Celebrating LeBron

As I’m sure you have probably heard, the Miami Heat won the NBA Championship on Thursday, giving current best player in the game LeBron James his first career title.  The media that surrounds the NBA – and becomes a veritable circus whenever “Finals” and “LeBron” are added –  has gone from critical to  a strange mix of reverence and neutrality.  The most popular discussion seems to be wondering how, and if, LeBron can be compared to Michael Jordan.  Unsurprisingly, this particular discussion lacks about as much perspective as all the other questions that have swirled around these players and teams and the NBA itself, but I’m not interested in dealing with that question.  I’ll compare the shit out of LeBron and Jordan…after LeBron retires.  Here, however, I would prefer to discuss some aspects of the last two years of James’ career that are often confused, or simplified, and used to support some kind of interpretation about him as a person and a player. 

Ever since “The Decision” happened in 2010, the two distinct occurrences of that evening have been unfairly intertwined.  The spectacle of the TV special was a horribly un-self-aware choice, buoyed according to LeBron’s camp by the fact that they gave a bunch of money to the Boys and Girls Club.  I hate to break it to LeBron’s business advisors, but there is not a single person on Earth who framed The Decision in terms of anything other than “LeBron’s TV special that will end his free agency and let us know where he’s playing next year”.  Even the Boys and Girls Club people remember it that way.  And that was settled before he announced that he was leaving Cleveland.  Add to it the fact that some business-savvy LeBron confidant thought that it was a good idea to utilize the services of Grade-A tool and part-time asshole Jim Gray as the anchor for the special and you have the perfect storm of stupid and self-important. 

            I still hold that against LeBron.  It’s become a permanent part of his image.  And when he and Wade thought it was a good idea to poke fun at Dirk Nowitzki for being ill prior to Game 5 in 2011, the German Moses made sure to deliver a swift and pointed comeuppance.

            So this year LeBron got back to making news with his play, delivering a legendary performance in Game 6 of the Easter Conference Finals in Boston and throwing down the hammer in the NBA Finals.  It only took him two year to realize that the best way to deflect criticism of his late game performances had nothing to do with empty gestures to non-profit organizations or mocking opponents.  The best way was to make sure that his team was so far ahead that the fourth quarter literally didn’t matter.

            The other aspect of The Decision was the fact that he left Cleveland.  If you took issue with this you are one or more of the following:

a) A Cavaliers fan.

b) A person who has great nostalgia for baseball’s reserve clause.

c) Entirely out of touch with reality and the structure of free agency in American professional sports.

And if you are all of these things, you are Dan Gilbert.

            Still, though, the fact that LeBron played out his rookie contract and had his team in the Eastern Conference Finals in the last year of said contract means that his departure was far less subversive that that of Carmelo Anthony from Denver or the impending departure of Dwight Howard from Orlando.  Fans in Cleveland suffer from a pathology that occurs for almost every sports team that endures a lengthy era of failure.  This pattern manifests most often as a singular event that is revised as the watershed moment for future futility.  Think Bill Buckner, or “The Drive”.  Sadly for Cavaliers fans, this watershed moment seems to be its inception, as the 42 years from their creation in 1970 have seen three Central Division titles, one Eastern Conference championship, and no NBA Finals championships.  Not surprisingly, two of the division titles (2009 and 2010) and the conference championship (2007) came during LeBron’s time there.  For those of you not so hot at math, this translates to LeBron being responsible for 75% of the banners hung in the Quicken Loans Arena.  That fact makes polemic, whiny “sports writers” like Scott Raab very angry, but his anger is, unsurprisingly, misdirected. 

            We’ll never know if LeBron would have left for less money, or gone somewhere else, and none of it matters because in 2010, nearly anywhere would probably have been better than Cleveland.  The narrative that Cavs fan have of LeBron abandoning them is shallow and foolish.  He gave the Cavaliers their chance to build a winning team around them, and it was their habitual failures, not money, that drove him from the Midwest.

            In the two years (2001-02 and 2002-03) before LeBron arrived as a rookie, the Cavaliers went 29-53 and 17-65, good for second to last and last place in the East, respectively.  In seven years with LeBron, the Cavs were 349-225, good for a .608 winning percentage, including an impressive 66-16 2008-09 season.  In the two years since LeBron left?  The Cavs are 40-108; a .270 winning percentage.  In layman’s terms, the Cavs sucked before LeBron, he was great, and they sucked after he left. 

            The argument I hear most often in opposition to this is that LeBron’s supporting cast wasn’t terrible…except it was.  Yes, Mo Williams was an All Star in 2009.  You know why?  BECAUSE HE PLAYED WITH LEBRON.  As a Wisconsin resident, I had the unfortunate chance to watch Williams play amazingly mediocre basketball for the Bucks from 2004-2008.  In Cleveland, he took an average skill set, paired it with a superstar player who allowed for Williams to receive above average situations, and produced above-average numbers.  Even more telling than a continued over-evaluation of Mo Williams by the esteemed sports media is the fact that in LeBron’s rookie year the Cavs more than doubled their previous season’s win total (from 17 to 35), while in the year after he left, they lost 42 more games, going from 61 wins to 19.  Even averaging wins per season during LeBron’s career (49.9) means that based on expectation the Cavaliers would have been 30+ games worse than usual.  A swing that big after the departure of a superstar means two things:  that player is more valuable than anyone else in his sport, and the team that surrounded him was barely a legitimate professional team, let alone a contender. 

           

            If LeBron can come to the conclusion that The Decision was a good idea, and then band together with his friends Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, having decided to do so on their own, and if that team can win games at a .702 clip (104-48) and have two Eastern Conference and one NBA Finals championship to show for it then there a whole lot of GMs out there that should be fearing for their jobs today (I’m looking at you Billy King).  As a Knicks fan, I hold out no hope for a shot at a title while Miami still has their Big Three.  It only took LeBron and Wade figuring out how to complement each other’s play to win their first title, imagine what happens when they can maximize Bosh and add the right role playing pieces.