Stalwart wrote:Youre trying to have it both ways. Lebron's team perform at historically high levels with his teammates all being properly utilized. But he also needs more help. You got to pick one and stick to it.
It's quite possible that his teams performed at an extremely high level... and then situationally weren't able to do too much. Take, for example, the Cleveland teams that are topping this list, yes? They won in 2016, so we don't need to worry about that season, because it all worked out, but what about 2015 and 2017? And we're ignoring 2018 primarily because it's not the 3-year window in the given list, yes?
2015: 12-2 through the EC, nice and smooth. Ran into the Golden State Warriors, who were a 67-win team, the 2nd-best offense and the best defense in the league. Legitimately the best team in the league. Held GSW 4 points below their RS ORTG, but Cleveland sucked ass on offense that series, under 100 ORTG themselves (more than an 11-point drop relative to the RS, when CLE was the 3rd-best offense in the league).
Was it Lebron? His scoring efficiency was < 48% TS, but he was also posting about 36/13/9 on 40.8% USG. So that touches some on the old Iverson "bolstering his team with insane usage and crap efficiency argument."
Was it the team? JR Smith, Dellevadova, Shumpert, James Jones and Kendrick Perkins were all under 50% TS. Tristan Thompson at 52.8%. Kyrie Irving played one game out of the 6 in the series, which would have looked very different if he'd been healthy. Injuries happen, and Lebron could certainly have played better. He stank at the foul line, was weak from 3 taking 7 per game, and shot under 40% FG on the series. But he also had literally nothing going on around him. The team shot 29.3% from 3. They were 36/125 from 3 apart from Lebron, which is 28.8%. The team shot 38.4% overall, shooting 118/315 apart from Lebron, or 37.5%.
So basically, they lost Kyrie and the team crapped the bed really bad around Lebron, who then couldn't bootstrap his injured Cavs over the best defense in the league (which was also the 2nd-best offense in the RS). Not a surprising loss, all told.
Two years later in 2017, the Warriors had added Kevin Durant, so I don't think I really need to explain that. The Cavs were a nearly 115 ORTG offense in the 2017 Finals, but the Warriors roflstomp'd them at just over 121 ORTG because they had the filthiest team imaginable. Again a 67-win team, and this time the best offense and the 2nd-best defense. Lebron needed more help in order to tackle the Warriors, who were a +11.35 SRS squad. Dunno what anyone thought he was going to do about that with Kyrie, Love, JR Smith and Richard Jefferson. Irving was pretty good on O in that series; nothing special, but certainly not bad. Lebron balled out like a madman (~ 34/12/10 on 63% TS now that he wasn't working with almost nothing and no second scorer), but it just didn't matter because they had no hope of guarding the Warriors. And it was the same the year after.
So yeah... against everyone except the ATG absurdity of Golden State's Durant-era offense, the Cavs were a high-performing support cast. 4 straight Finals appearances sort of speaks to that. And if Irving had been healthy in 2015, there's the possibility that the Cavs might have actually won. But Lebron needed more in the 2015 Finals, and anyone else would have also needed more in order to compete with Golden State in the following 2 seasons.
So those aren't really competing notions in this particular case.
). He could have used better overall team fit, health, and uh aging in 2014, but again the bigger issue was running into an all-time postseason squad beyond pretty much any Jordan encountered.
