NBA 2019-20 thread.

Adding Anthony Davis, Kevin Love and Chris Bosh to his teams might have had something to do with winning. Having Dwyane Wade and Kyrie Irving already in place helped too.

 

With the exception of Wade, as great as those players were/are, none had any playoff success before teaming up with LeBron and in the case of Love, Wade and Kyrie none did anything after.

 

One of the great double-edged swords in sports. He’s so great that he, by sheer force of will and talent, got his teams to 9 NBA Finals. And more often than not he couldn’t get those teams past just 1 last team.

He’s the most dominant player of his era. One of the greatest to play the game. And, The most itinerant of all superstars. The player with the most off court power in NBA history.
Why the overwhelming need to be declared, by near unanimous acclimation, the absolute greatest of all time, in his own time?

 

LeBron barely had any playoff success before teaming up with those players. He made one Finals and a conference finals in seven seasons.

 

Wait, you mean even a superstar needs a quality team around him to win? I did not know this. I always thought Shaq and Kobe, MJ and Pippen, Magic and Kareem, Bird and McHale, and Isaiah and Rodman won all their titles by themselves.

 

Except for Shaq, who moved more than James in search of better teammates? James is lauded for his 10th Finals, with his 4th team. Second team in Cleveland was nothing like his first. He went back to a franchise but the team was completely different. But Magic Bird Jordan Thomas Russell all won without benefit of traveling, literally and figuratively

 

So did Kobe and Duncan. I notice you left them off your list. Almost like you haven't watched basketball in 25 years.

 

Right Kobe and Duncan, stayed and won. Stayed and repeated.

There’s nothing wrong with what James did to get to where he is. But think of what Jordan would have done had he left Chicago after his 4th or 5th season to get away from Detroit. What if he went to Philly with Barkley and Mahorn. Or Portland with Drexler and Kersey and Williams. Or Utah with Malone and Stockton.

 

In his last 5 years with the Cavs in his first run, he went second round, finals, second round, conference finals and second round despite arguably not having another player in the top 50 on his team. He definitely came up short in that last Celtics series, but a heck of a run. In the 3 years before LeBron came, neither Wade, Bosh, Love, Kyrie nor AD won a playoff series, with 4 combined first round exits and 11 times missing the playoffs.

 

And how quickly we forget the Splash Bros., with and without Durant.

Even the superstars like James can't carry a team themselves, except in extraordinary instances like the 2016 Finals when he pushed the Cavs past Golden State. Look at the Lakers between Shaq's exit and the pickup of Gasol. Aside from Kobe, there wasn't much there, and it showed in early playoff exits.

 

Even in 2016, Irving had a pretty big shot. (Love's worth ultimately turned out to be less than I anticipated - I think they probably manage to win a title without him and a comparable player - but he was in the mix too.)

 

Carlos Boozer left Cleveland after LeBron's rookie year. In the next seven years who was the second best player on the roster on the Cavs roster?