2018 NBA Playoffs Thread

Who will win The Finals

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Watching Capela play a pivotal roll on a title contender only makes Dwight Howard more frustrating. If he'dd just accept his role as a paint defender, garbage man, rim-runner-type, he could be a great piece to a really good team.

His issues is that he still thinks he's a superstar who needs plays ran for him and pouts when he doesn't get touches. He hasn't evolved. A Dwight Howard post-up where his teammates stand around for 20 seconds is an inefficient play and don't even mention his awful turnover rate.

It's just sad to see the dinosaurs of the 00s like Melo and Dwight fade away. This only makes Lebron's evolution only more amazing. He's adapted and refined his game to seamlessly to different eras
 
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100027 said:
Isn't he pretty much doing that now though?
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Nope dude still asks for post touches even though he doesn’t have good position. His whole year this year is a bunch of empty stats his effort was so inconsistent.

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100027 said:
Well he's played on ****ing stacked teams since then so yeah
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If the Cavs make the finals (which I think they will), is this team better than the '07 squad that got swept by the Spurs?

Does this Cavs team win a game against GSW or the Rockets?
 
Trey Bantz said:
If the Cavs make the finals (which I think they will), is this team better than the '07 squad that got swept by the Spurs?

Does this Cavs team win a game against GSW or the Rockets?
Click to expand...

Yes it is better than the '07 squad. Still have Love which is much better than anything else Lebron had on that team.

They may be able to steal a game at home vs. one of those two teams.
 
pums said:
Nope dude still asks for post touches even though he doesn’t have good position. His whole year this year is a bunch of empty stats his effort was so inconsistent.

36D5917E-5AF5-4DE9-B818-C3C3302BC93E.png
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Exactly. As opposed to being Clint Capela on steroids, giving consistent effort and being a good teammate. He's like "nah I need my inefficient post touches or else I'm gonna complain". He's legit Melo status when it comes to lack or self-awareness.
 
ballinsam23 said:
If anyone beats this Warriors team 4x they deserve to be labeled GOAT. Dirks performance was legendary, but Lebron would damn near double that if he can pull it off.

With that said, Warriors in 4.
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4x? damn :lol:

1 would be amazing.. 2x tops imo

4x?! they're too stacked lol
 
https://thesportspost.com/lebron-james-nba-finals-history/

One Of the Most unbiased Lebron articles ever written & one of the most descriptive to people who will just look at the box score & continue to say "he did what he could" I wish the Writer would update this with the past 3 appearances to add even more nuance

The Complete History of LeBron James in the NBA Finals

Jun 15, 2014 // by Sam Quinn



There is no athlete more frustrating to write about than LeBron James. He has this way of making you look like a complete idiot no matter what you say. LeBron is a choker? He explodes for 45 points in Boston to shut you up. Call him the best player in basketball? He disappears down the stretch of a playoff game. Say these Finals will determine whether he’s Wilt Chamberlain or Michael Jordan? He spends the entire series vacillating between the two so often that it no longer feels right to say that he isn’t a bit of both, even if it means Dierdorfing yourself into a quintuple negative while trying to figure it out.

Instead, LeBron is a mystery burrito. He’s enigma steak with Jordan cheese, choker rice, ABA Doc sour cream and questionable motivations guacamole, all wrapped in a body we won’t see again in the NBA for 25 years, a gift from the Gods that makes it impossible to judge him fairly. Take one bite and you might end up with a mouthful of only one ingredient. But with the whole? We still have no idea how satisfying this meal will end up being.

There are nights where you watch LeBron and think to yourself, “I can’t imagine basketball being played at a higher level than this.” He does things that shouldn’t be humanly possible. You shouldn’t be able to shoot 57 percent from the field and 38 percent from long-range. You shouldn’t be able to put up 27-7-6 and leave people saying you left something on the table. For instance: Kevin Durant is a fantastic player, a future Hall-of-Fame, potentially a top-10 player of all-time. LeBron is 5–10 percent better than him and by extension, everyone else.

So why do we keep finding ourselves in situations like we have now? Game 4 saw LeBron put up yet another extraordinarily uneven performance (just nine points in the first half) and come one game closer to dropping him below .500 in the Finals. This has NEVER happened: the only top-10 all time player with a record below .500 in the Finals is Wilt, and he had to play against Bill Russell at his peak.

As our NBA Grand Poobah Sagar Panchal loves pointing out, LeBron has also played arguably the weakest conference in NBA history. Besides KG’s Celtics, who else has he had to beat in his own conference? Derrick Rose’s Bulls took care of themselves when Rose went down and stayed down. The Pacers nearly lost a playoff series with home-court advantage to a team whose third best player was Pero Antic. They’ve run into the Bobcats a few times… so there’s that. Could the 2007 Pistons really be the best team LeBron has beaten en route to the Finals? Really? This is the same team whose crunch time scorer was Rip Hamilton, splitting meaningful minutes between Nazr Mohammed, a 32-year-old, post ACL-surgery Antonio McDyess and a 133-year-old Chris Webber.

In the Finals? He has never once played an opponent with a star in his prime. Dirk Nowitzki’s team had exactly one star, Tim Duncan’s have largely featured a Big Three in their 30’s, and young Durant had to suffer through the great James Harden disappearance of 2012—or, as Sam Presti calls it, “why I traded that SOB.” Considering who he’s been lucky enough to play, you’d think LeBron would be closing in on ring No. 4 or 5 by now, yet he’s probably not even going to get his third. Right now, he’s 11-15 in the Finals.

How did we get here? Does LeBron disappearing in the Finals explain that record? Or has his greatness been enough to carry him to two rings without proper help? Are his teammates doing their jobs? Are we judging him fairly? There are so many dueling ideas with LeBron, such a consistently shifting narrative that it’d be unfair to judge the entire picture unless we judge the entire picture. We have to see if patterns develop, if judgments were premature.

If we want to judge how well LeBron has played on the biggest stage and what it means for his legacy, we have to look at every single Finals game he has ever played.

Series 1, 2007: San Antonio Spurs defeat Cleveland Cavaliers, 4-0


Primary Defender: Bruce Bowen

Secondary Defenders: Michael Finley, Manu Ginobili

Primary Rim Protector: Tim Duncan

Game 1: 14 points, 4-of-16 shooting (25%), 7 assists, 4 rebounds. Spurs win 85-76.

LeBron’s first game in the Finals was a personal disaster, but ultimately didn’t end up as a blowout. Bruce Bowen’s defensive strategy of forcing LeBron left made him very uncomfortable early on, but his teammates actually picked up some of the slack. Four other Cavs ended up in double figures: Boobie Gibson, Anderson Varejao, Drew Gooden, and Sasha Pavlovic, and all shot above 50 percent from the field. The deciding factor was rebounding, as Duncan’s 13 helped give the Spurs an 11-rebound advantage. So far, not so good for LeBron.

Game 2: 25 points, 9-of-21 shooting (42.9%), 6 assists, 7 rebounds. Spurs win 103-92.

Game 2 was a blowout, don’t let the final score tell you otherwise. The Spurs were up 27 heading into the fourth quarter thanks largely to their Big Three. Their two guards, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili combined for 55 points—some being defended by LeBron (particularly Manu, who scored 25), some not—to lead the Spurs to the win.

This is the game where the whole “LeBron had no one to play with” narrative really bears merit. No Cavalier besides James had more than three assists. Only Gooden and Gibson topped 10 points. By this point, two key free agent acquisitions—Hughes and Donyell Marshall—have shot a combined 4-of-19. Not surprisingly, the Spurs dominated.

Game 3: 25 points, 9-of-23 shooting (39.1%), 7 assists, 8 rebounds. Spurs win 75-72.

Considering the way this game went, LeBron’s inefficiencies can be forgiven. It was all about defense, and the few Cavs who did reach double figures (Pavlovic, Gooden, Zydrunas Illgauskas) did so below 50 percent. The real issue here, one that might’ve cost Cleveland the game, was LeBron’s shot selection. Most notably, he went 0-of-5 from three-point range. Typically in slugfests like this, stars barrel to the line and hope for whistles knowing that free throws can forgive even the lowest field goal percentages. But LeBron, with an undeveloped shooting motion compared to now, kept taking bad shots away from the basket.

Nonetheless, you have to admire LeBron and the Cavs for their defense in the series. When we talk about LeBron’s Cleveland teams, this is the fact that’s conveniently ignored: they played excellent defense. Though Parker had his way with them, they did a fairly decent job of containing Duncan and even managed to completely take Ginobili out of Game 3. Steve Nash never won a championship with Phoenix largely because he and his teammates never played any defense, but we never question his surrounding talent. LeBron’s Cavs teams were built around defense, and that’s something we have to consider when judging his teammates’ performance in these Finals.

Game 4: 24 points, 10-of-30 shooting (33.3%), 10 assists, 6 rebounds. Spurs win 83-82.

Had this game been played a year or two later, the Cavaliers likely win it, but in only his fourth year in the league LeBron wasn’t yet ready to carry a team at will. As great as he was, shifting into hero ball mode was exactly what the Spurs wanted. They stifled him into a horrible shooting performance, the rest of his team following suit.

It was a great example of a problem LeBron has had throughout his entire career. On a play-by-play basis, LeBron possesses an exemplary basketball IQ; however, he often misjudges the approach he should bring into a specific game. Jacking up 30 shots played right into San Antonio’s hands, at the time— eventually, we will complain about LeBron being too passive. But more on that later.

Series thoughts: The ultimate question you have to ask with this series is whether or not we blame LeBron for getting swept. We never could’ve expected him to win it, but could he have put up a better fight?

The short answer is maybe. Remember, the ultimate expectation was for Detroit and San Antonio to meet in the Finals again after their last series went seven games. The rematch was expected to be similarly close, even if San Antonio had the edge (mainly because Ben Wallace was gone). By beating the Pistons, Cleveland had proved that they were at least in that same ballpark as a team. You can win a game against a superior team, but it’s hard to win an entire series unless you’re almost evenly matched. In this case, we have to think that Cleveland was at least somewhere close to San Antonio's level. They beat a team that took the Spurs to seven, so they should’ve done similarly well. Instead they were swept. Therefore, we have to place some requisite blame on LeBron.

The other question mark here concerns LeBron’s teammates. Offensively, yes, they failed him, but defensively the Cavs actually did better than they reasonably could’ve hoped. San Antonio averaged 98.5 points per game in the regular season, but Cleveland held them to 86.5 in the Finals. With that kind of defense, I think winning at least one or two games is a fair expectation, but LeBron didn’t deliver on offense. He shot only 36 percent in the series as a whole, far below his regular season figure of 48 percent. So basically, LeBron couldn’t have won this series, but he should’ve played better than he did.

This is an early strike against him, but not a major one.

Series 2: 2011, Dallas Mavericks defeat Miami Heat, 4-2

Primary defender: Shawn Marion

Secondary Defenders: Deshawn Stevenson, Jason Kidd, J.J. Barea

Primary Rim Protector: Tyson Chandler

Game 1: 24 points, 9-of-16 shooting (56.3%), 5 assists, 9 rebounds. Heat win 92-84.

This is the oft-forgotten game of LeBron’s notorious 2011 Finals, where he dragged the Heat to a win practically by himself. Chris Bosh shot 28 percent from the field, the rest of his starting lineup went 14-of-42, and King James spent big minutes defending Nowitzki as he went only 7-of-18 from the field. Were it not for Bosh and Wade’s rebounding (19 in total between them) along with Bosh’s free throws (9-of-12), you could make a reasonable argument that the narrative for this game could have reflected what we saw in his old Cleveland teams.

Something interesting of note were the seeds of the defense Dallas would use to completely stifle LeBron later on in the series. There was plenty of defensive experimentation in Game 1, with several rotation players getting their shot at guarding James either by design or through switches. They gladly gave him three-pointers (4-of-5 in the game) to keep him out of the paint, which they did by using Tyson Chandler as something of an enforcer. He levied several hard fouls on Bosh that would later send a message to LeBron: come to the basket and I will throw you into the third row. This would shape much of Miami’s offense in the next five games.

Game 2: 20 Points, 8-of-15 shooting (53.3%), 4 assists, 8 rebounds. Mavericks win 95-93.

Though his numbers look decent at first glance, he played a huge role in his team blowing a big fourth quarter lead that allowed the Mavericks to tie the series at one. He went 0-of-4 from the field down the stretch, with his only points coming off of a hard foul by Chandler, and a key turnover helped maintain Dallas’ run.

For the first time, LeBron’s playing style was starting to shift. He wasn’t going to the basket as readily, instead settling for jumpers and acting as an orchestrator from the perimeter. The aggression that made him the league’s best player was slowly starting to disappear, leaving many to wonder if he was afraid to battle Chandler down low.

That may have been part of it, but really, it was Rick Carlisle’s brilliant zone defense. His scheme encouraged LeBron to shoot from the perimeter, and once he did, it locked that idea in his mind. The entire Dallas defense collapsed into the lane whenever LeBron so much as thought about going to the basket. Did the prospect of hard fouls scare him? Maybe, but we’ll never really know for sure. We do know that LeBron’s playing style changed that night, and it would eventually cost him his first championship.

Game 3: 17 points, 6-of-14 shooting (42.9%), 9 assists, 3 rebounds. Heat win 88-86.

Even though Miami won this game, it was the beginning of the end for LeBron. He made a layup with 11:39 left in the fourth quarter… and didn’t score again for the rest of the game. In fact, he didn’t even attempt another shot until there was only 1:16 left in the game. What he did do was commit two huge turnovers and let the shot clock expire on a horrible possession late in the period, ultimately saved only by Wade's brilliance.

Speaking of Wade, this game featured one of LeBron’s signature choker moments. Late in the game, as Dallas was mounting yet another late run, Wade pulled LeBron aside and yelled at him. Look, I never like playing armchair psychiatrist with athletes. We have no idea what’s going on in their heads. We have no idea whether or not they’re scared of the moment or not. But in this particular moment, LeBron was mortified, possibly by his own teammate. He wasn’t the same for the rest of the Finals, and it showed.

Game 4: 8 points, 3-of-11 shooting (27.3%), 7 assists, 9 rebounds. Mavericks win 86-83.

Arguably the most humiliating game of LeBron’s career. The supposed best player in the world only managed eight points in an NBA Finals game. He didn’t score a single point in the fourth quarter. Not surprisingly, his team blew yet another lead.

So now we have to ask, what the hell went wrong? Refusing to go to the basket, James shot a grand total of 14 free throws up to this point. For comparison’s sake, Dwyane Wade managed to do that in four separate, individual games during the 2006 Finals.

More importantly, and again, I hate playing armchair psychiatrist, LeBron was scared. I don’t think there’s any way around that. He’d just spent the past year of his life as the world’s most hated sports villain since… maybe ever. He’d been yelled at on national television by his teammate and friend, he’d been lambasted by every talking head in the country, he’d been ripped apart to a degree that no other athlete in the history of sports had. Of course LeBron choked, 99.9999999 percent of other athletes would have choked in that situation.

But then, we aren’t judging LeBron against the other 99 percent. We’re judging him against the best, and though other players have had bad games in the Finals, none have ever fallen apart to this degree. You can argue that LeBron eventually figured it out and reached the level of the greats, but you can’t say that Bird, Magic, Kareem, Russell, Duncan, Kobe, or Jordan ever did this. Kobe sucked in Game 7 of the 2010 Finals, but we never questioned whether or not he wanted to be there. With LeBron, it just felt like he was worn down. He wanted no part of that stage. Even if he’d eventually grow out of it, this can’t be ignored.

Game 5: 17 points, 8-of-19 shooting (42.1%), 10 assists, 10 rebounds. Mavericks win 112-103.

LeBron wasn’t nearly as bad as he was in Game 4, but the damage was done. Dallas was in his head, or maybe he was in his own head. Only two more free throws to add to his total, and the same amount of fourth quarter points to boot (and, to be fair, they came in garbage time). This series was over. LeBron had been broken.

Game 6: 21 points, 9-of-15 shooting (60%), 6 assists, 8 assists. Mavericks win 105-95.

If you look at the raw stat line, LeBron actually played fairly well in this one. But look closer and a pattern starts to emerge. Once again, even if his numbers look decent, it’s not what his team needed him to do. In 2007, San Antonio begged LeBron to take bad shots fully expecting him not to trust his teammates. Maybe that stuck with him, because in this series and beyond, he became far too trusting of his teammates.

In this series, Dallas designed a defense specifically to slow down LeBron, but it’s not like he was consistently double- or triple-teamed like Jordan playing the Bad Boy Pistons. He could’ve gotten shots up at almost any time, especially along the perimeter. For big stretches during this game, by either holes in the Dallas zone or through unfortunate switches, LeBron ended up covered by J.J. Barea.

Barea is a point guard, listed at six feet, generously. He weighs 180 pounds soaking wet and looks to only be 5'10" on a good day. He’s one of the worst defenders in basketball. Yet it never occurred to LeBron James that, you know, he was LeBron James. He could post him up in his sleep. Either he gets an open look or he gets fouled. Easy, right? Nope, Barea stifled LeBron in their limited engagements. Dallas won the series that night. LeBron went on TV and made an *** of himself. As a LeBron hater, life couldn’t be better.

Series thoughts: Simply put, there is absolutely no defense for LeBron’s 2011 Finals. None. He was terrible without any historical precedent. It’s not like he was playing against another dynasty. He was playing a team with one star, no lockdown perimeter defenders and a very good, albeit not historically great, rim protector.

When having the Jordan-LeBron conversation, ask yourself this: could the 2011 Dallas Mavericks have beaten any of the 1991 Lakers, ’92 Blazers, ’93 Suns, ’96 Sonics, ’97 Jazz or ’98 Jazz? I’m inclined to say no. The only real debate I see is with the ’92 Blazers, but they had the third-most efficient defense in the league and had several guys (most notably, Buck Williams) who matched up perfectly with Dirk on defense. So basically, LeBron lost to a team that probably wouldn’t have beaten any of the teams Jordan beat.

Yet these Mavs completely stifled him. It was a truly brilliant defensive scheme, one few other teams have managed to steal effectively, but that shouldn’t be enough to stop a player of LeBron’s caliber in his prime. We’ve now seen LeBron play in the Finals twice and, by his standards, suck twice. We know he’s going to get over it, but it’s just hard to ignore this happening again when you look at the whole picture. After all, you’d probably devalue a Picasso painting if someone smeared dog crap all over the bottom half, right?

Series 3: Miami Heat defeat Oklahoma City Thunder, 4-1


Primary Defender: Kevin Durant

Secondary Defenders: Thabo Sefolosha, Russell Westbrook

Primary Rim Protector: Serge Ibaka

Game 1: 30 points, 11-of-24 shooting (45.8%), 4 assists, 9 rebounds. Thunder win 105-94.

This was an excellent LeBron game that nobody seems to remember. Consider the context: the Heat had just played two physically and emotionally draining series against the Celtics and Pacers, two teams built to beat the crap out of Miami and make them uncomfortable. The last two games of the Eastern Conference Finals acted as the exorcism of LeBron’s playoff demons. Just getting to the Finals was a remarkable accomplishment in itself.

Now they had to play the Thunder, the league’s most athletic team by far, coming off of the emotional high of sweeping the last four games away from San Antonio? It’s a wonder that the Thunder didn’t completely run Miami out of the gym.

To be fair, Oklahoma City held a fairly commanding lead for most of this game, but LeBron had his way with Durant and pretty much everyone else. His team may have lost, but it was by no fault of his own. The fact that Miami even kept this one close was a testament to how great he managed to play.

Game 2: 32 points, 10-of-22 shooting (45.5%), 5 assists, 8 rebounds. Heat win 100-96.

Another great LeBron game, but one still somewhat controversial. On the final major possession of a potential OKC comeback, LeBron clearly fouled Kevin Durant on a game-tying shot. The foul was never called, and Miami won the game. Would the Thunder have won in overtime? Maybe, but the far more interesting story is the foul itself.

Both LeBron and Durant were excellent in the first two games of these finals, and would remain so for the rest of the series. Both are terrific individual defenders, yet neither could do much of anything to stop the other, hence, the foul. On some level, might LeBron need an individual opponent like Durant to consistently take his game to the next level? After all, it’s far easier to relax against a team like San Antonio, where no individual is going to beat you, than against Durant, where a few lapses can turn into a 50-point game. I’m not saying it’s what happened, but it’s worth noting that LeBron's best Finals by far came in the only one where he arguably had an equal on the court.

Game 3: 29 points, 11-of-23 shooting (47.8%), 3 assists, 14 rebounds. Heat win 91-85.

As the series shifts back to Miami, LeBron can smell the blood in the water. He’s only three wins away from a championship and can win them all at home. He never quite got his shot going, but his numbers actually point to another important Finals trend of LeBron’s: he has always, always, always been able to rebound on the biggest stage.

You might think I’m only saying it because it happened, but it’s actually a pretty common trend among perimeter stars that their rebounding goes up in the biggest games. Remember that horrible Game 7 Kobe played that we mentioned earlier? He had 15 rebounds. It’s something guys like Kobe, Jordan, and Pippen did as a way of imposing their will upon games when they couldn’t quite get it going as a scorer. That’s the biggest takeaway from this game, even as LeBron's shot wasn’t falling, he did what he always did: he rebounded at an extremely high level.

Game 4: 26 points, 10-of-20 shooting (50%), 12 assists, 9 rebounds. Heat win 104-98.

The greatest game that nobody remembers, the one where Russell Westbrook went off for 43 points and only went to the line three times. However, you could make the argument that Westbrook only went off because LeBron solved the Durant puzzle. It was really fairly simple: LeBron has something like 60 pounds on Durant. Let him have his jumpers, just keep him from posting up.

James' defense was superb, and he found a very nice mix of scoring and keeping his teammates involved. Some triple-doubles are misleading, but every assist and rebound by LeBron in this game was needed and came with the outcome still in question. At no point in this series has LeBron really needed to take over, so he was able to dominate in pretty much every facet of the game.

In fact, this was also the first cramp game. LeBron left briefly in the fourth quarter, but came back in and played out the final few possessions. Those possessions ended up winning the game for Miami. This would become a big moment in the history of LeBron, as he’d never really had to overcome an injury to win a big game before. Now he had. The Heat went up 3-1.

Game 5: 26 points, 9-of-19 shooting (47.4%), 13 assists, 11 rebounds. Heat win 121-106.

There is no greater example of the LeBron Effect than Game 5 of the 2012 NBA Finals. In the history of the NBA, no other player had such a diverse offensive game to the point where he himself generates open shots merely by existing. Remember, Magic wasn’t a scorer, so defenders could often give him space and dare him to shoot. In this game, everyone was open because LeBron was still a dangerous scorer everywhere on the court.

When everything is going well, this is the LeBron you’re getting, the one who dominates in every facet of the game and doesn’t need to score 40. He can do that against most teams because most teams don’t have the means to force him otherwise. Wewerere about to see what happens when he faces one that does.

Series thoughts: On a game-by-game basis, the stretch from Game 6 in Boston through Game 5 in Miami was the best stretch of LeBron’s career. He played seven games and dominated all of them. In fact, as far as individual stretches go, you could put this one against pretty much anyone’s best seven in the history of the league. If you’re arguing on LeBron’s behalf, this is the point you want to make. When LeBron is at his best, he’s as good as anyone at their best, even Jordan. This was basketball played at the absolute highest level, we just have to wonder why we haven’t seen it more often in June.

Series 4: Miami Heat defeat San Antonio Spurs, 4-3


Primary Defender: Kawhi Leonard

Secondary Defenders: Boris Diaw, Manu Ginobili, Danny Green

Primary Rim Protector: Tim Duncan

Game 1: 18 points, 7-of-16 shooting (43.8%), 10 assists, 18 rebounds. Spurs win 92-88.

This is one of the all-time misleading great games. Yes, on paper 18-10-18 is phenomenal, but it undercut all of the growth we saw from LeBron in 2012. We solved the whole dueling banjos thing pretty definitively against Boston, but Wade somehow saw Game 1 as the opportunity to revert his team back to the mess of 2011? Seriously? And LeBron let him? They finished the game with nearly identical scoring lines. LeBron went 7-of-16, Wade went 7-of-15, LeBron shot four free throws, Wade shot four free throws, and even if LeBron was the one holding the ball at the end, it was very stretchy in that most of their shots came in individual clusters.

More importantly, San Antonio came into this series with a very specific directive: they were never going to double team LeBron. Whether it was Kawhi Leonard or someone else, they were not going to let Miami’s shooters beat them the way they did Oklahoma City a year earlier. LeBron didn’t see that, and it cost his team the game.

Game 2: 17 points, 7-of-17 shooting (41.2%), 7 assists, 8 rebounds. Heat win 103-84.

Another curious game from LeBron. This time, he had the tape from Game 1, he knew how the Spurs wanted to play him. He also knew that Wade was nowhere near himself and Bosh wasn’t shooting well. The Heat won this game largely on the strength of their role players, particularly Mario Chalmers, who scored 19 points.

Overall, the big story of this game was yet another showing of LeBron’s questionable sense of the moment. He only seems to understand which games he needs to take over when it’s staring him completely in the face, like Game 6 in Boston or, as we’ll reach shortly, Game 7 in this series. Otherwise, he just sort of tends to play the way he plays, without much fluctuation in style.

Game 3: 15 points, 7-of-21 shooting (33%), 5 assists, 11 rebounds. Spurs win 113-77.

Besides Game 4 in 2011, I don’t ever remember watching LeBron play a worse individual game than this one. Those 15 points are misleading, 11 of them came in garbage time. The overwhelming majority of the game saw LeBron watching helplessly as Danny Green and Gary Neal sank three after three after three after three.

This game ends up definable by one sentence: LeBron’s shots weren’t falling. Leonard played excellent defense, as he did all series. This was San Antonio’s plan throughout the series. They knew Leonard could hold his own with LeBron, and at the very least could keep him away from the basket. If he were to beat them with jumpers, fine, there’s nothing they could do about that short of handing everyone else open three’s on a silver platter. So far, it was working.

Game 4: 33 points, 15-of-25 shooting (60%), 4 assists, 11 rebounds. Heat win 109-93.

A great game by LeBron, but ultimately, the most interesting part of it ends up how similar his line looks to Game 3. Same rebounds, one more assist, only four more shots. LeBron didn’t markedly change his approaching coming into this game, the shots that weren’t going in before just happened to start going in here in Game 4. It’s simultaneously amazing and frustrating to watch. There may never have been a more volatile NBA figure than LeBron, yet as a player he remains largely predictable. He’s going to play the way that LeBron plays. In Game 4, that was enough for the win.

Game 5: 25 points, 8-of-22 shooting (36.4%), 8 assists, 6 rebounds. Spurs win 114-104.

Something we don’t talk about often enough with LeBron: for most of his career, he’s been a victim of very bad coaching. Erik Spoelstra has evolved into a very good coach over the past few years, particularly as an offensive strategist, but he makes some very curious rotational choices that, in this series, almost cost his team a ring.

In Game 4, Spoelstra refused to play a traditional big man. Udonis Haslem only got 10 minutes, and Chris Andersen didn’t see the court at all. While this works in theory to space the floor for Miami’s shooters, Spoelstra considered it in a vacuum. He didn’t realize that his biggest advantage to that point in the series was Gregg Popovich’s steadfast loyalty to Tiago Splitter. But by taking Andersen off of the floor and going with five shooters, Spoelstra forced Pop’s hand, inadvertently unleashing San Antonio’s most dangerous lineup: any without the collapsing Splitter.

In Game 5, San Antonio put Manu Ginobili into the starting lineup and watched their offense soar. For LeBron, this meant no more hiding on Danny Green to catch his breath. Taking Splitter off of the floor spaced San Antonio’s offense to such a degree that LeBron had to be actively engaged in every possession or else it would create a guaranteed open shot. Expending this much energy on defense hurt LeBron on offense, and it showed down the stretch as he scored only three points in the fourth quarter. Spoelstra’s blunder put Miami down 3-2. What followed was basketball history.

Game 6: 32 points, 11-of-26 shooting (42.3%), 11 assists, 10 rebounds. Heat win 103-100.

Arguably the greatest game in NBA history. LeBron almost lost it, then almost won it, then almost lost it again, and then, finally, won it in overtime. He was horrible for most of the game. And then the headband came off.

There’s no logical explanation for why this happened, but once LeBron’s head went commando he turned into player we’d only seen once before: June 7th 2012 in Boston. For a brief stretch, he was completely and utterly unstoppable, out of a sheer force of will. He would have taken every shot if that’s what it took. Anything Kawhi Leonard was doing to slow him down was suddenly gone. This was the LeBron we were waiting for.

And then, as quickly as it came, it vanished. LeBron turned the ball over twice in the final two minutes, and then missed the potential game-tying three in the final moments. Game over. Series over. LeBron is suddenly 1-3 in the NBA Finals. Until Ray Allen saves everything.

It was the greatest single shot anyone has ever taken in the history of basketball. How many players do you honestly believe could have caught that desperation pitch, stepped back without looking down for the line, and then drained a highly contested three-pointer with a championship on the line? It was completely and utterly impossible. Yet, it happened. LeBron stayed alive.

He made it count. LeBron won the overtime for Miami, and the entire script flipped in a matter of minutes. The Finals were going to a seventh game.

Game 7: 37 points, 12-of-23 shooting (52.2%), 4 assists, 12 rebounds. Heat win 95-88.

As great as Game 6 in Boston was, this was the greatest game LeBron has ever played. It’d be unfair to really consider Game 6 because the circumstances surrounding it were so unsustainable. His legacy, his first championship, his manhood, were all on the line. You could lift an SUV if your child was trapped under it, but could you do it if was a stranger?

That’s what this was. This was LeBron lifting an SUV that some random person was trapped under. The stakes weren’t nearly as high. He already had his ring. But it was Game 7 of the Finals, and LeBron played an absolutely incredible game. San Antonio maintained the same strategy they’d used throughout the series of forcing LeBron into jumpers, and he hit pretty much all of them. There was no way LeBron was losing on that specific night. After almost blowing it several times, King James has his second ring and a dynasty may have just been born.

Series thoughts: No series better explains LeBron’s career in a nutshell. At times, you’re going to get the brilliance we saw in parts of Game 6 and Game 7. At times, we’re going to see some stinkers, like Games 3 and 5. For the most part, though, we’re going to see what we’re going to see: LeBron being LeBron.

For the most part, he tends not to change his game for the moment or even the opponent. He plays the way he plays, and more often than not, that’s good enough to win because he’s the best player in the world. Only when he’s backed into a corner with no way out does he truly explode into the player we know he can be.

Don’t get me wrong, 2012 Finals LeBron is the player LeBron should be. That guy who does everything right, who dominates in every area without taking 30 shots, that’s who you want him to be. But against certain teams, that guy isn’t going to win you championships. Sometimes you need your best player to say “screw it, I’m going to take 40 shots tonight.” LeBron is only that guy when the moment forces it upon him, something he didn’t fully seem to even recognize until Boston. Even afterwards, he has to wait for it to come to him.

Series 5: San Antonio Spurs leading Miami Heat, 3-1


Primary Defender: Kawhi Leonard

Secondary Defenders: Boris Diaw, Manu Ginobili, Danny Green

Primary Rim Protector: Tim Duncan

Game 1: 25 points, 9-of-17 shooting (52.9%), 3 assists, 6 rebounds. Spurs win 110-95

Let’s talk about cramps. First of all, let’s set the record straight on a few things. To any of you conspiracy theorists out there, the Spurs did not do this intentionally. That would be highly illegal, mainly because the Celtics used to pull stunts like that during the Red Auerbach period and it was deemed an unfair competitive advantage.

We’ve also heard a lot about Michael Jordan’s cramp game. There are two big differences there as well. The first is that Jordan came back into the game. He only sat for a brief period. The second, and more important factor, is that Jordan’s entire team was cramping. Why? Because Chicago’s trainers had stupidly given the team GatorLode instead of Gatorade. GatorLode is full of nothing but carbs. It’s the liquid equivalent of eating multiple baked potatoes. Can you imagine playing basketball with that in your system? Scottie Pippen was the only Bull who didn’t need a break because of it at some point or another. The entire team was decimated.

The temperature inside of the arena knocked LeBron out of Game 1, but didn’t do the same to anyone else. You’d think the heat would have more of an impact on the Spurs, as Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili are all several years older than LeBron. He was the only one to cramp up.

But I don’t think it’s fair to blame LeBron for sitting out. Are there a handful of players who would have at least tried to play through the cramps? Yea, but none of them would have succeeded in doing anything other than being a decoy. Playing with cramps is impossible in that moment, so it’s up to you to decide if LeBron is more valuable as a decoy than his replacement was as a player. Maybe it means he doesn’t have as much willpower as others, but ultimately it was a completely defensible decision.

Game 2: 35 points, 14-of-22 shooting (63.6%), 3 assists, 10 rebounds. Heat win 98-96

You can basically insert everything I said about Game 4 of the 2013 Finals into here. They were very similar games, a natural effect of the way San Antonio has been defending LeBron. They want him to take jump shots, sometimes he’s going to make them and sometimes he isn’t. In this game, he made them.

Game 3: 22 points, 9-of-14 shooting (64.3%), 7 assists, 5 rebounds. Spurs win 111-92

Another LeBronism that I can’t believe we’ve ignored until now. The Spurs were shooting 90 f****** percent at one point. They scored 71 points in the first half. Yet once the third quarter started and LeBron made a few shots, I was completely and utterly convinced that Miami was coming back. The Heat didn’t come back in this game, but they came pretty damn close. That counts for something. We’ll always remember LeBron as the guy you never quite felt safe against no matter what the score was.

Game 4: 28 points, 10-of-17 shooting (58.8%), 2 assists, 8 rebounds. Spurs win 107-86

And finally, we’ve reached our last LeBronism, and it’s one that is going to dictate the rest of this series and the rest of his career. LeBron was one of the first superstars in basketball to truly accept the league’s Moneyball movement. He thinks about his analytics as much as any superstar besides Chris Paul, and tries to build his game around being as efficient as possible.

The problem with this is that he does so without considering the other parts of the game. Ideally, you want to play an offense that generates as many good shots as possible. However, when you’re playing a great defensive team like San Antonio, you just aren’t going to get good shots as often as you’d like. When that happens, as a superstar you have to accept that taking a few contested shots is going to open things up for the rest of the offense.

Look at what happened in Game 4. LeBron struggled mightily in the first half, so when the second half came around he only looked for very specific shots—ones close to the basket or that were fairly open. Again, you’d ideally like all of your shots to come that way, but he can't work like that against San Antonio. In search of these shots, which he made, LeBron stifled the rest of his offense. The Spurs knew exactly what he was going to do, and by translation what the rest of the team was going to do. It forced Miami to rely a lot on isolation and transition. The result? Miami came into the fourth quarter with only seven total assists as a team. Boris Diaw had just as many on his own.

That’s the danger of playing the way that LeBron does without any room to adapt. It’s exceedingly rare for a team to have both the strategic capabilities and personnel to actually handle LeBron, but when one does he just sort of sticks to his guns and assumes it will all sort itself out.

It does for his stats, but it cripples his team. Sometimes, the most efficient offense for a team is being inefficient as an individual. It makes things easier for the rest of the team because the defense knows you’re willing to shoot and must adjust accordingly. This is a glaring hole in LeBron’s basketball IQ. He thinks his belief in analytics is helping him, which in many ways it is, but in these Finals it has given him situational ignorance. He’s blindly following one way of playing despite its obvious weakness in this situation.

Series thoughts: It’s very hard to beat the Spurs two years in a row. After a certain number of games, they master your tendencies and know how to attack them. They’ve outsmarted LeBron by allowing him to play the way he wants to play. They give him jumpers and he expects them to give him jumpers, so he takes those jumpers. When their offense is clicking and they have a lead, they let him have a few looks close to the basket to slow down the rest of the offense. It’s a simple strategy but an elegant one. They’re letting LeBron get his points through jumpers knowing that the avenues he’s going to get them, even if he’s doing so efficiently, will hurt the rest of his offense.

What’s more puzzling, though, is that San Antonio struggled with the Heat on their home floor, but have dominated them in Miami. LeBron’s Finals record as a whole after 26 games is 11-15, but his home record is 8-7. He’s barely above .500 at home on the biggest stage, where typical superstars thrive. His record is obviously worse on the road (3-8), but it still bears mentioning that he hasn’t exactly fed off of his home crowds. It might be because Miami’s fans suck and he wasn’t ready in Cleveland, but we usually see stars take over on their home floors in the Finals. Nope. LeBron is LeBron is LeBron is LeBron. He’s going to give you what he’s going to give you. Excellent basketball, no more, no less.

***

Adaptation. It was one of Jordan’s best qualities. Remember that scene early in The Dark Knight where Jim Gordon tells Detective Ramirez that sometimes he flashes the Bat Signal just to remind criminals that Batman’s out there? Well, every now and then, it’d be a Tuesday in Charlotte and Jordan would score 50 just to remind the league that he was out there. He’d proactively deliver that game early on in a series knowing that that was what his team needed to win.

Simultaneously, he knew when his team needed a triple double, particularly a period in ’91 when he shifted to point guard to compensate for his team’s shortcomings. He knew how to adapt, when necessary he had an extra gear and knew when to use it.

In his Finals career, James has scored 35 or more points in a game only twice: Jordan did it around twice per series. It’s not a matter of them being different players (which they are). Both are fantastic scorers even if it was a bigger part of Jordan’s game. LeBron is a career 27.5 point per game scorer. Raising his output in the Finals seems a prerequisite. It seems like something that would come with that extra gear Jordan has.

LeBron has that gear, but it only comes out of reluctance, when his team has absolutely no other option. He’s the most versatile player in the world and he refuses to adapt. That’s ultimately the biggest difference between the two. When it comes to recognizing what exactly needs to be done to win a specific game or ultimately win a title, Jordan has the edge.

In the end, that’s why LeBron James isn’t the greatest basketball player of all time. Instead, it's the final nail in his "modern day Wilt Chamberlain" coffin. Wilt did adjust his game… to whatever stat he was chasing on that particular night. One year he made a point of leading the league in assists just to say he could. That adaptability become predictability. Wilt was all about Wilt, and Russell knew exactly how to exploit that in the playoffs. Wilt never changed his game when the stakes were higher. He just played the way that he wanted to play.

Though LeBron doesn't do so in nearly as selfish a way, he does maintain one particular playing style regardless of situation. LeBron plays the way that he plays, whether it's the NBA Finals or a regular season game against the Raptors. I've said it before and I'll say it again, LeBron only changes that style when it's absolutely, unequivocally necessary.

Tonight against the Spurs, it is necessary. If Miami loses Game 5, they lose the Finals. If LeBron loses the Finals, he loses his last remaining shot at Jordan. He'll have lost the Finals in his prime with two other stars flanking him. Once Jordan started winning, he never stopped. If LeBron wants to do the same, he needs to take a bite into the mystery burrito and hope he comes out with some of that Jordan cheese. He needs to come out gunning, knowing that if he doesn't win it for his team nobody else will. If LeBron is going to catch Jordan, he'd better start acting like him.
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