play-making, defending, producing as much as humanly possible, balance be damned. When the coach or team lifts all constraints off of an individual we’re left with the opportunity to realize raw, individual potential and skies without ceilings. And while so-called ball hogs or gunners are unloved and criticized by much of the basketball-loving world, there’s a beauty in the most John Henry of senses with a man forced into an environment where he and his mates are overmatched and forced to unequally distribute the burden away from the many to the one.
The 2014-15 Finals weren’t the best Finals I’ve ever watched, but they were the most compelling. When Irving broke his kneecap and joined Love in street clothes, the gap in talent between Golden State and Cleveland became perhaps as wide as the 2006-07 Finals when LeBron marched a mediocre Cavs team to the championship against the vastly superior Spurs. In 2007, a 22-year-old James knew he was capable of something, but how and what remained undefined and the Cavs were smashed up and swept to the side in four games. It would take eight seasons, hundreds of games, thousands of minutes of experiences, and two key injuries for us and LeBron to finally the see the full range his capability
LeBron’s 2015 Finals had stuck in my head for nearly a year and as I started piecing this together in my head there were what felt like endless directions, threads, bits of prose, and half-written sentences and ideas that passed through – all germinating with the 2015 Finals and LeBron. What you’ll read in the unfolding includes both strong, obvious connections and more tenuous threads between James’s Finals and those of other players dating back to 1965.
I started with statistical similarities by looking at players with a combination of high volume field goal attempts, free throw attempts, assists and turnovers. From there, a pattern became clear – the players with the highest volumes of the aforementioned stats consistently lost.
Since 1947, 458 players have appeared in at least 5 Playoff games while shooting 18 or more shots each game. Of the top 30 players on the list, just two have come from championship teams – Michael Jordan in 1992 and 1993. Of the remaining 28 players in the top-30, six lost in the Finals. Of those six, I focused on LeBron’s 2015, Jerry West’s 1965, Ricky Barry’s 1967, and Allen Iverson’s 2001 with the naïve intent of fitting it all within the context of LeBron’s 2015 Finals. Instead, like the Nietzsche quote above, what I found was batches of different conditions, different contexts, and more than one way to try and carry a team through long odds against juggernaut opponents.
*****
GAMES 1 and 2
In terms of narrative arc, I would have expected Game 1 of the Finals, when Kyrie played 40+ minutes, to fall in line with the rest of LeBron’s playoff performance of 2014-15, but it didn’t. Up until Game 1, in 14 playoff games with his new Cavs teammates, LeBron was averaging 27.5 points and taking nearly 25 shots in about 40 minutes per game. To put into context just how aggressive he came out in Game 1, it was the most shots he’s taken in a game in a career that has now spanned over 1,150 games.
With no Kyrie, the Cavs should’ve been swept like 2007 all over again, but with two days to game plan, then-coach David Blatt and whoever else had a voice in Cleveland’s preparation for Game 2 hatched an approach akin to ground-and-pound, efficiency be damned. Instead of the Cavs balancing an attack between James and the MASH unit of a supporting cast, they put the entire offensive responsibility on LeBron’s massive muscular shoulders, attempting to tap into every cell of skill making up his physical and mental being.
They down-shifted the tempo to counteract the Warriors’ speed, talent, and depth while leveraging their substantial size up front and somehow won in Oracle Arena. LeBron’s Game 2 line: 39 points on 11-35 from the field, a 45 true shooting percentage, 16 rebounds, 11 assists, and a whopping, game-high 50 minutes. David Blatt didn’t say it at the time, but to borrow from Wilt
Chamberlain’s old coach Frank McGuire, “Gentlemen, if Wilt has to score 50 a game for us to win and if he can do it, then gentlemen, that is how it will be.”
*****
10