SHOOTING FROM THE LIP
LeBron James has made his case as best all-around basketball player to ever step on court
There is occasionally the suggestion, even from people I like, that Patrick Mahomes is now the greatest star in American team sports. He's not. Mahomes is a wonder on a football field, and the best player in his sport right now. But he is the biggest star in American sports when LeBron James is no longer in the gym.
He is now playing in his ninth NBA Finals in the last 10 years, and unless he gets hurt or Anthony Davis gets hurt, he is about to win his fourth title with his third different team. And he really is playing in his 10th Finals with his fourth different team, because that first Cavaliers team he took to the Finals bore no relationship, other than geography, to the Cavs team he won with later.
At the age of 34, after first playing an NBA game 17 years ago, he is still here, stil playing basketball in this remarkably high place. Basketball and team basketball. He has made the kind of game he has had in Bubble Ball, night after night, seem routine. He is expected to produce a triple-double every night, or come up a rebound or an assist short. He remains not just the best player in pro basketball, he remains the best teammate.
You want to know something else? He was right when he complained about not being MVP, and no disrespect, none, meant to Giannis. LeBron is always the MVP when he is healthy, the way Michael was always the MVP when he was healthy. It is not just about the all-around excellence of his game, and a skill set unlike any other the league has ever seen. It is about him doing the one thing in sport that a true MVP is supposed to do, which means make everybody around him better.
Does he have a dream sidekick in Anthony Davis? He does. No disrespect meant to Dwyane Wade, either, but Davis is the best teammate LeBron has ever had. I thought he would be a transformational player when he came to the NBA out of Kentucky, and thought it would be in New Orleans. But he had to get with LeBron. Now he has opened everything up with the Lakers even more than we thought he would because of his outside shot, the way Chris Bosh opened things up when he stepped outside and started knocking down shots in Miami.
Davis has made things so much easier on the court for LeBron. But playing with LeBron has made Davis even better than he already was. No. 23 makes them all better, and that includes Kyrie Irving, as much as Irving was there for LeBron in Game 7 against the Warriors in June of 2016.
The other day LeBro n James was asked about playing with Davis and this is what he said:
“We're not jealous of each other. I think that's the best thing. In professional sports, you have guys that join forces — you can call them alpha males. That's what they call them. Two guys that have been dominant in a specific sport on their own respective teams, and they get together and they talk about how dominant they can be and they talk about this is going to be this and that. I believe jealousy creeps in a lot. And that is the absolute contrary of what we are.
"We know who we are. We know what we're about. We want the best, seriously, every single day, both on and off the floor, for one another. We're just not jealous of one another. I think that you align that with respect, I think the sky's the limit."
If you round off his stats in this playoff season, he was averaging 27 points a game and 11 rebounds and nine assists going into Game 2 against the Heat on Friday night. You bet he has Davis playing the best ball of his life. And Playoff Ra
jon Rondo has come back at just the right moment and shown what he can do when surrounded by this kind of excellence. Not only does he make great decisions and great passes with the ball, he allows LeBron to rest on offense when Rondo is on the court, because LeBron doesn't always have to have the ball in his hands.
We know he had Wade and Bosh with him when he won in Miami. We know he had Kyrie and Kevin Love in Cleveland when they came from three games to one down and upset the Warriors and finally brought another title to Cleveland. Now he has A.D. But go back and look at the first Cavaliers team he took to the Finals when he was a kid, when the guys around him were Drew
Gooden and Larry Hughes and Zydrunas Ilgauskas and Booby Gibson and Anderson Varejao.
Is he Michael? No. He’s different than Michael, who won six NBA titles and never lost in the Finals. The late Kobe Bryant won five. But the idea that you can simply measure this man’s footprint on his sport in rings is dumber than a bag of hammers. Say it again: He is the greatest all-around player to ever step into an NBA arena. Not Michael. Not Magic. Not Larry.
You can never overstate this: Game in and game out, year in and year out, he impacts the game he is playing in more positive ways than any basketball player ever. And if you don’t think his athletic character and will influence the other four players on the court with him, than you really have been watching the wrong movie. There is so much amazing young talent in the NBA right now, in so many players under the age of 25. But the sport isn’t nearly as interesting, or as compelling, when the guy who turns 35 in three months isn’t playing. If all the creepy media trolls constantly looking for something wrong in his game, or in his resume, don’t appreciate watching him then they should be sentenced to a lifetime of watching Real Housewives shows.
This isn’t the season he wanted to play. Not the full season we wanted to see. No fans and no hostile crowds on the road, none of that. But it is more season than we ever thought we’d get. The one LeBron James has elevated this way. It was October of 2003 when he made his NBA debut. The last star we had like this was Tiger Woods when he was young. LeBron is no longer young. Still The King, though. Still here.