Michael’s six are now safe from King LeBron.

LeBron James may be the best player on the planet but he doesn’t play for the best team. And this is the difference in the debate over whether he is the greatest player of all time. The answer after he failed to win a fourth NBA championship is no he is not.

The plus-minus metric was not available in Michael Jordan’s day when he won six NBA Finals in six trips in the 1990s. Every box score has it now, right next to the total points each player scored in the game. In Game 5 after the Cavaliers succumbed to a superior Golden State team, James was a minus-13 next to his 41 points, 13 rebounds and eight assists, meaning when he was on the court the Cavaliers were outscored by 13 points.

If you are the best player, you are charged with making everyone else on the team better and James does not do that or needs better teammates. Kyrie Irving does because he sets up players and scores himself. Irving had 26 points and six assists, but the Cavaliers were plus-4 during his 42 minutes.

Dean Smith always said the MVP should go to someone on the winning team, and in this series that was Kevin Durant, who won his first NBA ring after his controversial move from the Oklahoma City Thunder, where he lost in his only NBA Finals appearance. KD had 39 points, seven rebounds and five assists, but more importantly the Warriors were a plus-18 over his 40 minutes of play.

James is a transcendent talent who is asked too many times to win the game on his own. He passed up a probable game-winning shot in Game 3 and threw the ball to a teammate who missed. In the clincher Monday night, he hit 19 of his 30 shots while the rest of his team shot under 50 percent. Other than LeBron and Irving, the Cavaliers just aren’t good enough to stay with not only the best offensive team in the NBA but one of the very best defensively, too. James is stuck on three rings and is already 32 years
old.

So the debate will go on, but will move toward whether Cleveland needs to be a three- or four-headed monster than two all-stars who are spectacular individual talents. During the off-season, you will surely read how James wants a better big man than Kevin Love and other scorers, passers and rebounders to compete with a team that will be even more heavily favored to win again in 2018.

(Photo by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Related Stories
None