Where did LeBron James go the first two weeks of 2015?
Having lost four of five games heading into the new year, the Cleveland Cavaliers announced James would miss two weeks to deal with what the team called “left knee and lower back strains.”
Many would speculate about where James went and what exactly he did during those two weeks. He had made the NBA Finals four straight times by that point, and it would have been understandable to sit down a minute. His team was young, untested and noticeably off.
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We know he went to the NCAA national championship football game in Dallas, which Ohio State won. This was a straight vacation, it seemed, even if it was veiled as rest and recuperation.
James’ 2015 sabbatical showed a level of control he did not quite have in his first tour of Cleveland. The vicegrip James had on the Cavs up to that point was mostly financial, having taken complete control of his contract situation. To set up his departure for the Heat in the first place, James had signed a contract below the maximum that aligned with the structure of deals signed by the other Heatles.
He was also massively famous outside of basketball — running a company and becoming the face of a dozen brands before the end of his second NBA contract. Yet just as James’ 2010 free agency showed a new way for stars to seize control of their future, the 2015 sabbatical strong-armed his old team into keeping him happy. Whether it was part of a larger plan or just a powerful, unspoken byproduct of his absence, James showed in 2015 the sway he held if and when the team around him wasn’t up to his standard.
To a certain extent, it worked. The Cavs’ front office acquired two solid role players to bolster the rotation and replace young talent with veteran production. James’ strike did not directly provoke Cleveland to go out and get J.R. Smith and Timofey Mosgov, but it certainly didn’t hurt.
In the last game he played before his sabbatical, James went 5-for-19 from the field for 17 points. Dion Waiters and Matthew Dellavedova, overexposed thanks to a Kyrie Irving injury, combined for nine points on 4-for-13 shooting. If James or Kevin Love were not excellent during the early part of that season, the team lost.
On Christmas Day 2014, when James and the Cavaliers played Dwyane Wade in Miami, the production crew at ABC caught audio of James whispering to Wade something that sounded an awful lot like, “Listen, we’ve done it before. We’re gonna reunite again and do some better things, alright?”
Though part of James’ alleged frustration at the end of his tenure in Miami was constantly having to wonder whether Wade would play night to night, the two friends could not keep themselves away from media attention that season.
“I’m here now and here to build something in the future,” James told reporters in early January.
Then he left.
Cleveland lost seven of the eight games he missed, as well as the matchup in Phoenix when he finally returned. The Smith and Mozgov megatrade happened halfway through James’ sabbatical, and a 29-point Smith explosion awaited James in Phoenix when he returned.
It was questionable of James to stoke the fires of another partnership with Wade mere months after signing with Cleveland, and it was an odd look to stay in the spotlight with that kind of talk so quickly after healing his image by coming home. The Cavs went out and traded for Kevin Love soon after signing James, signaling a sense of seriousness that he desperately needed from them. The roster, led by Love and Irving, already looked more competitive than the one he left in Cleveland.
Whatever it was that plagued him previously, James returned after the sabbatical looking like a completely different player. After that 7-point loss to the Suns, Cleveland responded and won their next 12 games. James averaged 30-6-6 on 51 percent shooting the rest of January, and that boost was about all the team needed, as James led the Cavaliers to their first NBA Finals appearance since he took them there in 2007.
The team, of course, went on to make the following two NBA Finals’ as well, winning in 2016 and solidifying James’ place as one of the top players in league history. Maybe you can trace that whole timeline straight through from January 2015 to June 2016.
Or maybe the only chronology that matters is the way James’ feelings about his team changed over the course of those 18 months, to the point that he was willing and able to lead the team to a championship not long after abandoning them for two weeks to recuperate and catch a college football game.
This year, Cleveland again retooled its roster with James’ future in doubt. The message wasn’t so loud this time around, but James showed with his lackadaisical play that he was frustrated, posting a minus-6 net rating in the month of January, a number that speaks to the poor play of James as well as the rest of the Cavs’ roster.
James’ message landed as effectively as it did in 2015, as seen in Cleveland’s trade of Isaiah Thomas and four others for a new, younger group. The Cavs turned trade season on its head based upon how James played — or didn’t — for a month in the middle of the season. Again.
David Griffin said something about James’ attitude on an episode of The Lowe Post podcast taped at this year’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference that shows how important that part of the equation can be for a James-led team. When asked about the Cavs’ moves at this February’s trade deadline, Griffin focused in on James’ motivations.
Griffin said that what Cleveland traded for, in effect, was a fully locked-in LeBron, someone who actively wanted to compete for the guys around him, which was more important than any individual they acquired from the Kings, Jazz or Lakers.
James showed in 2015 that he understood something about the way his psyche can rule over thousands of people whose lives are touched by his performance — fans, coaches, teammates, media. Whether he uses that lesson in the context of his day-to-day on-court excellence on the court, his free agency, or his brand, it’s an idea that fundamentally changed his career.
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James changed the course of the league once when he left for Miami. He changed it again, more quietly and intricately, as he played out the last three years in Cleveland. James learned that with the way the league adores its stars today, his every decree and elucidation might as well be gold. It is the currency around which the NBA is centered.