, but people like him, you have to play confident the whole night and play aggressive. I mean, it’s the Eastern Conference finals. It’s not enough, for him, for what he does, for what he brings. It’s not enough. He knows that. We know that. Just expecting him to be better in Game 4.”
Funny how JR Smith only talks about LeBron James after a Cleveland loss. We joke, of course, but Smith’s comment seems like a bit more of a zinger than Kenny Roda’s simple question. (Speaking of which, I spoke with Roda, who confirmed he’s been at four of Cleveland’s five home games this postseason. He said he’s also covered James since he was a sophomore in high school and has defended him on many occasions, but, “When the Cavs lose, I ask probing questions about what went wrong. If they want to refer to those as negative questions, fine.”)
Cavs coach Tyronn Lue said of LeBron: “For a guy who played great for five straight months, he’s got to have a bad game sooner or later. He’s human. He didn’t shoot the ball well. It wasn’t his ordinary game.”
That makes sense. As does something LeBron said Sunday night, ether before or after his “tirade” with the Cleveland radio guy.
“I feel like you have to have some type of adversity in order to be successful,” he said. “If it was going to happen, let it happen now, let us regroup. Let us regroup, and all the narrative and everything that was going on, let’s regroup and let’s get back to playing desperate basketball, which (the Celtics) did tonight.”
LeBron James is going to score 50 points tonight.