LeBron James, The NBA Finals, And The Business Of Astonishment

This article is part of_ VICE Sports' 2016 NBA Playoffs coverage_.

The truth about the Cleveland Cavaliers in the period since LeBron James returned to northeast Ohio to rescue the franchise from the crater that his exit produced is that they haven't ever made much sense. On the eve of Game 5 of the NBA Finals, after three thorough thumpings and a fluke-y blowout win at home, that nonsensicality looked malignant, and terminal. Kyrie Irving was inconsistent; Kevin Love and J.R. Smith were invisible. The Golden State Warriors played stifling defense and flummoxing offense, even if Steph Curry and Klay Thompson weren't their usual resplendent selves. How could any team overcome a 73-win juggernaut with its alleged third-best player looking more Eeyore than All-Star? A sleepy gentleman's sweep seemed about right.

It was said so many times during these Finals that it's had most of the meaning wrung from it, but this is the squad James asked for; after a season of fraught, grumpy excellence and sourpuss sniping, it didn't look like nearly enough. James wanted to play with Irving, then started shooting him Disappointed Father glances just three games into their first season together. James requested Andrew Wiggins be swapped out for Love, then relegated a force who averaged 26-and-12 in Minnesota to spot-up duty and gaslit him with late night subtweets. These past two seasons of James' career have seemed at times like the act in the Great Man's Decline flick where our Campbellian hero meets with the goddess, holes up in a mansion, and goes insane. He's been howling at his servants to bring him whiskey and then complaining that it's not water.

For all his versatility, James has always demanded his running mates adapt to him, not vice versa. Back in June of 2013, when the Miami Heat were scything through the league and on the verge of their second title, I wrote that the South Beach superfriends experiment was bearing fruit because "Dwyane Wade [knows] when to drive the team on offense and when to find ways to score by moving off the ball" and because "Chris Bosh has worked on extending his range out to the three-point line so he can play like both a big man and a spot-up shooter." The Heat began to click when they collectively figured out that James' multi-talentedness wasn't spackle, but the wall itself. On any given night, he would do whatever he felt he could do best, and would be likeliest to lead to a win—that could be playmaking or scoring, operating from the perimeter or post, guarding the other team's best player or floating around on defense. It was up to everyone else to figure out the rest.

What worked swimmingly in Miami led to so much locker room friction and on-court asynchronicity in Cleveland because Irving and Love are fairly static players. Irving is the lesser heir to Carmelo Anthony's mantle; he's phenomenally skilled, but clings steadfastly to a few bad habits. He's enamored with his own handle, stands around without possession, and, up until the Cavs reached their breaking point in these Finals, defended only for a few minutes at a time. Where Wade remade himself in James' presence as a slasher and secondary distributor, Irving hasn't yet altered his approach much at all. He had an exceptional Finals while doing the same shimmying one-man-band act he did when the Cavs were basement-dwellers during his first few years in the league. The Kyrie Irving Experience can be breathtaking when it's fully operational, but it's all he has to give at this point in his career.

Love, on the other hand, has tried to change for James, and it has mostly been a disaster. To play alongside the four-time MVP, Love dropped weight and tried to learn how to use new areas of the court, and it has clearly dented his confidence and screwed up his mechanics. It makes sense that Love might look a whit creaky and awkward operating along the perimeter, but he has also forgotten how to post up. The confident turn-arounds and running righty hooks that comprised his game with the Wolves are now frantic flailing tosses and butterfingers maneuvers. Love has had his ebbs and flows as a Cavalier—and these Finals were, his spunky Game 7 notwithstanding, a hell of a mortifying ebb—but he has never looked nearly as comfortable as Bosh did during the 2012-13 season, after his successful self-actualization as a tireless defender and rebounder with a smooth jumper. Anyway, they both have championship rings, now.

All of this is still true enough, which makes the team's historic title that much more astounding. The Cavs still do not, strictly speaking, function in the way they were designed to, but LeBron James: All-Time Basketball Supergenius was great enough when it mattered most to erase the errors of LeBron James: Just-Okay General Manager. His performances in Games 5 and 6 were twin masterpieces. The first was the purest 2007 vintage, all ugly-effective jumpers and unimpeded isolation drives, capped off by the best fourth quarter performance of Irving's career; the second was a display of wire-to-wire dominance so complete as to obliterate the memory of anything else that happened on the night. Game 7, somehow, was better. This was work and art, something James pulled from the depths of himself, like a climber summiting in low oxygen. What James so often does with apparent ease looked exactly as exhausting and painful as it actually is. It was a staggering performance.

James entered the league as a messiah—one of his first Nike ads literally posited him as something like a balling incarnation of The Holy Ghost—and made us wonder, in the way not-yet-formed generational talents do, what he would do that we had never seen before. And while he's tried on different personae in the years since, he hasn't ever been particularly legible. His interviews are some inscrutable blend of what he really means and what he wants us to think he thinks; he's had as many image reboots as he has deep playoff runs. Again, the work is visible near the surface: we do not have to imagine how strange it would be to grow up in public as an extraordinary person, because we're watching James do it.

This process is visible in the strange and variable way James has led the Cavaliers. He swings abruptly from grouchy passive-aggression to jocular back-slapping and gleefully intricate secret handshake choreography. James gives off the air of someone who is difficult to figure out because he is still figuring himself out from moment to moment. This is true of all people, but our ideas of great athletes are usually not so fraught—Michael Jordan is a killer, Magic Johnson is sunshine, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a monk. James is not as simple as that.

In the end, James couldn't make the Cavs fit. He gave up on Kevin Love playing like a star and was a spectator for Irving's one-on-one brilliance. Tristan Thompson and Richard Jefferson did their narrow jobs well. Smith was fine. Iman Shumpert contributed little. Both Dahntay Jones and Mo Williams can say they've scored in a NBA Finals game. The Warriors peaked this season because everyone on the team played as well as they possibly could; they won and lost as a collective. James did something different, and more singular. He made the Cavs' best basketball synonymous with his own, and made the team's various incongruities into minor details. That this could somehow win his team a championship, let alone against the best regular season team of all-time, seemed too steep an expectation even for an all-timer like James, right up until the moment it wasn't.

Maybe this is the way to understand James that holds up best. He deals in astonishment, and he has done something astonishing here. No one should be so strong, and so fast, and so skilled, and so smart, and so brave at the same time. No one should have as much great basketball to give as LeBron James. It's an insane thing to expect, or ask. And yet, here he is.

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