James climbs all-time greats ladder
That howling sound you heard was the monkey being thrown off LeBron James' back and into the path of an oncoming locomotive.
Like he said, it's about damn time.
With apologies to the ASPCA, these past two weeks were the defining career moment for the best player of his generation. Yes, the best. There can be no doubt any longer, as the lack of a championship was the one giant asterisk that allowed others into the discussion.
So as Miami holds its first title celebration since July of 2010 ("Not one, not two, not three ..."), it's time to take a step back and look at the bigger view: Where does this put James in history, and where might it lead to him eventually ranking amongst the greats?
It's hard to overstate how much the past two weeks have changed the perception of James, both in terms of where he stands among his peers and his place in the game's pantheon of greats.
People forget this now, but it was barely two weeks ago that the soundtrack to Miami's season was a 9-year-old kid shrieking "Good job! Good effort!" after the Heat sleepwalked through a Game 5 home loss to Boston. That loss left them on the brink of elimination and ushered in a new round of psychological evaluations from the world's armchair shrinks.
All James did since then was average 32.7 points, 11.1 rebounds and 6.3 assists on 51 percent shooting, leading his team to six wins in seven games en route to the championship. He was a man possessed, as Clay Bennett might say.
And he was at his most pathologically locked-in during the darkest moment, that fateful sixth game in Boston when James single-handedly tore apart the Celtics with 45 points. James said afterward that he'd succeeded this season by rediscovering the "joy" in his game, but he had all the glee of a serial killer on that night and it provided the turning point of his career.
Nobody will ever question his "closer" credentials again, not after he made all the big plays in these last six wins -- including clutch bailout 3s from several feet behind the line in Game 7 of the conference finals and Game 4 of the Finals. (Perhaps now that he's a certified closer[emoji]174[/emoji]", he'll feel liberated to take horrible 30-foot hero shots with impunity, like Paul Pierce or Kobe Bryant.) That's a pretty stark contrast to February, when everybody piled on him for not taking a wild jack at the end of the All-Star Game. The freaking All-Star Game.
Instead, James' new legacy is one of the most amazing top-to-bottom seasons in NBA annals. Amazingly, virtually nobody discussed this while it was happening; that's how all-consuming the will-he-choke-or-won't-he meme became. In the modern history of the league, the only seasons that can really compare are Shaquille O'Neal's first championship season with the Lakers and Michael Jordan's first three championships with the Bulls. Everything else is orders of magnitude below.
Check it out: James led the league in PER by a wide margin at 30.80, the 10th-best mark of the post-merger era. In the playoffs, he kept it up with a 30.39, which was doubly amazing because the competition in the postseason is so much tougher. It goes without saying that he led the league in both regular-season and playoff PER, and did so by wide margins. He also had the best adjusted plus-minus in the postseason, and nearly the best in the regular season.
He wasn't just the best player in the league; he dominated it from start to finish, in a way only three players had done in the past four decades. Jordan. Shaq. LeBron. That's the list.
Similarly, we are now forced to contemplate James' status as an all-timer, both when we consider the body of work and what he might add to it. By any analysis, LeBron is pretty darned high on the list.
Let's start with the numbers. According to basketball-reference.com, James' career PER is the second-best all time, trailing only Jordan's. Two caveats come with that: First, it is basically a post-merger stat since we don't have turnovers, blocks and steals for the older generation; and second, it's destined to go down a bit once he gets into his past-prime years.
The big asterisk with LeBron, however, has always been the playoffs. History says they haven't been as bad as you think. Jordan trumps him on this metric, and so do Shaq and Tim Duncan, leaving James a distant fourth in career playoff PER. Nonetheless, he outranks a pretty formidable list of talents, including guys with names like Earvin, Larry and Kobe. He also has the best single-season playoff PER ever, again by a wide margin: a ridiculous 37.43 in 2009 (check it out).
Of course, he's been the best player in the game for a while, he just hadn't backed it up in June until now. James had won three of the past four MVP awards, and the one exception was immediately called into question after James suffocated Chicago's Derrick Rose in the 2011 Eastern Conference finals. In two of his three MVP years his team also had the NBA's best record, and in the third it won the championship.
Want more? James has become one of only three players in the post-merger era (Jordan and Shaq are the others) with multiple seasons of PER greater than 30 (he has three), and this year joined those two as the only ones with multiple seasons of playoff PER greater than 30 (minimum 10 games).
In other words, if you ended his career today, at the age of 27, James is already in select company. Only 20 players have at least one MVP and one championship; only 16 have done it with multiples of one or the other. And virtually none of them did it while dominating to the extent James did. If LeBron retired tomorrow, he'll have had a top-10 all-time career.
To put it another way: In terms of players you could genuinely compare to James, even at this point, who is there? The one player lots of people use is another guy who had to leave Ohio to get his championship ring, Oscar Robertson, but the Big O had just one MVP and one championship, and the latter didn't come until he was near the end of his career.
Moreover, James can still add to his take. And the "not one, not two, not three ..." boast applies just as much to his MVP collection as it does to the championships. Voter fatigue is the biggest threat James faces to getting a ridiculous MVP haul. Jordan won five and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar a record six; matching those totals looks very attainable now, especially since voters can't hold his postseason failures against him anymore.
The ring is the harder thing, but as everybody is pointing out, Jordan was older when he finally broke through. Nonetheless, now that they've seen how hard it was to get just one, the Heat would probably reconsider that boast from their over-the-top welcome party in July 2010.
There's that Jordan comparison again, but I'd argue Shaq is the better comparison. Like Shaq, James is a physical freak of nature, got swept in a trip to the Finals, changed to a glamour market as a free agent, and had to endure some serious drama and questionings in his first title run (anybody remember Game 7 against Portland?) before finally breaking through.
Shaq won only one MVP award but is LeBron's contemporary in many of the statistical charts when we start talking about 30-plus PER seasons and playoff runs. And, of course, his total of four championships seems a decent enough bar for the "over" for LeBron.
But even in that comparison, James comes out ahead -- he's been more consistent, more durable and a better teammate.
So at the end of the day, it's scary to think how highly LeBron may rank in the pantheon. He has work to do, but it's not unreasonable to think he may go down as the second-best player of all time behind Jordan. Nobody else is going to match his combination of peak value, durability and (likely) longevity; the thing he was always missing was a championship.
He's got one now, and it may be the first of several. Good job, good effort, indeed.
