[ad_1]
I have come to appreciate the sheer fact of consistency, of availability. Not just day to day, although you can certainly expect this from LeBron James, but year after year. He is the rare timeless athlete, one of the rare constants in my life – in anyone’s life.
Eighteen years. LeBron’s career is old enough to be my drinking buddy, and it pretty much is.
Memories are unreliable and frustrating storytellers, but I remember the moments that involved him with perfect clarity.
When James made his playoff debut with the Miami Heat, I sneaked around watching TV at my sister-in-law’s bridal shower. When I was in college I would find “study” rooms with projectors that always ended up showing League Pass. I had no idea at the time that he would defeat enemies much bigger than Paul Pierce.
In 2017, when the Cleveland Cavaliers insisted on closing Game 3 of the NBA Finals, I sprinted from a Future gig before he took to the stage at a bar across the street. street, only to watch Kevin Durant nail a dagger to LeBron’s face. I watched it in Toronto. I watched it in Los Angeles. I watch it now, when I have no more gigs to run away from.
I still cry every time I watch The Block, watch James crumpled to the hardwood, hanging on the trophy that will always mean more than the rest.
After watching him for nearly two decades, our collective awareness of his particular form of dominance has inevitably receded into the fabric of the NBA. We can’t help but 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 his greatness at work, except on those days when he excels himself.
His current arsenal is basically an advertisement for NBA history: one foot fadeaway from Dirk Nowitzki, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skyhook, Kobe fadeaway from the left baseline. The San Antonio Spurs let him shoot midrange jumpers. Now he shoots 40% of the logo. The Dallas Mavericks let point guard Jason Kidd keep him on the block. Now James is one of the most effective post players in the NBA.
“As the league evolves you have to be able to evolve with it if you want to be able to keep pace, to keep up with the Joneses, or the James in my case,” James said with a laugh. “For me, [it’s] I never put on a hat. I just always want to keep improving and doing things on the pitch that maybe haven’t been done in other people’s careers and keep pushing the boundaries and seeing how much juice I can squeeze out of lemon.
James’ game was shaped by playoff failures that forced him to evolve. James failed against Doc Rivers’ Boston Celtics twice as a Cavalier, but never with the Heat.
Rivers, now the Sixers coach, remembers that they “were going to attack LeBron, even outside of the timeouts, because at that point he was a great player, but as far as the defensive game plan goes. and all that, he was in him, but he was young. Then we come to Miami, I remember he called sets. Our sets. I remember turning to – I think Lawrence Frank was my assistant – I remember turning to him and he said, “Oh, that’s not good for anybody. Now he’s not only becoming the great LeBron, but the great LeBron student of the game. Once he crosses that threshold, he really hasn’t looked back.
James has redesigned his game to stay on top, but these days I’m more in awe of how his core essence, his raison d’être, has remained the same. He never stopped imposing his will with playmaking, giving birth to a style so ubiquitous that his impact on the NBA goes almost unnoticed. When James fused his supernatural gaming intelligence with diligent study, he remade the league.
I watched Game 7 of the 2010 Final a few days ago and realized two things: Kobe did shoot too many double teams, but the attacking layout did not present an easy exit. And man, we thought about basketball very differently just ten years ago.
When LeBron passed by to open shooters for potential winners, he triggered DEFCON 1 protocols on sports broadcasts across America, with hosts begging him to score, assert his will, question his killer instinct. , his very manhood – all because he couldn’t see the things no one else did.
Now we see it in its own way. James is far from the only reason the game is timed out, but good offenses now simplify decision-making for star playmakers. The choices Luka Doncic and James Harden make with the ball in their hands are an evolution of LeBron’s style. Modern offense is built in its super-computer image.
My para relationship with James took a strange turn when I started covering the NBA.
In 2018, while I was covering the Toronto Raptors playoffs, Game 5 for the Pacers-Cavaliers was in its home stretch after the Raptors beat the Wizards. Long story short: James hit the winner, and I screamed and shook in my seat in the middle of a press conference. I tried not to look anyone in the eye for another five minutes.
Then James came to Toronto. I’ll never forget the first time I asked him a question, or my then-boyfriend screaming ‘no no no’ as James calmly dribbled all over the court and nailed a weird, end-of-series floating ball on OG Anunoby from the wing, destroying the Raptors thoroughly and nonchalantly. The Raptors were not, as James once said, at a disadvantage. You could feel him in his stride.
Imagine a clamp opening and you’ll see how most people react to change: one side trying to adjust to anything new while, with equal force, another clings to the familiar.
The older I get, the more I cling to watching LeBron. I tried to stifle that impulse until one day I quit trying. I have come to believe that the mere attempt to be impartial while covering sports, at least the way I cover them, is a sham: self-deception of the highest level, and that results in journalists who are not honest with themselves and therefore cannot be honest with readers. He accomplishes little apart from twisting his mind into knots that prevent him from thinking properly. We continue this line of work because we love sport, crave sport, want – even need – to be near them.
I imagine LeBron inspired this showdown in a lot of young writers. It is a symptom of its longevity. Everyone else that I loved watching before my job has retired. I wonder if NFL writers feel this conundrum with Tom Brady. LeBron has been the best player on the planet for so long that he can still connect me to my childhood, so I will continue to do this exercise of pretending not to root for him while still supporting him perpetually, until one day he does. will retire, which I hope never comes.
Learn more about Yahoo Sports:
[ad_2]
Source link