Inhuman wrote:I think Lebron had alot to do with the cavs not making the finals.
First off he had the whole team believing that they were the best team in the nba by far and that they should just cruise into the finals and championship too. You could hear/see it in their interviews and body language/mannerisms, pre game, during and after.
It's called friendship, camaraderie, and team chemistry. Having the team believe they were good is a GOOD thing, it generally instills confidence and makes a team perform better.
You could tell that Lebron was pretty much going for personal glory in the playoffs. Always going all out to make his stats inflated. you pretty much knew what lebron was going to do the whole game.
If you watched the laker games in the playoffs, you never knew what kobe was going to do. he played a bit different each series, even different each game. Sometimes he came out aggressive, other times he got his teammates involved early to take over later, etc. He adjusted to the situation.
LA played every opponent differently. Cavs did not.
You can only "tell" this is you were sitting on your couch in a #24 jersey during the NBA finals. Please, this is unbelievably ridiculous. If LeBron was going for "personal glory", he wouldn't have been so upset about the loss after the fact. He gave it his all to win that series, and his teammates didn't do anything to have his back no matter how many times he had theirs in a tough spot.
As for your "play-style" argument. It's pretty simple why the Cavs' offense last year seemed to rely so much on LeBron, especially in the playoffs. Here's why.
(Note: all of these stipulations are for what happened during the Orlando series)
Mo Williams either gets a pick, then takes the for a floater or a mid-range jumper.
When he attempted this during the Orlando series, he turned the ball over and clanked his shots. One particularly terrible stretch was when LeBron was sitting and the Magic made up half of a 20 point deficit running off of Mo's failed attempts at offense.
LeBron HAS to handle the ball. He has to make things happen for everyone else because last year in the playoffs we had nobody else who could make things happen.
You know why the Lakers looked so great and you "never knew what Kobe was going to do?"
It's because when Kobe throws the ball down into the post he can throw it to a guy like Pau Gasol, who's going to make something positive happen. He'll score,d raw a double, get to the line, get the ball moving.
If LeBron threw the ball down in the post..I suppose he could send it to Z. Who would then subsequently get pushed out of the lane by Rashard Lewis and either take a terrible hook shot that only goes in if the rim is feeling generous or a turn-around fade-away that hits at about a 25% rate of success.
I guess LeBron could have thrown it down to Ben Wallace to get the offense going...oh wait...
Maybe the 34 year old Joe Smith was going to take it at Howard in the post. Joe Smith was gonna create and make things happen, maybe they should have tried that(I'm too lazy to use green font).
I guess if LeBron threw it to Varejao he would have done something. (That something is a brazilian crab dribble followed by a triple spin reverse lay-up with his off-hand going away from the basket...great recipe for success)
The only guy that made any contribution offensively on his own besides LeBron was Delonte West. So, LeBron had Delonte West as the guy who was capable of making something happen with the ball in his hands. Kobe had Gasol, Odom, even Bynum to a lesser extent.
Another problem stemmed from this: when Derek Fisher or Trevor Ariza received a pass for a wide open or important shot, they DRAINED it.
When Mo Williams and Wally Szczerbiak received those same wide open shots, they clanked off the rim time and time again.
You can't blame LeBron for that. How is he supposed to make an offensive system work when his second option disappears and he has no bigs who can create any type of offense for themselves or others? The only option for the Cavs to score was to go to Le-Iso, and they did, and it resulted in them scoring 100PPG, and they STILL lost because they weren't able to match-up defensively. They won two games in the series, the first being on "LeShot", and the second being on LeBron getting the ball at the FT line and picking Orlando apart and producing 25 straight points for the Cavs.
We went to overtime once thanks to LeBron's play down the stretch in the fourth quarter. In that overtime period, a foul-plagued Anderson Varejao was too worried about fouling out so he let Dwight Howard dunk the ball 5 times in a row.
LeBron gets no blame for that series. NONE. 0. Zilch. I mean, even suggesting it was his fault they lost is so asinine it's not even imaginable how dumb you must be to actually believe that.
