In Defense of LeBron James

The Worst Basketball Player in the World (Allegedly)

It's been a rough 24 hours for LeBron James.

After a less-than-inspiring offensive performance in Game 3 of the NBA Finals, in which he mostly served as a facilitator for red-hot teammate Dwyane Wade, many in the media wanted to see James regain his "Alpha Dog" role in Game 4. Those people were sorely disappointed.

James remained incredibly passive throughout Tuesday's game in Dallas, finishing with only 8 points (a career playoff low) on 3-for-11 shooting. He also tallied 9 rebounds and 7 assists as his team very nearly took a commanding 3-1 lead in the series, but none of that seemed to matter after the game.

The ravenous wolves were out. They smelled the blood of a prima donna nearby, and the wound was fresh.

In the time since the clock ran out on the Heat in Game 4, LeBron James has been repeatedly savaged in the press. It has been a somewhat familiar refrain:

He can't bring it when it matters.

He shrinks from big moments.

He's not even the best player on his own team.

His legacy has been irreparably tarnished.

And most of all, Jordan would never have done that.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a LeBron James fan — far from it. I don't like the guy at all. I think he's smug, arrogant, self-important, and immature. Up until about nine months ago, I would have shouted until I was blue in the face that Kobe Bryant was the best player in the world. I would have literally cursed you for suggesting otherwise. I hope the Miami Heat lose every single game they play. Ever. And I absolutely do not believe that he is the next Michael Jordan.

So when I, the leader of the LeBron-haters, say that the faux outrage narrative that was peddled all day Wednesday on the ESPN family of networks is total crap, I suppose that's saying something.

As I was driving home from dropping my wife off at work yesterday morning (ah, the life of the unemployed American male), I spent 10-15 minutes with our vaunted morning show friends, Messrs. Michael and Michael. They, of course, were discussing how LeBron James had, within the span of eight hours, become one of the worst basketball players ever and totally overrated¹ — or at least that's what I gathered from their tone.

It was like a runaway train. I'm pretty sure Mr. Golic used the words "supposed superstar" at one point (and yes, his voice implied that he was probably utilizing a liberal helping of air-quotes in-studio), as if LeBron James was nothing more than Joe Johnson with a more rapidly receding hairline.²

And it didn't stop with the Messrs. Michael — once the narrative ball had begun to roll, everyone at the Worldwide Leader had to have their chance to kick it a little further down the road.

Even Bill Simmons — or, if you believe Tommy Craggs over at Deadspin, "mainstream sportswriting's last best hope" —got in on the act over at his horribly named (and ESPN-affiliated, natch) new site.³ As Simmons is sometimes wont to do, he rambled for nearly 2,000 words about his favorite pet topics (David Stern's secret machinations, Jordan playing baseball, footnotes about how he's restraining himself from making a joke about copulating with someone's mother, etc.) without actually adding much to the conversation that could be considered new or insightful. But then, after all that, he touched on something I thought was quite prescient:

There's a curse that comes with limitless potential: Everyone judges you against only that limitless potential. We crave Game 4 and Game 5 of the Chicago series from LeBron every time. When it doesn't happen, we feel like he failed us, just like fans in the 1960s always felt like Wilt was failing them. This definitely isn't fair.

He continues on for a bit about Bill Russell (who else?), but I'll cut if off there. Because Simmons is right. It isn't fair.

LeBron James is the best basketball player in the world. It's not even close. Kobe is too old, Derrick Rose is too flawed, Kevin Durant is too passive, Dwight Howard still can't execute a simple post move, and Dirk Nowitzki (for all his playoff excellence) still doesn't know what the word "defense" even means. No one can do what LeBron can do on a basketball court. He has the ability to not only impact, but to control every facet of a game — and Tuesday night didn't change any of that.

Admittedly, LeBron did not play well in Game 4. I don't think anyone would argue that fact. He wasn't aggressive, he didn't shoot well, and he deferred too much to lesser players who should legally be required to wear blindfolds to prevent them from even seeing the court.⁴ His passiveness very well may have cost the Heat the game — well, that and Dwyane Wade's inexplicable affinity for missed free throws and butterfingers.

All of this is true, and none of it makes anything we believed about LeBron James a week ago any less true today.

This is the ESPN hype machine in full effect — and I'll be damned if she ain't purring like a sleeping kitten. The multiplicity of talking heads employed by the Worldwide Leader aren't just painting with an exceptionally broad brush, they've basically decided to dump the entire paint bucket all over the canvas. They are so completely overreacting to an infinitesimally small ripple in the pond that is LeBron's larger career that it's almost laughable.

Do they really expect me to believe that a substandard (by LeBron's standards) performance in one — or even two! — non-decisive NBA Finals games just as he begins to really enter his prime have forever altered the legacy of the most talented player of his generation? Come on. If LeBron James never wins a title and consistently underperforms in big moments for the rest of his career, then we can talk about his legacy being seriously damaged. But at this point, when we don't even have the slightest notion what that legacy is or what it will be, they are really just a couple bad games that came at an inopportune time. Nothing more, nothing less.

That's the problem with the ESPN narrative. As one host after another with airtime to kill juices up a story to greater and greater heights, it feeds the frenzy of speculation and overreaction in the Bristol echo chamber and, ultimately, makes it seemingly impossible for anyone to view the event in any type of proper perspective. Context is dead on arrival. Every little thing that happens is no longer just an interesting occurrence worth discussing, but instead automatically becomes a life-changing, legacy-defining, world-shaking event of great "importance."

It's all garbage, of course — but it didn't stop a sizable number of the network's NBA commentators from declaring that Dallas had somehow exorcised their demons and "avenged" their 2006 Finals meltdown after winning Game 2.

Never mind that they barely eked out the victory after a frenzied comeback.

Never mind that they still had three more games to win before bringing home the hardware.

Never mind that they would go on to lose Game 3, causing these exact same people to declare the Heat suddenly superior and to start planning a lovely South Beach championship parade for the day after Game 5.

Never mind that, when one uses even the smallest semblance of rational thought, all of this matters much less than Magic Johnson's breathless analysis would lead you to believe.

That's just how the Bristol echo chamber works. If you win, you're a hero and even your greatest flaws are papered over in the interest of a more compelling (and overinflated) narrative. If you lose, you're a goat and your career is somehow hanging in the balance. If the Heat score four more measly points in Game 4 and squeak out a close victory, do we really believe the ESPN narrative would be centered around a supposed stain on LeBron's legacy?

Sure, his tentative play might've been mentioned in passing, but everyone would've been so busy hyperventilating over how "dominant" and "in control" the Heat are that nobody would have really noticed. More likely than not, a Heat win would have resulted in LeBron being praised as a "true team player," willing to sacrifice his own scoring in order to feed the hot hand (his 7 assists magically taste much better after a "W") and win ball games.

And that's really all it would've taken to shift the narrative completely on its head — four points. A few made Dwyane Wade free throws here, a fortunate bounce there. That's apparently all that stands between greatness and goat-ness for The Best Player in the World in the eyes of the ESPN machine.

The same goes for every star athlete. Whether the target is a fabricated Westbrook-Durant feud, a not-so-dire pseudo-threat to LeBron James' currently amorphous legacy, or a painfully premature declaration of vengeance on behalf of the Dallas Mavericks, viewers can always expect the Worldwide Leader and its litany of insta-babblers to be there — ready to ratchet up the tension and inflate the importance of even the most trivial incident.

After all, it's distinctly possible that the world could come crashing down around us if LeBron passes the ball to Mario Chalmers in the corner one more time...

-------------------------

¹ Or, in other words, a hybrid of Greg Ostertag and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf.
² The LeBron James Headband Timeline never gets old.
³ As a matter of policy, I will refer to the new Simmons project only as ESPNHipster (or ESPNH for short) for at least the foreseeable future. I reserve the right to change this policy at any time, but you should not expect such a change to occur until I can keep myself from vomiting each and every time I hear the site's actual name spoken out loud.
⁴ Here's looking at you, Mario Chalmers.