The Decline of False Dichotomies
When elite athletes put together transcendent moments, they often discuss the game slowing down for them (except for Ichiro Suzuki). In the final two games of the Eastern Conference Finals and the first game of the Finals (basically, the last three games before he broke his hand), LeBron took that a step further: the game slowed down for us as well. The end result of Al Horford stumbling a half-step behind as LeBron laid the ball in came into view the moment Horford switched onto LeBron. LeBron bullying Klay Thompson and Draymond Green at the rim was baked into the moment LeBron caught an outlet pass and started a 1-on-2 fast break. A tough pocket pass to Tristan Thompson in transition, one that, had anyone else thrown it, Thompson probably would have fumbled out of bounds, could only end with a layup and a foul shot. Perhaps most telling of all, the kind of shot good defenses want to force their opponent’s best player into taking – a fadeaway in which LeBron is also gliding parallel to the rim, so that his proximity to the hoop is in flux in two directions – went in with the kind of consistency that makes it seem unpreventable; even as defenses forced LeBron to do what they wanted, the outcome felt inevitable.
Games 6 and 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals held an alarming symmetry that, as a Celtics fan, slowly registered for me like a repressed chunk of ice coming loose from the bottom of an iceberg and floating to the surface. In 2012, down 3-2 to the Celtics, LeBron took control of each moment of games 6 and 7 to effectively end the Big Three era. His grip on both games was absolute. At no point did I believe the Celtics had a shot, or even had a shot of having a shot, of winning either game. I’ll never forget watching Game 6 at a bar and, as we desperately waited for something to cheer, the air never entered the room. In a way, these performances bookend a certain era of witnessing LeBron, one that is defined by the public’s reception to him. Let’s call it The Age of Uncertainty. In the time between then and now, the critics who chastised his ‘killer instincts’ and looked to poke holes in his resume, who were at a fever pitch after LeBron lost in the Finals to Dallas, have either begrudgingly faded out or transformed altogether into enlightened fans. Now there are only the raving lunatics, the Skip Baylessess of the world, howling outside the gates of the castle. The main difference between then and now is that before, I hoped LeBron would settle for jump shots. Now, his game has no holes. It’s like The Simpsons episode where Homer and Lisa create a battlebot that has to go head-to-head with Professor Frink’s far superior battlebot. “Okay,” Homer says, “I’ve been studying Frink’s robot. And I’ve discovered he has one small weak spot.” In the background, Frink is tinkering with his bot. “Oh-oh!” he exclaims. “His weak spot is now his strongest point.”
In Game 1 of the NBA Finals, LeBron James hit another level, playing a near perfect game, but his team still lost. That defeat highlights the grayest area in basketball: the slippage between the interpersonal and intrapersonal. Basketball might be the team sport where a player’s individual talent has the most impact, but it may also be the one where the intangibles of chemistry are most essential. LeBron was like a maestro whose baton is a wizard’s wand. He seemed to have accounted for the Warriors’ third quarter run, for Jordan Clarkson’s myriad bricks, for innumerable factors working against, and then, right at the end, he took over. But even LeBron couldn’t account for the refs’ multiple mistakes down the stretch, their unprecedented overturning of a charge call in the final minute and a half, George Hill’s inability to hit both free throws, or JR Smith’s unthinkable blunder.
How do you reckon with the distance between performance and result, this friction between journey and destination? It complicates a conversation that had been flattened into a reductive binary by the mythos of Michael Jordan. Rather than start at the result and work backward, viewing everything that happened through that singular lens, LeBron’s achievements in the shadow of failure requires a more nuanced way of discussing not just greatness but also what we are hoping for when we tune in to watch in the first place.
In art, unlike sports, the immediacy of success is no guarantor of surviving the brutal appraisals of history. Moby Dick was a commercial failure in its own time. The Baha Men won a Grammy for “Who Let The Dogs Out.” Our ability to evaluate the merits of what we just witnessed is, to put it kindly, faulty. The way an event unfolds and the impression it leaves on us should be more foundational to our understanding of it than how it ends. Anyone who watched Game 1 of the Finals had to have been moved by watching LeBron close in on basketball singularity, like the first artificial intelligence to realize it is smarter than the smartest human. Moments like these pry open the discourse to make room for what it felt like to witness virtuosity in real time. Being able to celebrate experiences like that is crucial to being a fan, and no one plays a more essential role in this paradigm shift than LeBron James. The experience of watching LeBron, in his 33rd year on this earth, play the best basketball I have ever seen, is something to celebrate not despite the result, but completely outside of it.
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