LeBron James Is Doing Everything

LeBron James scored forty points on Tuesday night. He also grabbed 12 rebounds and dished out eight assists, and added four steals and two blocks. The most astonishing thing about this astonishing night is that, in context, it's something like normal. LeBron is averaging 41, 12, and eight for the series; more relevant, his effort on Tuesday led the Cavaliers to a 2-1 series lead over the Warriors. That—even now, only midway through the Finals slate—may be the single most impressive accomplishment of any NBA team this season.

When an MRI revealed a fracture in Kyrie Irving's kneecap following a non-contact injury late in Game 1, Cleveland seemed doomed to play the Plucky Vanquished Opponent role; I count myself among those who wrote them off. The Warriors had come off a historic, zeitgeist-defining regular season to run through the rough Western Conference playoffs with relative ease; the Cavs, for their part, had only one player, James, remaining from their opening night starting five. Golden State had won the first game despite taking what looked to be Cleveland's best shot. All logic suggested not a rollover, quite, but some variation on a gentleman's sweep. LeBron James has changed this, and done so as close to singlehandedly as anything ever gets in the NBA. In the process, he's upended everything about not just these Finals, but our understanding of LeBron as well.

An admission: I have been prone to bouts of ambivalence where LeBron James is concerned, as recently as the last few weeks. I have at times found his public posturing obnoxious, his use of his off-arm dubiously legal, and his light antagonism of coaches insincere. Something about how LeBron's game just irked. I don't mean the superficial stuff, the foul-pleading or the spotty jumpshot, but the core thesis. James' great gift as a basketball player is his variability, but this experimentation seemed, when viewed from the wrong angle, as a failure to commit. It distanced him from the usual rules of the game in a way that my reptile brain, and many others, couldn't quite handle. Most players' or teams' failures are failures of degree; they eventually hit the ceiling of who or what they can be. This is not how it works for LeBron.

James' failures, because his ceiling is so stratospherically high, are murkier and harder to parse. He is not maxing out; we still do not know where his ceiling even is. So his failures seem like failures of design, or skill-allocation. He is so gifted that he will forever leave models of his game—ways that he could be, if he settled on being one type of player—untested. I wished, for simplicity's sake, he would just stick with one. He has already tried on several this season, moving on from his post-heavy Miami iteration to a thermonuclear approach to pick-and-roll basketball for most of this one.

For someone seeking a simpler LeBron, this series has been bliss. For maybe the first time in his career, James is presently without other options. During his first run in Cleveland, the objective was to define the dimensions of his extraordinary talent; in Miami, it was to achieve maximum efficiency as part of a team with three superstar-level players. Now, with his team so depleted, the only aim is to win, and the only possibility of doing that rests on playing a type of basketball that funnels relentlessly and directly through him.

Early in Game 2, as if in a statement of post-Kyrie purpose, James buried Draymond Green under the basket in transition, caught a pass, and dropped in a utilitarian layup. Since then, most every maneuver has been shot through with the elements of that play. Again and again, he sets up shop in the mid-post, every trip down the court feeling like an elevator ride down into a mineshaft. He faces up and backs down, storms to the rim and whisks passes all over the court to three-point shooters. He shoulders past Andre Iguodala, drop-steps around Harrison Barnes, and hits gliding step-backs from the middle of dense thickets of leaping Warriors.

Most of this has boiled down to LeBron's ability to work, to bear the sheer load of initiating (and finishing, for that matter) most every Cleveland possession, for over 40 minutes a night. The brawn that has for years figured into his adaptability, letting him switch onto centers or bully overmatched defenders, now seems to work as self-sustenance, cushioning the steady blows and keeping him upright. His knack for interior shot-making, his encompassing court vision, and his defensive timing all follow from this. His acumen for switching between macro-tactics is largely irrelevant; he has no use for high basketball science in his present scenario. He just has to do things.

And he is doing it, doing everything. There is no dissonance in LeBron right now. His christening this current batch of Cavaliers the "Grit Squad," his screams and rapturous after-buzzer celebrations—this all scans as entirely called-for and appropriate. His Iversonian shooting percentages scan as perverse accomplishments, evidence of meeting unique requirements. Even his pointillist hairline, given this hyperstress Atlas routine, seems to fit.

The Warriors may well win this series. In their 36-point fourth quarter Tuesday night, they seemed to find some of the tempo and systemic trust that had eluded them for much of the series to that point. They have an obvious advantage in overall talent, and there is the lingering sense that they could right their troubles with nothing more than a few deep breaths. They're still the Warriors, and the Cavaliers are only faintly themselves.

Regardless of how things end up, though, James is giving his admirers and holdouts alike a performance that resists all criticism. It is inspiring, and very difficult, and nearly mythic. If it ends in a loss, it will be a failure of the most straightforward and satisfying kind—easier to understand than any in LeBron's past. LeBron has been many different players across his career; some of them have been more fun to watch than his current incarnation. But he has never seemed more heroic, or been more astonishing to watch.