LeBron’s legend grows play by play
Cavaliers star offers not perfection but a growing greatness
One problem with being one of the greatest basketball players of all time is that at some point you are playing against Michael Jordan, or at least the idea of Michael Jordan, and, Internet memes aside, he’s undefeated.
Jordan set a bar so high that it can be hard to remember the times he wasn’t a pure hero. As former adversary Joe Dumars said years later, sitting in the empty stands at The Palace in Auburn Hills, “Time does things to people’s memories. Time makes you think that everybody had 40 (points) every night. Mike had some awfully tough games in this building, man.”
But people remember Jordan’s great works: the five MVP awards, the six MVPs in the NBA final, the shot to beat Cleveland, the pass to beat Utah, the shot to beat Utah and that statue-worthy pose. Can’t write it better, and probably nobody ever will.
Well, after Cleveland’s win over Golden State on Sunday, there are two players with at least three MVP awards in the final and four regular-season MVPs: Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Bill Russell would make the list if the playoff MVP award had been created earlier, so add him. That’s it.
The Cavaliers needed everything to win a breath- less Game 7 in Oakland, against a 73-win team. But most of all, they needed LeBron. Here’s what he did once the Cavaliers faced a 3-1 deficit: 41points, 16 rebounds, seven assists, three steals and three blocks in Game 5; 41points, eight rebounds, 11 assists, four steals and three blocks in Game 6; 27 points, 11 rebounds, 11 assists, two steals, three blocks — including The Block — in Game 7. In those three games, he shot .506 from the field, .421 from three-point range, .731 from the line. You can’t play basketball much better. I’m not sure who has.
He didn’t get a Jordan moment. The Block didn’t decide the game. The Block was the kind of play that only one or two people ever could have made, and LeBron told Fox’s Cleveland affiliate that “it was a defining moment in my career. To do that at that moment, man . . .”
But that didn’t decide the NBA final. It was pure greatness, but it was one play.
That is LeBron: Greatness, one play at a time, over 13 years. Not perfection, but greatness. And the day after Cleveland defeated the Warriors 93-89 in a breathless Game 7, The Block stood as the moment to remember after the others have been forgotten.
People will remember Kyrie Irving hitting the game’s biggest shot, a Steph Curry-like three over Steph Curry with a little under a minute left, because it was the only shot anybody hit in the last 4:38, as the heavy gravity was compressing and distorting the fine motor skills of every man on the floor.
We might forget that Curry, the greatest shooter there ever was, had a wide-open three-pointer with 4:05 left, and missed. Or the misses from Klay Thompson, who is only a shade behind Curry, and Draymond Green, and Curry again twice more. The greatest shooting team in history couldn’t make a shot when it mattered. Almost nobody could. Pressure breaks you down.
There may never have ever been a player under more pressure than James. He dumped Cleveland on national TV and won his titles in Miami, and then came back to Ohio to do the same with players who had never won in a city that felt like it would never win again, and he shouldered that responsibility every day.
Maybe we’ll remember that, down 87-83, he hit all three free throws in a playoffs when he shot .649 from the line.
Or that he hit Cleveland’s secondlast field goal, a three-pointer, after he had made one of his nine shots from outside 12 feet in the game.
Or that he defended everyone, and the Warriors never led again after that three.
“To experience that with a great player like that, that is a future Hall of Famer, that deals with so much criticism and a lot of naysayers, and to be able to grow with him is just awesome,” said Irving at the podium, after it was done. “And when my time does come of being able to lead a franchise and see the landscape of how it’s supposed to be composed, I watched Beethoven tonight.”
Of course he didn’t do it alone. Players who do it alone lose. They all lose. LeBron needed Irving’s shotmaking, and Tristan Thompson’s relentlessness, and Kevin Love to defend Curry one on one, 27 feet from the basket, his slow feet keeping pace. He needed enough Golden State bodies to fall apart, and Curry’s and Thompson’s legendary mechanics to crumple.
But this was LeBron’s defining series. No Dwyane Wade, no Chris Bosh, no Pat Riley lording over it all. He pulled Cleveland back from 3-1 against a 73-win death machine, playing some of the greatest basketball ever played. How can you argue against LeBron now?
Well, put it this way: You can argue about what he does, and that will never change. But you can’t argue about what he is.
We kill our heroes. We celebrate them and venerate them and then when they falter we eat them, eventually. We Crying Jordan them, now, on the Internet. It happens to everyone.
But I’ll remember that after playing 45 of the first 46 minutes of a game that felt like nothing more than a pure test of basketball will, at a moment where it felt like the next basket might win, with the ball racing ahead of him in the game of his life, LeBron James gathered all his gifts and propelled himself through the air and further into history, arriving a fraction of a second before the ball hit the glass and escaped his reach. I’ll remember that he felt bigger than the game. LeBron shouldered as much pressure as any basketball player ever has, and he went and did it, and when it was over his great carved face cracked apart and he wept. He was destined for greatness, and there it was.