LeBron James: A man and his legacy
By Ian Levy
It’s a make-or-miss league. Sometimes the shots that should go in, don’t. Sometimes the miracle heaves that shouldn’t go in, do. In the NBA, control is an illusion. All you can do is prepare and then bring all that preparation to bear. Often, that’s more than enough. But sometimes it is just dumb, stupid luck, the manifestations of a random universe that draw a line between the winners and losers.
*****
The legacy of LeBron James is riddled with holes. They are not actually holes, but soft spots that people like to stick their fingers into and wiggle around — failing in Cleveland, quitting on Cleveland, needing to team up with stars to win a title, still failing as often as he won, returning to Cleveland and neglecting to bring redemption with him.
If LeBron and the Cavaliers do indeed lose this series to the Golden State Warriors, it will further warp the historical perspective on him. By almost any measure, LeBron has been one of the best players in the NBA for more than a decade. The only subjective criteria for greatness on which he falls (relatively) short is his teams’ results in the NBA Finals.
LeBron is frequently compared to Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant and seems doomed to trail both players in the category of RINGZ. This kind of simplistic comparison ignores the fact that throughout his career, LeBron has had supporting casts that were dramatically inferior by statistical measures. His current 2-4 NBA Finals record comes from his teams going 2-1 in series in which they were favored, and 0-3 in series in which they were the underdog (never having more than a 31 percent chance of winning, per FiveThirtyEight’s Elo Ratings).
These collaborative failings are laid at the feet of LeBron because he has always been the best player on his team. This is the standard contract of a sports star — extra credit when things go your way, extra blame when they do not — and James seem to have reconciled with the inherent unfairness of these terms. But like any other basketball player, he is subject to the random whims of the universe, a flawed hero of circumstance.
The make-or-miss explanation doesn’t fit neatly with an understanding of LeBron because his fate has never really been decided by such an obvious 50-50 play on the court. His wins and losses have generally been decisive. Off the court, LeBron’s career has as many coin flips as anyone.
The fact that LeBron has played in Cleveland at all is a product of draft lottery ping-pong balls (or the conspiratorial machinations of David Stern, if you’re the suspicious sort). In the 2002-03 season, the Cavaliers and Denver Nuggets both finished with a 17-65 record and the same odds at the top pick in the draft. The balls settled in Cleveland’s favor and LeBron was theirs, but things could just have easily been reversed and LeBron could have been a Nugget. Or a Detroit Piston, who leapfrogged up to the No. 2 pick, riding the Memphis Grizzlies odds as compensation for a long-completed trade.
What would the last two seasons have looked like if the Golden State Warriors had pulled the trigger on that Klay Thompson for Kevin Love trade? What if the Boston Celtics had not been bumped out of the top three picks in the 2007 NBA Draft Lottery, and had the opportunity to build around Kevin Durant or Greg Oden instead of assembling their Voltron of Garnett-Allen-Pierce? What if Kawhi Leonard had not slid to the No. 15 pick in the 2011 NBA Draft, available to be selected by the Indiana Pacers and traded to the San Antonio Spurs?
Acknowledging LeBron James as a victim of circumstance, to some degree, means recognizing the thousands of alternate timelines, each with a slender fork standing tall and marking the moment that a road diverged.
*****
The idea of LeBron as a product of circumstance is intellectual uncomfortable. Aesthetically, he projects power and strength — his talents seem to come from deep within him, from the very fiber of his being. Humanity has devoted significant portions of its history to celebrating those traits and stubbornly refusing to accept that they can be eroded. He is also one of the absolute best in the world at his craft. If LeBron, with all his athletics gifts and years of preparation, can’t control his own narrow universe, then what hope is there for the rest of us?
Admitting that the universe can push LeBron James anyway it wants, and that he has only a fraction of control over the outcome, puts our own lives on shaky existential ground.
Making LeBron’s story one of personal failing is girding ourselves against accepting the unknown. It is myth-making of the primordial kind — taking a phenomenon we can’t fully understand (the inherent complexities of time and space) and substituting an easy answer (that dude sucks, can’t win the big one, doesn’t have enough heart). In a recent post at Ribbonfarm, Sarah Perry explored the nature of narrative and why some stories endure and spread when others fall away. Among the many factors she unpacks, Perry provided this graph as a way of understanding the likelihood of truth in a given story.
The real story of LeBron’s basketball journey lives in that purple blot. It is probably the least interesting way to think about him and where he fits in the historical arc of the NBA but it is the only narrative that is both detailed and coherent — as a basketball player he is exactly as good as he appears to be, not perfect, but as an individual at least as good as anyone we’ve ever seen play the game. This perspective is supported by facts both objective (statistics) and subjective (observation). His failing in the winning championships department are a product of team failings, bad timing, and bad luck. He is not absolved from responsibility but he is not solely culpable either.
The legacy of LeBron will be argued about for decades, win or lose in this year’s NBA Finals. Everyone will apply their own shading to the story, finding a way to make it interesting and satisfying to themselves. The same basic fact will underpin all of those narratives.
LeBron James is an incredible basketball player but sometimes that isn’t enough.
For more NBA Finals coverage, check out our NBA Finals hub page.