History says that, back pressed against the wall, LeBron James will put together as enormous a performance as necessary to lead the Cavaliers to a Game 6 win over the Celtics on Friday to preserve his team’s season for at least one more weekend. History says that, back still pressed against the wall, LeBron will produce a Ulyssean effort in Boston for Game 7 on Sunday and carry the Cavaliers back to the NBA Finals for the fourth straight spring.
LeBron James’ reign isn’t over yet. But this is how the end will look.
LeBron James has shown he can do it all, but his past is no guarantee of his future.
Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
But past performance is no guarantee of future results.
This has been the single most challenging run through the Eastern Conference playoffs LeBron has experienced since returning to Cleveland in 2014. The Cavaliers have lost six games in the East bracket to this point. If they lose just one more, they won’t make the Finals. In the past three Finals runs combined, the Cavaliers had lost just five games to Eastern opponents. Cleveland has dropped more games in the East this year alone than in the previous three years altogether. That’s a huge sign of how tough a slog this has been.
LeBron is so ridiculously good, smart, and central that the Cavaliers could still pull this out. A Game 7 seems like destiny, if for no other reason than to fuel the eternal LeBron-vs-Boston narrative and provide either another chapter in the tale of King James’ conquests or a coda for the rise of the New Celtics. Can the Cavaliers win in Boston, something they have looked utterly incapable of doing in three attempts this series? With LeBron, (almost) all things are possible.
LeBron is absurdly good in Game 7s, and in close-out games more generally. Boston’s defense has been really strong, and had a masterpiece on Wednesday in the Celtics’ Game 5 triumph. With Kevin Love and Kyle Korver misfiring from long-range, the Cavaliers had few options to generate good lucks. The only one that worked consistently was LeBron getting an advantageous switch and getting to the rim. There, his ability to find space and finish tough shots kept Cleveland in the game until the closing minutes.
But it wasn’t enough. LeBron was exhausted, as he has openly said he has been all postseason long. He played more minutes in the regular season than any other player. He’s played more playoff minutes than any other player, too. LeBron at 33, after carrying such a heavy load since mid-October, can’t repeatedly put his head down and go to the rim again and again and remain effective (or, uh, standing upright).
At least he couldn’t in Game 5, which at some point must have begun feeling like a lost cause as the other Cavaliers bricked shot after shot. If this were an elimination game, something tells me LeBron would have been able to muster up the dregs of his energy into just enough to keep pressing.
Something else that indicated LeBron’s pegged exhaustion level: the careless passes that signaled a lack of the mental focus we have come to expect. Mental and physiological processes are, of course, intertwined: physical exhaustion has massively deleterious effects on mental performance. When you’re sucking air, it’s hard to deliver those pinpoint passes we’ve become accustomed to seeing LeBron dole out.
Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
But again, no one would be surprised if — despite all those minutes and all that heavy cargo on his back — LeBron pulled it off and beat the Celtics twice.
If that happens, this postseason won’t signify the end of LeBron and the Cavaliers’ reign over the East. It will instead signal what the end of LeBron will look like when it comes.
That’s what we’re getting here: a peek at LeBron’s future mortality. LeBron has not fallen off yet: he will finish third in MVP voting, in all likelihood, and he has carried a disastrous little roster (outside of Love) to the Eastern Conference Finals. He absolutely destroyed the best team in the East, the Raptors, in the second round. He is still, by a fairly large consensus, the single best player in the world. He is still supernatural in his ability to avoid injuries and grind every night out.
Cleveland fan?
Read SB Nation’s Cavs site!
But nothing is eternal, and we are seeing the extraordinary workload he’s handled without fail for 15 years catch up to him, just enough to hurt. A younger, more energetic LeBron could have continued turning the corner on Aron Baynes or backing down Terry Rozier. A younger, more energetic LeBron could have rotated harder to prevent a screaming Celtic coming down the lane or getting out in transition. A less exhausted LeBron could have smelled blood when the Celtics’ lead shrunk to single digits in the fourth quarter and feasted amid the ensuing panic.
LeBron can and quite possibly will still do all that in the next two games. But it’s not automatic. And when that sad day arrives that he can’t do it but as a party trick instead of on demand, it will look a lot like LeBron’s Game 5.
This isn’t necessarily the end of LeBron’s reign, but this is what the end of LeBron’s reign will look like when it arrives. Whether LeBron recognizes it — and recognizes the need to find a team that can ligthen the load and stretch out the denouement as a free agent this summer — remains to be seen.
