lessthanjake wrote:There’s certainly some ways that prime LeBron would be better than LeBron was in this current series. As you said, for instance, he had more energy back then. And that’s a big deal! But, at the same time, there are reasons that LeBron in this series put up the kinds of numbers that he did such that they were competitive with prime LeBron numbers—specifically, there were things that he happened to do even better than prime LeBron generally did (again, largely just because it’s a tiny sample). For instance, in this series, LeBron shot 39% from three, 50% on shots from 16 feet to the three-point line, and 60% on shots between 10-16 feet from the basket. In other words, LeBron’s jump shooting overall was way better than normal. We would expect prime LeBron to shoot notably worse than that. So yeah, if you put prime LeBron in this series, there’s definitely things he’d do notably better, but there’s also things he’d almost certainly do notably worse. Which is why the stats from this series look pretty competitive with prime LeBron. We can’t just assume that you’d get all the advantages of prime LeBron while *also* having the same random positive variance that made this an outlier series for current LeBron. Or at least, if we did assume that, then we’d be comparing Jokic to prime LeBron *plus* favorable variance—which obviously isn’t a fair thing to compare to Jokic.
To an extent, yes, LeBron was likely benefitting from higher shooting variance this series.
However, I'm not so sure I'd handwave prime LeBron's shooting so easily, when he has not only had multiple finals runs shooting 40% from 3 (and 11 series total), prime LeBron actually broke 40% from 3 over the entire 2012-13 regular season. He did have seasons struggling with his shooting, but he also had seasons where he was a very good shooter. LeBron's shooting may not be a consistently high level tool, but he has been able to showcase high level shooting over extended periods of time.
For example, he was > 44% on catch and shoot 3s across the entire 2013-14 season (which is roughly the level of, say, Klay Thompson/Kyrie Irving on catch and shoot 3s, based off what I've observed).
On that note...
I'd also like to note that LeBron's shot distribution isn't exactly the same as previous seasons either - a brief visit to Basketball-Reference shows that LeBron was assisted on 80% of his 3s in the Nuggets series, which is the highest of any playoff run he has had (his career playoff average is being assisted on 46% of 3s).
But wait; there's more!
There was another career playoff high that LeBron had, and it's that he had more shots within 0-3 feet than in any other playoff run. A younger, more athletic LeBron would have absolutely feasted on the interior. If we choose to typecast LeBron's entire prime as an individual entity without skill changes in order to handwave his hot shooting, then we need to go beyond "LeBron might be better in ways, such as having more energy!" and acknowledge that LeBron, in his youthful years, would have absolutely decimated the Nuggets interior defence... now, who was their centre again?
But wait; there's more!
I'd also note that the increase in spacing over time has made league averages across shooting zones generally higher. "Prime" LeBron extends quite far into an older, more constrained era. Back in, say, 2012-13, teams shot 63% from 0-3, 38% from 3-10 and 39.5% from 10-16. In 2024, they're shooting 70%, 45% and 44.5% respectively. It's not too wild to suggest that Miami LeBron would have been immaculate this series, and put up more eye-popping numbers in 2024. Or alternatively, 2008-09 LeBron, who literally posted up the highest single season playoff BPM ever. It's almost like... LeBron is the GOAT, or something!