LeBron teeters on ultimate Finals failure
DALLAS – Everything promises to be sheer torture now, the worst basketball nightmare of LeBron James(notes) unfolding one mocking, ridiculing jeer stacked upon another until the world comes crashing down Sunday night. Biggest game of my life, James proclaimed, and the final minutes of Game 5, the final score, still belonged to someone else. Beyond failure, this felt so much like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Biggest game of his life, James proclaimed, and his good was unacceptable again. Greatness is demanded for a global icon. Greatness is the burden. Back to the brink for LeBron James, back to the dizzying, dumbfounding edge of his chaotic, careening planet.
All hell crashed down upon James and the Miami Heat in a confounding 112-103 loss to the Dallas Mavericks, an avalanche of Mavericks 3-pointers conspiring with one more pedestrian performance from James in the fourth quarter. From Dirk Nowitzki(notes) to Jason Terry(notes), the Mavericks humiliated him in the clutch and moved within a victory of an NBA championship. Nothing out of James in the fourth quarter, nothing to honor and validate a talent that ought to be controlling these Finals.
These Dallas Mavericks go to great lengths to mess with him, hurling insults and insinuations with regularity that they never would’ve dared with different superstars. Why? Because they believe it messes with his mind. They believe the words will fester within him, keep him thinking when he ought to be reacting. Terry says James can’t guard him, and so far he’s been right. DeShawn Stevenson(notes) essentially called him a quitter in Game 4. Shawn Marion(notes) appeared to call him much worse on the floor, too.
James won’t get mad, and James won’t get even and make people pay a price. When opposing players hear people insist they ought to be respectful of James out of fear of retribution – be careful they don’t stir him with words – they privately giggle.
“Different guys are different,” Stevenson told Yahoo! Sports in a corner of the Mavericks’ locker room Thursday night. “Kobe Bryant feeds off stuff like that. He looks for it every time. LeBron’s a different kind of person. Obviously he’s a freak of nature, able to do a lot of things, but everybody in this league is built different.”
Built differently. Translated: Where’s the killer within? Where’s the best player in basketball, the prodigious talent that left the Chicago Bulls and Boston Celtics crumpled messes back in the Eastern Conference? Where’s the cold-bloodedness?
Where is this guy?
Deep down, James has to still see the opportunity tangled within the disheartening defeat. He goes home, and gets a chance to fight back and take that championship. The opportunity is historic. Down 2-3 in the series, James has a chance to manufacture the most dramatic narrative in Finals history.
The ultimate frontrunner could still craft the ultimate comeback story.
Maybe going home makes the difference for him. Maybe this was just too much for him in Dallas. After all, James has lost the desire to drive to the basket and get to the free-throw line. He’s lost the touch on his jump shot. He’s lost the fourth quarters of these Finals, totaling just 11 points in all five of them.
Still, LeBron James hasn’t lost these Finals. He hasn’t lost this series. Now, winning could be bigger than ever. He’s set himself up for one of the great, great victories in NBA history or one of the biggest flops ever seen. Never in-between with him, never halfway.
When the game was over, someone asked Chris Bosh(notes) how James had played. Bosh stared blankly for a moment, because James’ performance was statistically sound and perfectly forgettable. Finally, Bosh looked down at the stat sheet and managed to spit out, “Triple-double.”
Yes, triple-double: 17 points, 10 rebounds and 10 assists. In the final five minutes, 59 seconds, James missed two of his three shots, had no assists, no rebounds and a turnover.
As Game 5 slipped away, James missed an open 3-pointer with the Heat trailing 102-100. He was called for a charge on the baseline. And he let Terry beat him on the biggest 3-pointer of the night. No one had talked more trash at James, and no one backed it up with such brilliant shot-making. For nearly the entire fourth quarter, James went without a basket – and don’t dare count a layup inside the final minute once the Heat were far gone. This was A-Rod with a ninth inning solo shot to make it 7-2.
Eventually, James is going to do this. He’s going to win a title. Once again, the Heat need to win Games 6 and 7, or the Year of LeBron becomes one big bust. These days, he is a one-man, 24-hour news cycle. When James is done talking between games in these playoffs, half-baked reports on his personal life are flying and innocent bystanders are ducking shrapnel, forced to publicly deny cyber gossip. He’s the deepest, darkest swirling vortex of insanity that modern sports has ever seen.
Just Thursday morning at the Heat’s shootaround, someone asked James how he had been spending his time since a costly and dreadful eight-point debacle in Game 4. Why, he had been reading everyone’s columns on the Internet. This inspired a good laugh, but he probably wasn’t joking. From his mid-teens, he’s always seen himself from the outside looking in, as a spectacle within a spectacle. Reality is a fuzzy place for a child prodigy raised, empowered and enabled by the sneaker industry.
As a product of that environment, the need for James to validate his brand with unforgettable performances, with clutch play in championship games, is monumental. And perhaps paralyzing. He had a good game on Thursday night, but it doesn’t matter that James plays with Dwyane Wade(notes) and Bosh. Good isn’t good enough for him. No one’s even sure great covers it for him.
By design, James and his crackerjack marketers wanted the feeding frenzies, wanted the residual of “The Decision” to be the dawning of a generational, global sports icon. Well, global icons take over fourth quarters. They find a way to will their teams – will themselves – to victory. LeBron James still has his chance. He still has Games 6 and 7 in Miami. All cheers, all adulation for him. He needs it, craves it, because he isn’t so hot with hostility.
The next 72 hours promise to be the most torturous for James, because the world will keep closing on him, keep parsing and replaying and re-engaging everything about his Finals failures. He can’t help himself, because so much of the way he sees himself, the way he built himself, was through the prism of this basketball “Truman Show.”
From the edge of disaster, from the brink, James can still do the unthinkable. After running off to play with Wade and Bosh, the ultimate frontrunner can still craft the ultimate comeback. Between now and then, the biggest job for James will be to spare himself combustion from ingesting everything that’s coming for him now. These Mavericks don’t seem to believe this is all fuel for James. They don’t believe he gets angry and narrow, but shaken and obtuse. They aren’t alone, and that’s the burden on James now.
All these months, all about him, and good isn’t enough now. Greatness is demanded, dominance. James gets his chance again. All that noise, all that static, and those 72 hours between Games 5 and 6 promise to raise the volume, raise the stakes on a man who sometimes can be so easily distracted, easily disturbed. Back to the brink for James, back to that combative, spinning place where his basketball career, his life, has long existed. Seventy-two hours of poring over everything – what the world’s saying, thinking and wishing – could be crippling. Biggest game of his life, all over again.
Here comes Game 6 for LeBron James, here come the walls, the chances, the mayhem of everything he’s created, real and illusionary. Here comes LeBron James, the contradiction of contradictions: the frontrunner chasing a comeback story.
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