Sometimes it’s easy to forget that NBA players are themselves huge basketball fans. They love watching the highlight-reel plays as much as anyone else. Even for a mega-star and future Hall-of-Famer like Dwyane Wade, who played alongside LeBron James for five years in Miami and saw up close and personal what he’s capable of, he still sometimes looks on in utter awe at what his friend can do on the basketball court.
So it shouldn’t be any surprise that during the waning moments of Game 7 of last year’s Finals, Wade was just as astonished as the rest of us when LeBron somehow managed to transport himself through time and space to get a championship-saving chase-down block on Andre Iguodala. Via Jonathan Abrams of Bleacher Report:
“Everybody was like—pardon my French—’What the f–k?'” Wade tells B/R Mag in a conversation about the characteristics of clutch. “He literally got dropped out of the air to do it. He came out of nowhere. Just one of those plays, man, that is a defining play in his career that people will talk about and how that’s going to be shown over and over again for his legacy. He did it in a different way.”
Wade’s comments were part of the article’s larger discussion of what it means to be “clutch” in professional sports, the entirety of which is well worth the read.
He spoke at various points about whether you’re born with the so-called “clutch gene” or whether you can learn it, about trusting your teammates and knowing when to defer, and about how being clutch is more about consistent, all-around play than making or missing individual shots with the game on the line.
So far in these Finals LeBron has once again posted tremendous numbers, but facing a 2-0 deficit heading back to Cleveland for Games 3 and 4, his clutch play alone won’t be enough to save the Cavs against one of the most dominant teams we’ve ever seen. Last year, LeBron got major help from his supporting cast, and they’re going to have to step up soon if they want any chance of climbing out of the hole they’ve dug themselves.
(Via Bleacher Report)
