I learned to appreciate the simple fact of consistency, of availability. Not just on a daily basis, although you can certainly expect that from LeBron James, but year by year. He is the rare timeless athlete, one of the few constants in my life – in anyone’s life.
Eighteen years. LeBron’s career is old enough to be my drinking companion, and it practically is.
Memories are not reliable and frustrating narrators, but I remember moments that involved him with perfect clarity.
When James made his playoff debut with the Miami Heat, I sneaked a look at the TV at my sister-in-law’s bridal shower. When I was in college, I used to find “study” rooms with projectors that somehow always ended up broadcasting League Pass. At that time, I had no idea that he would beat enemies much bigger than Paul Pierce.
In 2017, when the Cleveland Cavaliers insisted on closing Game 3 of the NBA Finals, I ran from a Future show before he took the stage to a bar across the street, only to watch Kevin Durant put a dagger in his face. of LeBron. I watched you in Toronto. I watched him in Los Angeles. I watch it now, when I have no show to get away.
I still cry every time I watch The Block, I see James collapsing on the wood, clutching the trophy that will always mean more than the rest.
After watching it for nearly two decades, our collective awareness of its particular form of dominance inevitably fell back into the NBA. We cannot fail to take it for granted. Our minds don’t pay attention to the information we already recognize, so we miss what is right in front of our faces. We hardly notice its daily grandeur, except on days when it excels.
His current arsenal is essentially an advertisement for NBA history: Dirk Nowitzki’s one-foot fadeaway, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s skyhook, Kobe’s left baseline fadeaway. The San Antonio Spurs used to let him shoot mid-range jumpers. Now, he is shooting 40 percent of the logo. The Dallas Mavericks let guard Jason Kidd protect him in the block. James is now one of the NBA’s most efficient powder players.
“As the league evolves, you have to be able to evolve with it if you want to be able to keep up with the times, keep up with the Jones or the James in my case,” said James, laughing. “For me, [it’s] just never putting a limit on myself. I just want to keep improving and doing things on the floor that maybe haven’t been done in other people’s careers and continue to push the envelope and see how much juice I can get out of the lemon. “
James’ game was shaped by failures in the postseason that forced him to evolve. James failed twice against Doc Rivers’ Boston Celtics as Cavalier, but never with the Heat.
Rivers, now the coach of the Sixers, remembers that they “went out and attacked LeBron, even out of time, because at that moment he was a great player, but with regard to the defensive game plan and everything, he was in it , but he was young. So we arrived in Miami, I remember him calling sets. Our sets. I remember turning to – I think Lawrence Frank was my assistant – I remember turning to him and saying, ‘Uh, this is not good for anyone. Now, he is becoming not only the great LeBron, but the great LeBron student of the game. After crossing that limit, he didn’t really look back. “
James reimagined his game to stay on top, but nowadays, I am more impressed by how its basic essence, its raison d’être, has remained the same. He never stopped imposing his will on creating games, giving rise to a style so ubiquitous that its impact on the NBA goes almost unnoticed. When James combined his supernatural intelligence as a game creator with diligent study, he remade the league.
I watched Game 7 of the 2010 finals again a few days ago and realized two things: Kobe really shot a lot of double teams, but the offensive layout did not present any easy way out. And man, we thought very differently about basketball just a decade ago.
When LeBron used to switch to snipers open to potential winners, he triggered DEFCON 1 protocols on sports programs across America, hosts begging him to score, to enforce his will, questioning his murderous instinct, his own masculinity – all because he didn’t saw things that no one else did.
Now, we see it in its own way. James is far from the only reason the game is spaced out, but good attacks now simplify decision making for the stars. The choices of Luka Doncic and James Harden with the ball in their hands are an evolution of LeBron’s style. The modern attack is built on its image of supercomputing.
My para-relationship with James became awkward when I started covering the NBA.
In 2018, when I was covering the Toronto Raptors playoff streak, Pacers-Cavaliers game 5 was in its final stretch after the Raptors defeated the Wizards. To sum up the story: James hit the winner and I screamed and shivered in my seat in the middle of a press conference. I tried not to look anyone in the eye for another five minutes.
So James came to Toronto. I will never forget the first time I asked him a question, or my boyfriend at the time shouting “no, no”, while James dribbled calmly across the court and hit a strange and floating shot at the end of the series on the wing’s OG Anunoby, destroying the Raptors completely and indifferently. The Raptors did not, as James once said, have an adverse situation. You could feel it in your stride.
Imagine a clamp opening and you will see how most people react to change: one side tries to adapt to everything new while, with equal strength, the other side clings to the familiar.
The older I get, the more I get attached to watching LeBron. I tried to suppress that impulse until one day I stopped trying. I came to believe that the mere attempt to be impartial when covering sports, at least in the way I cover them, is a scam: self-deception of the highest order, and that translates to reporters who are not honest with themselves and therefore not can be honest with readers. It does little more than twist the mind in us that prevent it from thinking straight. We pursue this line of work because we love sports, we crave sports, we want – we even need – to be close to them.
I imagine LeBron has inspired this tug of war in many young writers. It is a symptom of your longevity. All the other people I loved to watch before it was my job retired. I wonder if NFL writers feel this riddle with Tom Brady. LeBron has been the best player on the planet for so long that he still manages to connect me to my childhood, so I’ll continue doing this exercise of pretending I don’t cheer for him while I cheer for him perpetually, until the day he retires, which I hope it never arrives.
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