therealbig3 wrote:The 09 and 10 Cavs were title favorites because of LeBron.
Yes, and the team that’s the title favorite every year is the title favorite in large part because of their best player. The fact remains that the dominant perception at the time was that the supporting cast around LeBron was absolutely good enough to win with, and indeed that it was good enough for the Cavs to be favorites to a degree that the league doesn’t even have at all in like half of years. Them failing to win the title in those two years was a huge title favorite failing, not the failure of some team that had a mega-star but clearly wasn’t good enough.
And he did not play poorly in 09, idk how anyone could come up with that narrative.
Did you read what I said? I’ll quote what I said for you again:
“One of those years it was in spite of LeBron playing well (he played well against Orlando, but Orlando ended up being a tough matchup for them defensively), and one of those years it was primarily caused by LeBron playing abysmally in the last three games of the series in completely inexplicable fashion (so inexplicable that people constructed conspiracy theories regarding his mother’s sex life to try to explain it).”
So yeah, you’re straw manning.
Those were extremely flawed teams with limited talent outside of LeBron that got exposed come playoff time. We see teams like that go down all the time, regardless of their RS record. Don’t need to revise history by acting like those were secretly great teams that LeBron just screwed up with.
We rarely see teams go down when they are that level of title favorite and have an all-time great in his peak years. And when we do, it is always the case that that team at least wins the title in a nearby year. The 2009 and 2010 Cavs are literally the *only* exception to that ever.
And you can say they had “limited talent outside of LeBron,” but that simply wasn’t the perception at the time. It’s a post-hoc rationale. If that were what people thought before the Cavs lost (i.e. before losers’ bias and peoples’ desire to make excuses comes in), there’s no way they would’ve been such huge title favorites. The Cavs weren’t such huge title favorites in earlier years. Nor, in fact, were the vast majority of the teams LeBron later had (only the 2013 Heat had better pre-playoff title odds than the 2009 and 2010 Cavs), so this cannot simply be explained by the effect LeBron himself has on odds. The bottom line is that people absolutely thought that those supporting casts were good enough to win the title—and, in fact, thought that they were good enough to be huge favorites. The narrative that they weren’t good enough was a post-hoc rationale after they lost and LeBron left.
Why was the perception of those teams so good, even though they didn’t have a major star alongside LeBron? Well, they were crafted really well around LeBron: the team had a defensively slanted roster that was constructed to nevertheless fit optimally well with LeBron offensively by surrounding LeBron with shooters. The result was that they played great defense while also giving LeBron the floor spacing he needed to flourish with his heliocentric offensive style (this is relative to the era, of course—obviously court spacing these days is a different animal). The pieces were clearly there for them to be a great team and potentially win the title. It was only after they didn’t win the title that the narrative formed that LeBron didn’t have enough “help” because he didn’t have another major star. Prior to that, people understood that that was a really well-constructed roster around LeBron that had every opportunity to win a title. They didn’t do it, and LeBron left for a situation that he thought would be even easier. And, initially, he failed spectacularly even then, but to his credit he did eventually put it together and stop failing. But it’s that period where peak LeBron was failing with teams that were widely considered more than good enough to win the title that leads a lot of people to have him clearly below Jordan.
2011 is really the only time LeBron just straight up failed and clearly underachieved. Want to say that never happened with Jordan, fine, but we have many, many other years when LeBron delivered and met expectations or overachieved, often times in a spectacular way. He also wasn’t the same guy in 2011 that he was in 2009 or 2010. He was physically different and not in a good way. There also seems to be this narrative of him only figuring out how to be clutch in 2012, when he was the clutchest player in the league in Cleveland.
I agree that the narrative that LeBron wasn’t “clutch” in his first stint in Cleveland was wrong. That was really just people wanting to find something to criticize him for—and criticizing someone who has never won a title as not being “clutch” is low-hanging fruit, even when it’s not *really* true. Overall, LeBron played very well in clutch situations in those years. However, he did also have times where he came in well below expectations with those teams. The 2010 playoffs was a very good example—where he played awfully in the last half the series against the Celtics. It wasn’t as bad as the 2011 Finals, because it wasn’t the whole series, but it was still quite bad. The angle people try to take now is to just say we should ignore it because those Cavs weren’t good enough to win anyways, but that’s just completely divorced from what people thought at the time, and really should just be understood as a post-hoc excuse. The 2007 Finals is another example where LeBron came in well below expectations. There, I do think that it’s true that the Cavs weren’t good enough to win anyways, so it’s not as much of a black mark, but LeBron did play badly in those Finals even considering the difficult and perhaps futile circumstances.
