OT: NBA Western Conference Finals Q4 Open Thread
Once again the media that covers that NBA proves that the MVP award should be renamed "The best player not named Lebron James award" cause that's what it's become. Harden, for the God-only-knows how many times in a row, wilted under pressure while Lebron carried his team to a win.
To me the ultimate test of the league MVP would be this. If every player in the league and all incoming college players were available for one year and one year only and all had the same salary who would the league's GMs want for their first pick? My guess is each and every GM would write the name "Lebron James" down if they could choose any player they wanted for one year - not Russell Westbrook, not Steph Curry and certainly not James Harden. They would ALL want Lebron motherfucking James for that one year cause they know he would do more than all the others combined to elevate their team's win totals.
I personally think my Cavs are gong to lose in 5 this year. But I'm going to enjoy each of those games as I get to watch Lebron play just a little bit more in a Cleveland unform and that's a pretty good deal to me.
The arguements that Jordan was 6-0 in the Finals, faced a far tougher Eastern Conference, never did this or did that, etc. say far more about the people making them than they do about LeBron.
LeBron can only play the teams on his schedule. And even if he loses (and smart money says he will) he's still the best player of this generation by some distance. Magic was 5-4 in the Finals, Jerry West was 1-8, Wilt was 2-4... and if you tried to argue to any NBA historian that this knocks them off the pantheon of all-time greats you'd get laughed out of the room. What What LeBron is doing right now is right up there with some of the all-time great basketball ever. The last team before this year to make the NBA Finals four years in a row was the 80's Lakers, and if you wanna complain about *today's* superteams...
You can make plausible cases for him, Jordan or Kareem for best players I've seen in my lifetime, but what does that even matter? He's the best right now and that's more than enough. It's fine to criticize him for his sideburns or for his passive-aggressive Tweeterizing but that has 0.0 percent to do with his dominance on the court.
I do think it's fair criticism to say that his ego has led him to exert similar dominance over how his teams are constructed and he has some blind spots that have led to more often than not having the less-talented squad in the Finals. So, you could say in a roundabout way that his ego may have worked against him in terms of NBA Finals success (he's had home court advantage 3/8 times and won the Finals 3/8 times) But, with everything, the good comes with the bad. And to watch him play game in and game out, having the ego and belief in himself he does is 100% understandable.
That means that Jordan failed to reach the finals 9 times in his career (6 out of 15) while Lebron has only missed making the finals 6 times in his career (9 out of 15).
That's an insightful way of looking at it, yeah.
I think people don't really appreciate how hard it is to win a title, much less to repeatedly do so. Burn out and tire tread are very real things - both of Kobe's dynasty teams crashed hard after 3 year runs and Wade/Bosh certainly weren't the same after their run with LeBron and all those post-season minutes. And a lot of the arguments trotted out specifically about LeBron** - that he feasted on a joke Eastern Conference - are more motivated by petty dislike of him than objective and factual analysis.
Jordan faced, on balance, a probably tougher Eastern Conference than LeBron but how many top-tier teams did he defeat in the Finals? I'd argue that the only really *great* Finals opponent he faced was the Utah Jazz but - again - Jordan's Bulls could only face who was on the schedule. And if you want to say that if LeBron wanted to be one of the all-time greats he'd go to the far deeper and stronger Western Conference, but show me where Jordan insisted on staying in the (at the time) better Eastern Conference in order to play better teams in the playoffs.
** - I have no more horse in this race myself, other than to say it's hard not to love a guy who's clowned the Boston Lepers as many times as LeBron has.