SAN FRANCISCO — It’s tough to rival perfection. That’s the challenge that has and always will face LeBron James as his legend grows in status compared to that of one Michael Jeffrey Jordan, the ghost James is chasing.
Not that he doesn’t already have enough on his plate.
Beginning Thursday across the bay in Oakland, the leader of the defending NBA-champion Cleveland Cavaliers will take on the underdog role against one of the best teams the league has ever seen: the 67-win Golden State Warriors, a squad so rattled at blowing a 3-1 series lead to James and the Cavs – but mostly James – in the Finals last year that they went out and signed Kevin Durant, who has spent most of his brilliant 10-year career jockeying for the title of second-best player in the NBA, behind James.
James is used to climbing some tall mountains. Win a second straight title and he’ll improve to 4-4 in NBA Finals; a record earned against teams loaded with future Hall of Famers, whether it be the then-baby-faced trio of Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden when they were all still with the Oklahoma City Thunder or the dynastic, later-era San Antonio Spurs as Kawhi Leonard came along to bolster Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Tim Duncan.
But the Warriors, reconfigured and motivated to avenge their loss a year ago and get on with their own march deep into the NBA record books, are James’ toughest test yet. In the moments after he secured his seventh-consecutive trip to the Finals – more than anyone other than a handful of 60s-era Celtics – James didn’t even want to look ahead. “Too stressful,” he said.
But the time is now and James needs to figure out a way to lead the Cavs past the Warriors if he’s going to muscle his way into the emotional and intellectual shelf space basketball fans quite reasonably have always reserved for Jordan.
It’s heavy lifting. For many NBA fans, Jordan has always represented something simple and reliable; a rare truth. Jordan was the best, without equivocation. His status as the best basketball player of all time was the argument almost no one argued about, not without risk of looking foolish.
Jordan’s legacy was sports comfort food. Something we could all warm our hands around.
[relatedlinks]
After some early missteps James is beginning to challenge that thinking. The debate is quite rightly starting.
But it could all die quickly if James’ title total tops out at three, or he ends up with five or more Finals losses on his resume.
The guy he’s trying to catch went 6-0 in NBA Finals with six Finals MVPs – totals that have always been Jordan’s trump card.
But James can see his resume swelling. A second win over the Warriors? Two straight titles for Cleveland, a team that won an average of 24 games a year in the four seasons James was in Miami?
Only the most committed anti-James, pro-Jordan grump would be able to dismiss that.
To his credit James has never shied from the comparisons, meaning this is the rare sports debate that resonates in the imagination of the person trying to make it come to life.
“My motivation,” James famously told Sports Illustrated’s Lee Jenkins. “Is this ghost I’m chasing. The ghost played in Chicago.”
And just in case anyone thought he was referring to the Bulls’ Scottie Pippen, James doubled down: “My career is totally different than Michael Jordan’s,” he said in the same interview last summer. “What I’ve gone through is totally different than what he went through. What he did was unbelievable, and I watched it unfold. I looked up to him so much. I think it’s cool to put myself in position to be one of those great players, but if I can ever put myself in position to be the greatest player, that would be something extraordinary.”
It would be a mistake to make one of the most anticipated Finals matchups in NBA history all about James chasing Jordan, but it would also be wrong to ignore James’ march on the extraordinary.
These moments only come along so often in sports and rarely are the moments so uncomplicated, which doesn’t make the conclusions any easier to reach, only that the lines aren’t tangled. Barry Bonds’ chase of Hank Aaron was the opposite of a feel-good moment for baseball, thanks to the quite reasonable allegations of Bonds’ PED use. Trying to properly contextualize what Wayne Gretzky or Bobby Orr did in the NHL with the dead-puck era greatness that is Sidney Crosby bends the brain and the shifting nature of football gives the modern quarterback statistics that make no sense when compared with generations before.
Jordan and James certainly played in different eras but the games they played aren’t foreign to each other. Their talents translate; there is no need for subtitles.
And as time passes, James is reeling Jordan in, as hard as it is for someone like myself – who was raised on Bird and Magic and came of age with Jordan – to completely get their head around.
In addition to his other-worldly performance in Games 5-7 of the Finals last year – better than anything Jordan did in his six Finals, given the circumstance — James passed Jordan in career playoff scoring the same night the Cavs eliminated Boston in the Eastern Conference Finals last week.
In his 14th season, James seems to be picking up steam at the exact stage of his career Jordan began to falter. Jordan’s final title came in his 14th year out of college. After that he was essentially done save for two quirky comeback years with the Washington Wizards while pushing 40. If James plays five more seasons he’ll be within striking distance of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s record as the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, too. In his race with Jordan he’ll win all the longevity categories – he already has more all-NBA teams to his credit and more Finals appearances.
But Jordan will always have the hammer: 6-0 in Finals.
It’s a resume that earns the benefit of the doubt, every time. Had Jordan not taken the 1993-94 season and most of the 95-96 season off to grieve his murdered father and try his hand at baseball it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t think that Jordan and the Bulls wouldn’t have won eight straight titles. And if the NBA lockout hadn’t reared its head after the 1997-98 season and Phil Jackson had been able to get over his own ego in his battles with then-Bulls general manager Jerry Krause and worked to keep the team together? Maybe the Last Dance season wouldn’t have been the last title either.
[snippet id=3360195]
James has never had the benefit of the doubt, and he’s never been perfect. Be it his stumbles against Boston’s Big Three while he was with Cleveland the first time around or his flat performance against the Dallas Mavericks in his first Finals appearance with his Miami super team, it’s always been easier to find James’ flaws than Jordan’s.
But as James evolves into the NBA’s grand old man phase at age 32 he may begin to get some slack, just as Jordan did later in his career as he faltered ever so slightly. And while he’ll never be ‘perfect’ as Jordan was, the length and breadth of his dominance will be a card to play that Jordan doesn’t have.
But the easiest way for James to reach his goals and for him to challenge Jordan’s hegemony is to win another storybook title, to be perfect in his own way.
He’ll get another chance to tug on Jordan’s shorts on Thursday night, all while trying to match up with Durant and Steph Curry in a series that has the promise of being perfect in every way.
