Iwasawitness wrote:lessthanjake wrote:LeBron had a pretty average amount of spacing for that era. The team was right in the middle of the league in terms of 3PA, 3PM, and 3P%. Not good, but not bad either. And it was arguably above-average by playoff time, since they had Wally, who was a good shooter but had barely played for them in the regular season. If LeBron needed well above-average spacing to not be woefully inefficient against good teams in the playoffs, then that reflects real flaws in his game.
FWIW, I think you’re actually right and it exposes his weak jump shooting. From other discussions with you, I think you like to take LeBron’s flaws as given and say a performance wasn’t disappointing or unexpected because LeBron’s weak performances flowed from flaws we knew he had. But I think that just begs the question. The performances were disappointing because his flaws got exposed and resulted in him playing badly, and saying they weren’t disappointing because people should’ve known he could be forced to play badly isn’t a meaningful response IMO. The point here is that that happened several times in the relatively early years of LeBron’s career, and a lot of younger people just never saw that. Instead, what they saw were LeBron’s playoff failures largely being situations where he actually played well. That makes their perspective on him very different than people who actually saw the entire career—they don’t really understand or acknowledge his flaws and the fact that they got exploited.
Pretty much, yes. LeBron's mid range and three point shooting during the early portions of his career were always a great concern of mine, but more importantly, I was always concerned about his mentality when attacking defenses. He was almost always able to get his way, until he came up against teams where he couldn't. And even then, sometimes he'd have games where it felt like he could do no wrong offensively and got whatever he wanted. The problem is that in a seven game series, that was an easy way for you to get exposed. And more often than that, that's exactly what happened. This, among other reasons, is why I thought LeBron was going to lose in 2011 to Dallas.
One thing I was asked before I joined this site was who was the better player in their first seven years before their first championship, and my answer was and always will be Jordan. Jordan came into the league with a much more NBA friendly game and a more polished skillset. While LeBron was outright dominant in his own way, it limited him and what he could do. Now mind you, he made up for this by being a terrific passer and playmaker, thus making double and triple teaming him almost worthless. But that's where not having an all star caliber player alongside him often led to him coming up short in the postseason. But when he went to Miami, he thought things would be easier. He thought "well, I have my all star teammates now, time for the championships to role in". In reality, the problem never really got solved. He still thought he could get by doing his usual thing, not understanding that in order for him to truly experience the success he wanted, he needed to change how he played and improve on his flaws. And it took him experiencing what is without question his greatest failure (losing in 2011) to realize he was part of the problem.
I think the rest of the discussion is mostly window-dressing and that this gets to the point I’m making.
Broadly speaking, while I’m not sure I agree with every single word above, the story you’re weaving here actually seems generally pretty accurate to me. But I think it actually is pretty supportive of the point I made. LeBron spent a significant chunk of his career having playoff series where his flaws got exposed. You and I both agree on that. And the point I was making is that there’s a lot of LeBron fans who just aren’t even old enough to have seen that. They only saw later years where that was not nearly so common. A lot of them basically just don’t even really believe it happened, and choose instead to try to rationalize why none of what happened in the earlier years was on LeBron. It’s not an interpretation that people who actually watched basketball back then tend to have. That was my point.
I don’t think anything you’re saying is disputing that. I think you’re just disputing whether he was “disappointing” or not. If you happened to have been very clear-eyed about LeBron’s flaws and the fact that those flaws could be exploited, then maybe it wasn’t “disappointing,” because your expectations weren’t actually all that high. I think for most people, those years were pretty disappointing, though. But it doesn’t really matter whether the term “disappointing” applies or not, since my point is really just that younger fans didn’t watch LeBron’s flaws get frequently exposed in his earlier years, and that gives them a perception of LeBron that I’d say doesn’t account for the whole picture.
That's why I ultimately think LeBron is the GOAT, because the player he became once he realized he had to truly develop his offensive game was, at least in my opinion, greater than Jordan ever was.
I think it’s definitely true that LeBron didn’t get flaws exposed nearly so much in his later years as he did earlier. But I’d say a couple things about this:
1. It’s an open question whether that’s because LeBron really got meaningfully better, or whether he just had teams that fit him better and opponents that couldn’t exploit him as much. I think there’s a strong argument that a combination of the two was at play.
- LeBron definitely needs spacing to be most difficult to limit, because otherwise he can be forced to take lots of jump shots and that’s not what you want him doing. And he got more of that as time went on—partly due to roster changes (and some sacrifices from guys like Bosh and Love), but also because the league as a whole just moved to more and more spacing as time went on. This was a big help for him IMO.
- Meanwhile, the East also just became a lot weaker, making there be fewer teams that could potentially limit him. He’s a great player, so teams that aren’t real contenders aren’t likely to trouble him much. And after 2011, he tended to only really face really good teams in the Finals. He generally performed very well in those series, but it’s hard to draw too strong of a conclusion from that, particularly since it’s mostly just a function of what happened against one opponent (the Warriors). Basically, the number of really good teams that had a bite at the apple here wasn’t very high, so I don’t know whether it tells us LeBron truly fixed the issue. I’d also note that he was actually limited against the Spurs in 2013—he just had a better team than in the past and some luck go his team’s way, and was able to do just enough. He also was actually limited against the Warriors in 2015, though that was pretty understandable under the circumstances. I don’t think those years really disprove the issues. In fact, if anything, they’d tend to confirm them. So the argument mostly would just come down to him doing well against the Thunder in 2012, the Spurs in 2014, and the Warriors in 2016-2018. Those are an impressive set of performances from LeBron! But I don’t know that it really is enough to tell us the issues were definitely gone—especially when three of those series were blowout series where the other team found it so easy to score that the series had a real shootout tenor to it.
All this is to say that I’m really not sure that if you put 2012-2020 LeBron in the era/team that first-stint LeBron played in, that he’d have avoided being exposed in a similar way. It may mostly just be that the circumstances were more favorable for him in the later years than they’d been in the earlier years.
2. I think it’s also important to recognize that these years where LeBron was liable to get exposed include a lot of his career. He was 27 in the 2011 NBA Finals! Even if we say that he just fixed the issue later, it is a big problem for someone’s GOAT case that they were liable to get exposed all the way through age 27. And that’s especially the case when that actually goes well into the years of LeBron’s consensus five-year peak (2009-2013). I gather you’d probably conclude that LeBron’s best era was actually later than that. And that is potentially right. But it’s a bit awkward, because the later years definitely don’t look like the best in the regular season. So we have to really lean into the “coasting” stuff to really think later LeBron was better, rather than just having better circumstances to shine individually in the playoffs.
LeBron is 0-7 in game winning/tying FGs in the finals. And is 20/116 or 17% in game winning/tying FGs in the 4th/OT for his career. That's historically bad 
