How does LeBron James adjust to being the Cavs’ 2nd-best offensive player?

LeBron James is fine at basketball. He does some things well. Unfortunately for him, Isaiah Thomas is demonstrably better. Let’s talk about that a bit.

Basketball is a messy hell of a concept thing. Now that we agree on that, I assume we agree that LeBron James needs to take a step back and let Isaiah Thomas run the team’s offense. This is Tiny Thom’s Theam now.

That was easy.

Maybe one or two of your are still skeptical, so I’d like to bring some stats to bear. Using the internet website pbpstats.com (the .com stands for “internet”), I got some data on the Cavs’ lineups.

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With both James and Thomas on the court, the stats look like this:

Fairly unremarkable, outside of the fairly poor 3-point percentage. That’s more or less to be expected, though. LeBron is very tall and NBA Jam taught me that tall people are bad shooters.

These are LeBron’s numbers without Thomas so far this season:

+91 in 1371 minutes. That’s a paltry +0.06637 points per minute. You can’t win basketball games like that. I haven’t checked the Cavaliers’ record in a while, but I bet they have a bunch of ties.

Let’s compare that to Thomas’ numbers without LeBron:

That’s the good stuff. Thomas, in nine minutes without James, is a +18. That’s a +2 points per minute. If we stretch that out to the 1371 minutes that James has played, we can assume that Thomas would be +2742 on the season were their situations reversed.

Obviously that’s not the whole story, and it’d be mean spirited to wish that LeBron were injured instead. LeBron supposedly adds some value. It could be Robert Sacre-type bench celebrations, or maybe he’s a good team defender. Defense is hard to rate, so let’s ignore it and stick with the facts.

One would think that the integration process would be easy since LeBron is supposedly good at basketball despite the fact Kobe Bryant has more rings. So if he’s so good, he should know that Thomas is better. Game recognize game, I’m told. So there’s that.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t yet been the case. I’d like to share some examples of LeBron doing unfortunate things from Thomas’ first game back from injury.

Here’s LeBron leaking out for a fastbreak and hitting a layup around some defender or other:

What he should have done instead is pass the ball to Thomas. Thomas was on the court, and a good team is built on half-court sets, not this modern “transition” dross. Thomas is the point guard, and that’s it. Period. Sentence over. The clause is at completion. No more words about that ever again or else.

Here’s a moving picture of Thomas passing the ball to LeBron for a layup in the paint:

What James should have done is pass the ball to Thomas. Give-and-gos were effective in 5th grade CYO basketball, so they probably are in the NBA too. Plus, 3-pointers are worth more than 2-pointers. That’s right in their names.

Here’s a video of Thomas getting a technical foul:

What James should have done instead is pass the ball to Thomas. It would have distracted the ref, and then maybe Thomas wouldn’t have gotten the tech. If not that, maybe throw himself between the T symbol the referee was giving like a bodyguard taking a bullet. I think that means that LeBron would have gotten the tech instead. I think that’s how it works, so this is on LeBron if you think about it.

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It’s a little early to start making snap judgments, but I’m really smart, so I’m doing it anyway. Results so far tell us that LeBron’s hero-ball approach is dragging Thomas and the Cavs down. If he can adjust his style, maybe they’ll have a shot at getting past Kyrie Irving in the playoffs.

But that’s a maybe. Maybe a hard maybe. Maybe.