In five NBA Finals games a man averaged 33 points, 12 rebounds, and 10 assists – and lost. For LeBron James, greatness comes even in a loss, and it continues to define him.
Sports are a meritocracy, and like much of life, history is told from the winner’s perspective. LeBron averaging a triple double for an entire NBA Finals will make for an interesting footnote, but the impact of what he actually did will get lost among the casual fans. The best hope he has is it being carried like a fable or a myth via word of mouth by the basketball junkies. Again, LeBron averaged a triple double for an entire series against the best team in the NBA this season, and did it while shooting 56 percent from the floor.
This is a 32-year-old man who has already logged an unbelievable amount of minutes. He shouldn’t be able to perform David Blaine-esque magic tricks to keep a team competitive against four All-Stars (including two MVPs) on the opposing side.
“I left everything on the floor every game, all five games” James said after Game 5. “So for me personally I have no reason to put my head down. I have no reason to look back at what I could have done or what I shouldn’t have done or what I could have done better for the team. I left everything I had out on the floor every single game for five games in this Finals, and you come up short.”
While most would agree with LeBron, his record is now 3-5 in the NBA Finals. For some people, that’s all that matters. Once the layers are peeled back, you start to see more than the “choker” narrative that’s so easy to throw into a meme. LeBron has only been favored by Vegas three times in his career (LeBron is 2-1 lifetime in those series). Of LeBron’s NBA Finals losses, he’s lost twice to the Spurs and now twice to the Warriors, both models of excellence and consistency.
In fact, James’s struggles hearken back to another player who consistently found himself overmatched in the NBA Finals: Jerry West.
West, the only player with the dubious distinction of being named the NBA Finals MVP on the losing team, went 1-8 in the Finals. West, like LeBron, went up against teams that were absolutely loaded. One of them, the Boston Celtics, defeated West a total of six times in a ten-year span in the NBA Finals. But if it wasn’t the Celtics, it’d be San Francisco Warriors and Rick Barry derailing the Lakers in the playoffs, or the Knicks, who won their two titles in the 70s over West and the Lakers.
For some all-time greats, they’re Wile E. Coyote instead of the Roadrunner. And this is where LeBron and West are kindred spirits. Both are in the upper echelon of the sport and yet their playing careers run the risk of being defined by their losses. It just so happens that West’s came at the expense of the most dominant run in the history of American sports. LeBron’s is at the expense of a continually shifting Collective Bargaining Agreement and a salary cap spike that allowed a 73-win team on the cusp of its own dynasty to add one of the most efficient scorers the NBA has ever seen.
Luck plays a large factor in whether a star wins a title. For LeBron, he was unfortunate to lead a barren Cavs team into the Finals in 2007 against the Spurs, who showed he had further to go in his basketball education. The 2014 Miami Heat team was running out of fumes and the Spurs smelled blood in the water, ending James’ run in Miami. The first year back in Cleveland in the 2015 Finals saw both Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love out. (Somehow LeBron mystifyingly extended that series to six games.)
Similarly, West faced the same stretch of bad luck, whether it was Elgin Baylor’s knees keeping him out of the lineup, or one of the most inspirational comeback stories in Willis Reed coming out for Game Seven of the 1970 Finals and Walt Clyde Frazier drops 36 points (and 19 assists!) to win the title in Madison Square Garden.
At the end of the day it comes down to that if Jerry West can somehow become the NBA Logo despite his awful luck in terms of winning multiple championships, LeBron James should lose no stature for his Finals record. If awful luck robs a star of his status, Jerry West’s shouldn’t be the logo at all (something he’s been campaigning the NBA actually do), and guys like Patrick Ewing, Reggie Miller, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, and John Stockton don’t belong in the conversation among great players because they couldn’t beat the monolith that was Michael Jordan in his prime. At that point, we may as well remove all nuance from the discussion at all when chopping up the NBA.
“At the end of the day, nobody can – no matter what anybody says from now on in your career or whatever they say – they can never take away from you being a champion,” James said after Game 5. “That’s something that they are always going to speak about, about you. It may be like the last thing they may say, but they are always going to have to say that you’re a champion.”
LeBron, to his credit, has three of them, and has plenty of time to square off against the Warriors – or whomever else stands in his way – once again. So let’s lionize West and LeBron as all time great players – not only for their triumphs, but their failures as well.
