Pondering the greatness of LeBron James this season has been like inviting a da Vinci scholar to consider the Mona Lisa’s smile, or asking a theologian, “What is life?” Where to begin? LeBron steps onto a basketball court and it must have been how it felt watching Gershwin sit before a piano. What is next? What magic?
“He has created that problem for himself,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra was saying before Tuesday night’s game here. “That consistent greatness. How can he top himself each night?
“This isn’t a normal MVP year he is having.”This isn’t normal, no. Not even by superstar standards. Not even by best-player-in the-NBA standards. The player known for the highlight-reel dunks that make full arenas gasp keeps going higher. Keeps elevating.
So when James does have a mortal (for him) game, as he did in Tuesday’s 107-91 victory over the Cleveland Cavaliers, it stands out even more than the excellence that has become his norm. Yeah, all James did was score 24 points with six assists and five rebounds, and end the night’s scoring with a perfect alley-oop to Udonis Haslem for a dunk and then a laser pass to Mike Miller for a three. Oh, and LeBron only had three dunks. Yawn.
James is so great that when he’s below average, he’s still really good. Spoelstra said seven words this week that were a simple declarative, stunning in their truthfulness, and also pretty much inarguable: “There really isn’t anyone that’s his peer.”It isn’t Kobe Bryant, not anymore. It isn’t Derrick Rose or Kevin Durant or Blake Griffin, at least not yet. It isn’t Dwight Howard or anybody else. It isn’t teammate Dwyane Wade, either.
LeBron James is unleashed this season, in the heart of his prime and playing even better than we had a right to expect when his jump from Cleveland to Miami went 10.0-seismic on the NBA Richter Scale two summers ago. The body was always there. The talent. This season, the mind has caught up.
Most nights, he’s a locomotive. “I’m more free, more happy than I was last year,” he explained. Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino, from the latter half of his 1983 rookie season through his record-setting ’84, is the only pro athlete South Florida has seen attain and sustain the level of greatness James has this season.
I doubted I’d ever think it, but LeBron is better at what he does, right now, than Marino was then. This is by no stretch a knock on Marino or a retrofitted diminishment of what he accomplished. This is a plain appreciation of what Miami has in the Heat’s No. 6.
Earlier Tuesday happened to see the retirement of likely the most interesting player in South Florida sports history in Ricky Williams. Later Tuesday brought the latest installment of likely the best player we have seen.
Maybe the simplest way to put James’ current level of play in context is to say he can wear those hideous Floridians throwback jerseys as the team unfortunately did again Tuesday night — you know, the ones with the ghastly vertical stripes of orange and some sort of pinkish chartreuse — and still look good.
James entered Tuesday’s game against his former team averaging 29.2 points, 8.5 rebounds and 6.8 assists — first in the league by a large margin in the combination of those three main categories. He was shooting 55.6 percent, first among forwards. His player efficiency rating, which measures players’ overall productivity, was 32.79. Durant was second at 26.56, a difference such as was seen nowhere else in the top 100.
And that’s with Spoelstra and the Heat asking James to do more than any other player. Need him at point guard for a stretch? No problem. Need him to defend and shut down Chicago’s Rose? No problem. Bike ride to the arena? He can do that, too. James could lead the NBA in scoring or rebounding or assists, if you needed him to.
“I ask him to do more than any other player in the league,” Spoelstra said. “Playing five positions and defending four positions and doing it as well as anybody.”
This wasn’t intended as such an ode to LeBron, honestly. Then I realized he’d had an unusually quiet game, what felt like an off night, and still scored 24 points. It is so natural to take for granted, to under-appreciate or at least to under-express that, and we must try to make an exception to that human nature.
This is a player who lives up to whatever feeling of awestruck he sends coursing across arenas. This is a player having a season that simply begs better adjectives, even if his night was merely very good. That nickname of his continues outrageously presumptuous, even pompous. King James.