Dominant or Convenient?

LeBron James is undoubtedly one of the greatest players in the history of the NBA. His eighteen year journey throughout the league has been filled with memorable moments that have left fans in awe and made all of us bear witness to a legacy of greatness that will set the bar for players of current and future generations. In the discussion regarding his legacy and his overall case to be named the undisputed greatest of all time (GOAT), the primary suspect of analysis is the eight year stint between 2011 and 2018, where James led the Miami Heat (2011-2014) and Cleveland Cavaliers (2015-2018) to the NBA Finals each season. In reviewing this stretch, while there is much to be accredited for after leading his team to at least three playoff series’ victories in eight consecutive runs, the fashion in which this feat was accomplished combined with the perception of the competition that was laid before LeBron in this time begs the question on whether or not this near decade long reign over the eastern conference was more about him being that good, or the opposition being that bad.

With regards to how James dominated teams in the east, while he has never in his career lost a series in the first round of the playoffs, one of the defining traits in this specific stretch is the lacking competition he often faced in that round. In 2011, LeBron and the Heat opened the postseason against a 76ers team that finished with a 41-41 record. They were led by the solid cast of Andre Iguodala, Lou Williams, Jrue Holiday, Elton Brand, Thaddeus Young, and Evan Turner, but not each player named was at the peak of their respective careers, which partly explains why they only finished with a .500 record, and were done away with by the “Big 3” led Heat in short order.
In 2012, the Heat went up against a Knicks team riddled with misfortune and dysfunction. A big reason why the Knicks even made the playoffs that season was because of Jeremy Lin, a nobody turned overnight sensation (coined “Linsanity”) that led New York on a hot streak to usher them into the postseason picture while Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony were dealing with injuries. Once their stars returned, the team hit a slump, and slid into the playoffs as a helpless seventh seed. Like Philadelphia the year before, they were also ousted by the Heat in 5.
Then came 2013, where the defending champs were fed a Milwaukee Bucks squad that made the playoffs despite having a losing record (38-44). The tale of the tape told you everything you needed to know. It was a quick, non-competitive, four game sweep.
In LeBron’s last season with the Heat (2014), he led them into the first round against Charlotte, in what was their last season as the Bobcats. There really isn’t much to say about this. Charlotte wasn’t that good, the Heat dealt with them accordingly, sweeping them as well.
Transitioning to LeBron’s second stint in Cleveland with the Cavaliers, he continued his first round winning streak in 2015 by sweeping the Boston Celtics, who were only in the second year of their rebuild, yet to reap the rewards of the infamous trade that they had made with the Nets the year before. In 2016 and ‘17, the Pistons and Pacers met the same fate, being swept by Cleveland despite being somewhat competitive throughout their respective series with the Cavs.
2018 proved to be the outlier, as not only did LeBron’s winning streak in the preliminary round come to a close, but he came extremely close to being eliminated that early for the first time in his career. What that series against Indiana pointed out was two key components that give way to both sides of the overall argument concerning LeBron’s legacy.
Having watched a majority of that series in 2018, I can confidently affirm that if not for LeBron, the Cavs would have been soundly beaten by the Pacers that year. The unduplicable numbers he put up in each game, and the fashion in which he led them to victory further proved himself as a dominant player. However, this was the first and only time in this eight year stretch where he wasn’t complimented by two all-star caliber players. In Miami he had Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. In Cleveland it was Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love. Back in the 2017 offseason, Kyrie had been traded to Boston, leaving LeBron with only one star teammate at his side. In the year that followed he faced his hardest road to the finals to date, thus highlighting the convenience James had in years past. The other teams he faced in the first round before were worse than the 2018 Pacers. Equally, the teams he led in span were much better than the 2018 Cavaliers. Having acknowledged this, him winning 28 of 30 games in the first round of the playoffs between 2011 and 2017 isn’t as impressive as it sounds.

Throughout his Finals streak, there were just over a handful of teams that were considered to be legitimate threats to knock James off of his metaphorical throne. Between 2011 and 2012 we first had the Boston Celtics and Chicago Bulls as the top threats to LeBron’s Miami Heat. Boston had stood firmly in LeBron’s way since 2008 after forming what was known as the original “Big 3”. The Bulls, on the other hand were being led by the 2011 league MVP, Derrick Rose. By 2012, Chicago’s hopes were ended early as Rose began to suffer from a string of debilitating knee injuries. Boston’s window would close after Ray Allen’s departure in the summer of 2012.
The paradigm shifted in the following seasons. Without their superstar guard, the Bulls were momentarily reduced to the middle of the playoff bracket, and Boston’s core started to chip away. Indiana would enter the fray in their place as the primary threat to the Heat, with 2013 Most Improved Player award winner Paul George leading the charge. The Pacers were able to appear in back-to-back conference finals with Miami, but went without ever achieving a series victory against them. A gruesome injury to Paul George over the summer of 2014 knocked the Pacers out of the race, but the Hawks and Bulls emerged as the main opposition in 2015, as LeBron made his return to Cleveland to team up with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love. Atlanta was an odd story. With largely the same roster the year before they had a losing record (38-44), but in 2015 they were able to notch 60 wins. They had good players, a couple of legitimate all-stars even, but nothing that ever resembled a true championship contender. They went on to get swept by the Cavaliers. Meanwhile in Chicago, Jimmy Butler took his game up a notch and was rewarded with the 2015 Most Improved Player award, Derrick Rose stayed relatively healthy for most of the year and served as a key complimentary player alongside Pau Gasol and Joakim Noah. They pushed the Cavs to 6 games in the conference semifinals, but the better team ultimately prevailed.
From 2016 to 2018 it was all about the Toronto Raptors and Boston Celtics. In Toronto’s case they had always struggled in the playoffs, but never more glaringly than when they were matched up against LeBron James. In all three years they matched up with the Cavs eventually, and they are a combined 2-12 in the 14 games played against them, which includes them getting swept by Cleveland in consecutive seasons (2017-18). Boston, in their resurgence, made much bigger strides compared to Toronto. They were a first round elimination in 2016, but the next two years saw them emerge as conference finalists against the Cavaliers. In 2017, Isaiah Thomas on the heels of an eccentric MVP-worthy campaign, led the charge. And in 2018, the Celtics were led by Al Horford and the outstanding play of youthful talents like Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Terry Rozier, and Marcus Smart.
Now as you know, LeBron led his groups to victory over each of these teams, and deserves all the credit in the world for doing such. However, we often make some of these teams out to be better than they actually were. We’ll bring up how LeBron led the Heat past the MVP in 2011, but gloss over the fact that it was one all-star against three. People often criticize Michael Jordan’s Bulls for only beating the Pistons and Lakers once those teams got too old, but don’t attach the same idea to LeBron in relation to his rivalry with the big 3 in Boston. People will promote the 2015 Hawks and 2018 Raptors as these great teams that LeBron took out because of how great he is, but ignore that those teams were never as good as their records suggested. In those 2015 playoffs, the Hawks were pushed to 6 games by both an actively collapsing Nets team, and a Wizards team whose best player (John Wall) missed half the series. It was no surprise that the Cavs beat them as easily as they did. In 2016 the Hawks fell down to 48 wins and got swept by Cleveland again. In the case of Toronto, they had always struggled in the postseason. In 2014 they lost out to an old Nets team, got swept by the Wizards in round one in 2015, barely beat a one man Pacers team and a Heat team without Chris Bosh in 2016, struggled to beat a poorly coached Bucks team in 2017, and a dysfunctional Wizards team in 2018. Not one time did they ever convincingly win a series in that stretch.

I don’t mean to take away from what LeBron has accomplished in his career or in this particular stint, but as far as I’m concerned, he did what he was supposed to do. With the exception of 2018, he always had the better team in each playoff scenario. If he didn’t make the finals in each of the first seven years of this eight year stretch, you and I would think less of him as an all-time great player. Derrick Rose didn’t have two other true stars by his side in 2011, nor Paul George in 2013 or 2014 (Roy Hibbert doesn’t count, he fell off catastrophically midseason). Al Horford and Paul Millsap didn’t have a third option to match up with Cleveland in Atlanta, nor did Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan in Toronto. LeBron was almost always part of a trio of stars, something no other eastern conference star had in their grasp. Knowing this, I feel that while it would be wrong to discredit LeBron for what he was able to achieve in this time because would criticize him otherwise, we also are limited in how much we can accredit him because he simply did what he was positioned to do in the first place. It’s common to how most of us feel about Kevin Durant’s championships. On one hand, we would have endlessly criticized him had he not won the championship in 2017 or 2018, but on the other hand, we only granted him so much credit for doing just that seeing as how he was doing all he had done on a team that was an established, championship winning squad before he arrived. Essentially, you and I are running a race. I get a ten second head start and win. You and everyone else would think less of me if I had lost the race, but even though I won, there’s the caveat of me getting that head start that would have people heap little praise upon me because it was established that I had the advantage going in. Get it?

Now it gets kind of screwy, because in some of these past cases, LeBron alone made the difference between his team being potentially worse than some of the opposition, and worlds better than them. Like LeBron, Wade and Bosh easily did away with the 2011 Bulls and Celtics, but would they have even won those series with just the latter two leading the way with no LeBron? How far would Cleveland have gotten in each season if it were just Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love at the head of it all? Would they have made four straight Finals? Would they have made the Finals at all? We will never get the actual answer to these questions because after LeBron left Miami, Chris Bosh started dealing with blood clots and Kyrie left the Cavaliers before LeBron even did. Now in that sole season without Kyrie in Cleveland, LeBron led the Cavs to the Finals, but then there’s the caveat of Boston not being healthy in that year’s conference finals sitting in the back of my mind.

All this, and not a word has been said of how much better the western conference was throughout this entire period. Often has the question been posed on whether LeBron James’ teams would have been as successful if they were in the western conference, or if he had spent his career playing in the western conference. It’s not just the Warriors and Spurs, but also the KD and Russ led Thunder, the Lob City Clippers, basically all three iterations of the Rockets, the Trail Blazers before and after LaMarcus Aldridge left them, and the Grit ‘n Grind Grizzlies that he would have had to be concerned about. And it isn’t just a matter of if he would have beaten these teams, because surely he would have at least a couple of times. But also, it is about how much harder would it have been to do so. Because again, a large part of this career defining stretch for LeBron was highlighted by the dominance he exuded both statistically and visually while playing against the competition in the eastern conference. So if that aspect of it were tapered from, how differently would we view LeBron’s legacy?

In the end, you can feel however you choose about the career of LeBron James. No matter what any of us have to say about it, it’s indisputable that he is one of the best to ever play the game. I just wanted to get a conversation going about it. Personally, I struggle with how much I am willing to grant him since I can’t seem to properly gauge how much of his legacy-defining eight year run through the eastern conference was about him being the unmovable force he’s been known to be throughout his career, and how much of it was about playing in the weaker conference in the NBA and how much of a difference exists in that realm.