An impromptu memorial for the 2006-07 Cavaliers

The unfortunate legacy of our times is that, given the opportunity to nightly witness one of the greatest players ever — LeBron James — we have used our collective resources of HD broadcasts (remember how breathtaking at first?), League Pass, Twitter, blogs, and let out a mostly unrelenting, decade-plus barf-blast of takes on every theoretical weakness in James’ game, personality, DNA.

I was thinking about James after Russell Westbrook’s just-completed, ultimately doomed venture into the first round. The consensus has formed, in the uncontrollable ways that it does, that Westbrook, playing one of the greatest seasons of all time, dragged the Oklahoma City Thunder to the absolute brink of their limited potential. Then I remembered the 2006-07 Cleveland Cavaliers. With Larry Hughes as their second-leading scorer and Sasha Pavlovic an every-night starter in the playoffs, the 2006-07 Cavaliers were every bit the one-man show that the 2016-17 Thunder were. But that Cavaliers team, piloted by 22-year-old James, made it all the way to the NBA Finals.

Now, once they got there, Cleveland was soundly swept away by the peak-boring San Antonio Spurs. Powerless to interrupt the Spurs’ dissertation in rock-pounding, the Cavaliers topped 90 points just once in four games. The 2007 Finals was the miserable lowpoint of modern basketball from a business perspective, from an aesthetics perspective. For everybody but hardcore defense fetishists.

The highlight tape of the fourth and final game in the series is a bizarre artifact in that it combines the tense air of the deep playoffs with the relaxed hijinx of the regular season. And by this I mean: in the fourth quarter, the season on the line, veteran Cavaliers point guard Eric Snow (31.6 percent shooting in the postseason) attempts to give a troop-rallying speech that belly-flops so hard that nobody can really bear to make eye contact with him:

With a championship seconds away, Spurs franchise legend David Robinson looks upon the proceedings with the aura of a man who is quietly irritated that he is late for something:

Seconds after clinching his fourth championship ring, Gregg Popovich also appears vaguely annoyed — as if the game had moved so slowly that he had time to calculate that this would somehow be the least satisfying triumph of his career:

There is really only one modern season that is at all like what happened to LeBron and the 2006-07 Cavaliers: Allen Iverson and the 2000-01 Philadelphia 76ers (also featuring Eric Snow). Game 1 of that year’s Finals, a road upset of the mighty Los Angeles Lakers, is the still-unsurpassed peak of playoff swagger, Iverson dropping in 48 points and making one giant step for man over a befuddled Tyronn Lue.

Maybe it is actually literally that step-over that makes Iverson’s playoff run seem so heroic, while LeBron’s run was about as fun and as emotionally thrilling as completing homework. If only Fabricio Oberto or Francisco Elson had been there at the right place and right time, for those 2006-07 Spurs, for LeBron to ether them with a totally monster jam or other display of mortally embarrassing athleticism.

While hopefully taking away nothing from Iverson’s often-imitated-never-duplicated style of productive gunslinging, a few back-of-the-napkin stats via Basketball-Reference show that it was LeBron who had much less to work with:

Regular Season

Playoffs

I’m not quite sure how the Sixers’ plus-minus with Iverson in the playoffs got so flipped around. The Sixers actually only went 12-11 in the playoffs — two of their three Eastern Conference rounds went to Game 7, and then they lost in the Finals. But also: over the whole 23-game playoffs, Iverson sat for only 87 total minutes, or a bananas 3.8 minutes per game. So we’re dealing with a small sample size here.

Still: in his brief moments on the bench, Iverson did not have to see his bench bumble leads away, while James most certainly did. Plus, Iverson had a teammate who at least made a plausible case for actually being the most effective player on the floor: Dikembe Mutombo. At the time, Mutombo was not yet a jolly cereal-slapping pitchman but instead one of the game’s most diligent rim protectors in a paint-bound era of basketball. A midseason trade acquisition, Mutombo spent the Sixers’ Finals run becoming the only player ever to grab 100 offensive rebounds and block at least 50 shots in a single postseason. (This, when the first round was still a best-of-five.) Mutombo also bested 40 minutes per game in the 2001 playoffs, and the Sixers absolutely crumbled whenever he took a seat.

LeBron had no such Robin to his Batman. Even Zydrunas Ilgauskas — the other half of the league’s most historically improbable bromance — couldn’t impose any sort of plus-minus impact on the playoffs. In fact, the Cavalier other than LeBron with the best plus-minus marks was a 24-year-old Anderson Varejao, who was just refining his irritation skills off the bench in his third NBA season.

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With such a truly limited team around him, LeBron did what was necessary to win, which was: invent an entirely new realm of statistical production. James is the first player to average a 25/6/6 career line in the playoffs, not just propelling his team forward in scoring but also already thriving, at age 22, in his ceaselessly underrated, self-appointed task of firing revelatory bullet-style assists. Westbrook has since joined James in these lofty box score heights — but James towers over Westbrook when it comes to true shooting percentage, turnover percentage, and per-minute defensive contributions.

So: long live LeBron’s 2007 playoffs, the most under-appreciated two months of transcendent basketball this league has ever seen.