What LeBron James is doing is making even critics scratch their heads
Nobody wants to go there, but what he's doing in these NBA Finals demands it.
By
Bill Reiter
•
6 min read
CLEVELAND -- We knew the possibility of the greatest single-season team in NBA history was on the line in this NBA Finals. What most of us missed is that maybe, just maybe, so is the status of the greatest basketball player of all time.
If the Warriors, after getting walloped in Game 6, manage to win Game 7, it's a done deal: With the 73 regular season wins, the 3-1 Western Conference finals comeback against the Oklahoma City Thunder and the coup de grace against LeBron James, they'll have notched themselves as the best team ever.
But what if LeBron James flips the script, leads the only 3-1 series comeback in Finals history and cracks whatever dark magic has cursed Cleveland sports for so many decades?
Then that door that separates LeBron from Michael Jordan's place in the game that seemed slammed shut -- particularly after the last two seasons' losses in the Finals, which dropped LeBron to 2-4 in his career with a title on the line -- suddenly opens back up. However slightly. However slim the remaining odds are that he can charge through it.
How could it not, just a little?
In this series, LeBron has been superhuman -- a basketball force of nature that has obliterated all narratives and notions about him, including some of my own:
- He can't win without Pat Riley.
- He can't perform in crunch time -- at least not consistently enough to climb the most coveted of basketball lists.
- He can't face utter, devastating odds and bring his equally and opposite greatness as a counterweight to bear against them. Not when the going -- the Spurs' dynasty, the Mavs that discombobulating season, the Warriors rising threat -- gets truly tough.
- He can't even claim the top spot in the league today, nor dominion over the NBA, not with Steph Curry and his 73 wins and own unique brand of greatness riding herd on LeBron's hopes in June.
A Cavs win in Game 7, and all of it turns to dust, like the Warriors' hopes and claim on their own all-time great status. But only if the Cavs win. And that, almost certainly, only happens if LeBron James again reminds all of us just how great -- how truly great -- he can be.
In Game 6 Thursday night, he had 41 points, eight rebounds, 11 assists, four steals and three blocks. Still trying to get your mind around just how mind-boggling that is? Try this: From the midway point of the third quarter until garbage time in the fourth quarter, he scored or assisted on 35 of the Cavaliers' 36 points.
With his season, and his legacy, on the line.
Against the history-defying, and redefining, Golden State Warriors.
In Game 5, with the same things hanging in the balance, LeBron scored 41 points, had 16 rebounds, dished seven dimes, and added three steals and three blocks.
And those numbers, gaudy as they are, do not properly capture the way he imposed his will on the Warriors, nor how he eviscerated what in most other situations would have been a Golden State comeback and an opponents' collapse. Whenever the almost-best-team of all time made an all-time great run, there was LeBron James, standing in the way. And winning.
In this series, he is averaging 41.2 minutes, 30.2 points, 11.3 rebounds, 8.5 assists and 2.2 blocks per game. He is shooting 51.4 percent from the field. He has gotten into both Draymond Green's and Steph Curry's heads. He is, quite literally, on the verge of rewriting history.
And, certainly on Thursday night, as he poured in 17 fourth-quarter points, he sealed the deal under the brightest of lights in the most pressure-packed of situations against one of the most challenging opponents we've ever seen.
Alec Baldwin called it in Glengarry Glen Ross: Coffee is for closers. So is all-time -- true all-time -- greatness. Life isn't fair, and in this world of rarefied NBA air LeBron's greatness is calculated first and foremost in rings, followed by a heavy dose of storylines, themes and memorable moments to match them.
Winning this series for Cleveland accomplishes all of that. Doing it against the 73-win Golden State Warriors, and unanimous MVP Steph Curry, does it. Coming back from down 3-1 does it.
Pass Jordan?
Maybe. Just maybe.
LeBron is unlikely to finish his career as the NBA's all-time scorer, but he could. He very well could finish with the best Player Efficiency Rating of all time, ahead of Jordan, who now reigns in that department, too. He could also pass Jordan as the postseason's all-time scorer if he makes four, or maybe three, more NBA Finals. Which would give him 10-11 Finals appearances -- a goal as stupefying as it is possible. He's two MVP awards away from tying Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He could finish in the top 5 all-time in career assists. And a 3-4 Finals record -- and that's just for now -- would be greatly improved by having won a title for Cleveland, particularly against this Warriors team.
I thought LeBron would never have a shot at passing Jordan. And, given how hard it is to move up that top 10 list -- Russell, Kobe, Duncan, Bird, Shaq, Magic ... the margins of greatness separating all of these men is daunting -- I doubted LeBron would finish as high as most of us previously believed. That was earlier this week. Then he simply went to another place, a level of basketball fortitude we've rarely, if ever, seen in back-to-back Finals games.
I doubted LeBron's continued climb toward Jordan largely because I thought this series was over, that he couldn't and wouldn't be able to turn his great talent into the kind of once-in-a-generation accomplishment winning this series would mean.
But if LeBron can in fact force a comeback no one else has ever mustered against the team that would've been the best in NBA history, why can't he come back against the same odds that said he'd never pass Jordan?
Or finish at No. 2 all-time, which for me would mean passing Magic Johnson? Or No. 3? Or No. 4? All that is certain is that this accomplishment, if it happens on Sunday, is not a thing to be underestimated, and it reopens the tantalizing possibilities of how exactly his career and greatness will be remembered.
Greatness is more than the numbers of the accumulated stats that so often act as compasses in our arguments about who slips ahead of whom among the best of the best. It's always been about also doing it when it matters, about grit and toughness and changing the course of the game and its history and, yes, about being clutch when others shrink. Jordan's perfection is what set that standard. It's also often been the argument against LeBron.
It went roughly this way: His
The answer, it turns out, might just be the 2016 NBA Finals.
But only if he and the Cavs win Sunday. Coffee is for closers.
Some of the true all-time greats throughout our history got there despite enormous obstacles. Churchill was banished from politics, Roosevelt crippled, Napoleon not even a true Frenchman, Fitzgerald died alone and broke and under-appreciated, his work molded as much by his tortured wife and tumultuous marriage as his talent.
The point? Perfection is incredible. But some of those who truly shaped and defined their arenas -- that blend of talent, art, transcendent greatness and how history remembered them because of how they changed it -- came from the struggles that shaped that very greatness.
And too many doubted those same people as they found their path because no one likes saying they were wrong, or they missed the true depth of a genius' place in the higher order. Criticism and tearing down is much, much easier to do than exalting those we didn't properly understand.
History is hard, winning it against all others even harder. But If LeBron James completes this comeback, it's time to take a whole new look at where, exactly, his remarkable basketball career could rank when it comes to an end.
