LeBron James has won less than half of his appearances in
the NBA Finals. Michael Jordan was 6-0 in the NBA Finals, with six MVPs. This
is the story that pundits like ESPN First
Take host, Skip Bayless, paint with regards to LeBron’s most recent failure
in the Finals. In their eyes, LeBron’s team has not come out on top and he has
not performed perfectly on the NBA’s biggest stage, his legacy as an all-time
great is diminished.
While these numbers are factually correct, the picture it
paints is far from complete. You might as well say Dwyane Wade had an awful,
injury-laden career, based off the fact that his last two seasons were a
struggle in terms of health.
Twelve players are on a team. Five players are on the floor.
A general manager, head coach, and owner are all vital to an NBA team’s
success. But the media, market, and fans hype up the individual superstars like
Kevin Durant and LeBron James because they are the most entertaining and what
ultimately bring sponsorships and revenue to the league.
If anything, these 2014 NBA champion, San Antonio Spurs,
should have taught us that it’s the twelve players combined not solely the
individual superstar that wins titles. The evidence is right in front of our
faces. While some people may be crazy enough to argue Kawhi Leonard is a better
player than LeBron because he had a better Finals series this year, here’s
something that we can all agree on: if you were to pick one player out of the
two 2014 NBA Finals rosters to build an organization around, that player would
be LeBron James.
One player can win regular season games. One player wins a
regular season MVP. It takes a team to win an NBA championship—something I emphasized
in an old column discussing why
rings don’t equate to greatness. Where this nuances is how far a great
player can take you in the playoffs.
A great player should be able to carry a greater percentage of the load that it takes to
win an NBA game, season, and championship. This is something that puts great
players in more frequent contention for titles.
My problem is this establishment of an arbitrary difference between losses in the preliminary rounds of the playoffs and the NBA Finals. A great player will
be able to defeat teams with superior depth for so long in the playoffs. That
ability to carry a team may last through the first or second rounds, or it may
last until the Finals. In some cases, a great player may even defeat a superior
team in the Finals—you could certainly make that argument for the 2013 NBA
champion, Miami Heat.
LeBron lifting a relatively poor Heat team as far as he did
is a testament to his ability. His engine carried the Heat to the Finals but the
strategic bumps placed by Gregg Popovich stopped the LeBron train in its
tracks. Even the inconsistent Pacers had a deeper team than the Heat, but LeBron was
able to push through. Sure, the Eastern conference was horrendous compared to
the West, but the Heat won the East. The hypotheticals of how the Heat would
have fared in the Western conference playoff bracket are entertaining but
ultimately irrelevant to this particular discussion.
Michael Jordan was not undefeated in the playoffs. His first
six seasons he did not even make it to the NBA Finals. In his first three
seasons, Jordan won a grand total of one playoff game. For comparison, LeBron
took the Cavaliers to the Finals in his fourth season and won seven games in
his third season. These numbers suggest not that LeBron is better than Jordan
(or even that Jordan is better than LeBron). They show that great players are
only able to do so much.
When discussing the NBA greats across and within
generations, you cannot isolate a statistic like an individual’s record in the Finals
and claim it alone differentiates two players. As I have done in my own
analysis of the greatest
NBA players of all time, there is too much more to consider. LeBron’s
window to become the GOAT is slowly closing. But, if he gets to five or six
championships and six or seven MVPs along with all the other accolades he has
earned, maybe the LeBron
vs. Jordan comparison becomes relevant again. Regardless, the fact that two of his
three Finals losses were to superior teams should not detract from his legacy
in any way.
Follow @ElijahAbramson