We now pause to consider whether being this generation’s Jerry West is a good thing, and whether Jerry West would be Jerry West if he had a 1-8 NBA Finals record in the spewing Twitter era. (This is going to become the norm if Twitter isn’t real careful).
LeBron James will play in his 38th Finals game tonight, as he tries to keep his Cleveland Cavaliers from a second straight championship series loss to the Golden State Warriors.
Stop and read that again: tonight will be James’ 38th Finals game. Finals. Not playoffs. Finals.
After Monday, James will have played in more Finals games than Kobe Bryant (37), Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain (35 apiece) and Tim Duncan (34). He’s appeared in more Finals games than Larry Bird (31), Shaquille O’Neal (30) and Dwyane Wade (29).
He is reviled.
He averaged 37.5 points, 15 rebounds and 8.8 assists in the Cavs’ six-game Finals loss to Golden State last season.
He must do more.
Jordan had Scottie Pippen, a fellow Hall of Famer, as his second throughout his career. Bird had Hall of Famers Kevin McHale and Robert Parish throughout his career (and Hall of Famers Dennis Johnson and Nate Archibald at other points in the title runs, too). Magic Johnson had fellow Hall of Famers Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (or, Abdul-Jabbar had Magic Johnson) and James Worthy throughout his career (and HOFer Bob McAdoo as a reserve for two of those title runs). Isiah Thomas had fellow Hall of Famer Joe Dumars throughout his career.
James had Wade — still effective, to be sure, and a future Hall of Famer — but only for four seasons, and, to put it charitably, on the back nine of his career when James and Chris Bosh came to Miami in 2010. For LeBron 1.0 in Cleveland, his most talented teammate in seven seasons was either Zydrunas Ilgauskas or Mo Williams, take your pick. He has Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love this season — which happens to be the first time Love has been in The Finals, as well as, for all intents and purposes, Irving, who fractured his kneecap in Game 1 last year. Maybe they’ll become Hall of Famers. They aren’t there, yet.
He’s not a winner — at least not in The Finals. If the Cavs go down tonight, James’ record will fall to 2-5 (.286) in The Finals.
By contrast, West’s Finals winning percentage was .125. Elgin Baylor, 0-for-8 in The Finals, had no winning percentage. Carmelo Anthony, Dominique Wilkins, Bernard King, Chris Webber, George Gervin and Alex English never have had the pleasure of being introduced to The Finals. Reggie Miller (0-1) made one Finals. Patrick Ewing (0-2) made two, although he only played in one. Charles Barkley (0-1) made one. Karl Malone (0-3) and John Stockton (0-2) didn’t win a title either. All but two of those men (Webber and the still-playing Anthony) have bronze busts in Springfield.
LeBron James was a crafty veteran in goading Draymond Green into a suspension — inducing a punch to James’ groin in the waning seconds of Friday’s loss to the Warriors.
Draymond Green was right to punch LeBron James in what my two boys call the Man Zone.
You can’t have a conversation about James in mixed company, have a reasoned back and forth about his pros and cons. Point out his strengths, and you’re a jock-sniffer; point out his faults, and you’re a hater. Yet every season seems to become a referendum on James, now in his 13th NBA season, having played more career playoff games (197, as of tonight, which will tie Manu Ginobili for ninth on the all-time list) than the Magic (123 career postseason games), the Los Angeles Clippers (97) and the Toronto Raptors (62), to name a few.
It’s an especially pointed discussion now, as James can see the start of the end of the road.
He’s 31 now, still looking to lead Cleveland to that major pro sports championship that has eluded it since 1964. (Yes, the Lake Erie Monsters, the minor league affiliate of the Columbus Blue Jackets, won the American Hockey League’s Calder Cup in a 4-0 sweep over the Hershey Bears on Saturday.) And this is the team that James wanted, starting with Irving and Love, as a condition for his return.
Will he be defined by his .500 Finals record in Miami, or the collar he’s taken so far in the Land? How would he process not succeeding at the one thing he’s dreamed of since he was 18?
“Well, for me, I think from a basketball standpoint, that’s one of the reasons why I came back, but it’s not the main reason I came back,” he said Sunday. “It wasn’t the only reason I came back, and there wasn’t just one reason why I came back. Me personally, what I’m able to do off the floor as well with my foundation and me being back home and me being — last summer, I was able to guarantee all my kids in my program college scholarships. I’m able to do so many things because I’m actually there, hands on, with my foundation and things that go on. I’m able to up lift the youth in my community and also in other communities. Even though you’re able to do it from afar, if you’re actually there, I think it’s even more meaningful to kids that look up to you for inspiration.
“Then from a basketball standpoint, yeah, I mean, that’s always been my goal since I was drafted in 2003. I was drafted in 2003. My goal was to bring a championship to Cleveland, and it hasn’t changed. When I left, my goal was to bring a championship to Miami. That didn’t change. And when I came back, it hasn’t changed.”
No one should doubt his sincerity in trying to uplift kids in his hometown, with the partnership he forged with the University of Akron last year to fund scholarships for 1,000 at-risk students to go to the school, starting in 2021. Alone, it won’t lift the impoverished sections of the city, or in Northeast Ohio. But it was more than a gesture; it was a commitment to strengthen his already deep roots in the community, and perhaps permanently. James takes his civic duty in helping lift young people, especially kids of color, up and out of the circumstances in which he also grew up.
But James’ equally important raison d’etre is raising a banner in Ohio. That’s what he has sold since his return. That’s why his adopted city is called Believeland. That’s why the banner is back up across the street from Quicken Loans Arena.
Fifty-two years, man. Fifty-two years. Cleveland’s last championship came the year before I was born. And I’m old!
Won’t another loss define him, the way Wide Right has come to define Scott Norwood and the 0-4 in Super Bowls Buffalo Bills?
“Look, he wants it bad,” his longtime teammate and friend, James Jones, said last week. “But by no stretch of the imagination is his life going to be defined by his ability to bring a championship to the city, or to win a championship. Because you play this game to win championships, understanding that it’s the most difficult thing you’ll ever do.
“We all know, those who play and those who’ve been around the game a long time, realize that no matter how hard you play, how badly you want it, you can’t do it by yourself. So you can control a portion of it, but at some point it becomes about your teammates, it becomes about your coaches, it becomes a byproduct of all those factors. So when it doesn’t happen, for him, as long as he understands — which he does — that he’s given it all he has, then he’ll live with the results.”
It’s like Jones channeled what James said just a few days later.
“Well, at the end of the day you control what you can control,” James said. “You dedicate yourself to the game, you be true to the game. I commit myself to those 14 guys and our coaching staff and our fans every single night that I step on the floor. At the end of the day, win, lose or draw, I’m not happy, but I’m okay with it because I know I’ve given all I’ve got.”
But what if the Cavaliers lose again? What if James is destined to lose much more than he wins on the game’s biggest stage? Does it say more about him, or us?
Were the Atlanta Braves of the 1990s — 14 straight division titles, one World Series championship — a success, or a failure? Is Glenn Close — six Oscar nominations, no Oscars — a great actress, or a loser? Is sustained excellence over a long period enough without numerous titles?
Is nuance still possible in our hot take sports world? Can you appreciate what James has done over the last six years, leading six straight teams to The Finals, if he doesn’t always win The Finals?
James can drive you crazy at times. He did almost nothing to help David Blatt in his season-plus as head coach (Blatt has taken a job coaching in Turkey since being fired in Cleveland), and if he didn’t have him fired, he certainly didn’t save him. He has never embraced regularly playing power forward, the position where his size, strength and passing ability would have done the most damage over the longest period of time, and allowed him a graceful transition as his leaping ability began to wane. (Who, exactly, would keep James from getting to the rim if he started most possessions eight to 12 feet away?)
But here is his team, again, in The Finals. (Yes, the Eastern Conference is easier to navigate than the Western Conference.) James has been more facilitator than attacker during the playoffs, and the Cavs played their best basketball of the season with Irving and Love and Channing Frye going 3-point happy.
The Cavs, like the Stockton-Malone Jazz team a generation ago, have just run into a historically good team (the Jazz’s foil was the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls), one that they match up poorly with (that is, when Green is on the floor). If the Oklahoma City Thunder win one more game this year, Cleveland would have the size up front, with its Timofey Mozgovs and Tristan Thompsons, to neutralize OKC’s frontcourt edge. The Cavs couldn’t guard Russell Westbrook, but the Thunder couldn’t guard Irving.
And, not unimportantly: Cleveland would have had home-court advantage.
But that didn’t happen. And unless the Cavaliers have a monumental three games in them, they won’t beat the Warriors, again. No one else but James will be blamed. He won in Miami on the court with the help of the SuperFriends and the organizational spine of Pat Riley off it. In Cleveland, he loses alone, believed to be the de facto GM and coach. (You wonder: if there was an unending tap of sodium pentathol laying around, would James cop to maybe being premature about letting Andrew Wiggins go to Minnesota to bring Love in?)
Is it enough to be West? Wasn’t “The Logo” pretty damn incredible, even as he and his teams lost to Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics, year after year? Or would West have been skewered today after, say, his fourth loss in six seasons to Boston?
We live in a 51-49 country politically. Maybe it’s too much to expect a full embrace of James as well.
“I don’t know if there’s anyone that’s been in the league and won a championship every single year they’ve been in the league,” he said. “Unless they played one year, won a championship as a rookie and then they retire. One thing I can say that I’ve been blessed enough to be a part of seven Finals, and hopefully I’ll be blessed enough to play in many more even after this year, win, lose or draw.”
MORE MORNING TIP: David Aldridge’s Weekly Top 15 Rankings
Longtime NBA reporter and columnist David Aldridge is an analyst for TNT. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter.
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