The NBA was two Cavaliers’ wins away from having a LeBron problem.
He is the most dominant player in the league, a transcendent superstar that sells tickets and merchandise. Even after teammates Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving were lost to injury, he almost single-handedly carried his team to the NBA title.
And that’s the problem: What is the rest of the league supposed to do if its best player cannot be stopped? What are the other 29 teams supposed to do when having one LeBron James negates an entire year’s worth of transactions and development and strategizing?
Ask the Hawks how they feel after the best season they had in franchise history was undone in a four-game sweep at the hands of LeBron.
It seemed like throughout sports bars and talk shows across the nation, all everyone wanted to do before games six was talk about LeBron calling himself the best player in the world. I heard plenty of people calling him arrogant, calling him overconfident and calling him childish.
What they didn’t do however was dispute that he was the best basketball player on the planet. We just got to witness six games of why no one could argue against it.
Throughout the finals, LeBron led both teams in points, rebounds and assists, while averaging an astounding 45.7 minutes per game.
Throughout the playoffs more and more of his teammates were dropping like flies, and yet after the Cavaliers took a 2-1 series lead over the Golden State Warriors, we were faced with the possibility that the LeBron might actually drag a bunch of cast offs to the promised land.
That is not something that any other great player in the history of the NBA could claim. It would be like Jordan winning a ring without Pippen and Rodman.
The magic of LeBron is that he really can make up for nearly any deficiency his team has. In the series against the Warriors, he added a new role to his resume that hadn’t been seen since Magic Johnson’s rookie season, the point-center.
Yet, in the end it was not enough to beat the Warriors, a not-just-good but historically great team. The Warriors racked up 67 wins during the regular season, beating teams by an average of over 10 points per game.
Steph Curry, Andre Iguodala and Draymond Green rode into Cleveland to save the NBA from a season of inevitability. Iguodala even won the Finals MVP award simply because he managed to make LeBron work harder than most. But James still averaged 35.8 points per game.
It was around the fourth quarter of game five when it started to sink in that the Cavaliers would not be able to win the championship. It wasn’t because LeBron James is not the best player in the world. It was because even the best player in the world still needs quality teammates to rise to the top. Even with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh in tow, the Miami Heat won two titles in four trips to the finals.
That made it easier to enjoy the artistry of LeBron struggling to keep his team above water. That made it easier for the rest of the league to accept that LeBron is so clearly better than everyone else at basketball.
But watch out for when his team gets healthy. Then he’s coming for everything.