The Soul-Crushing Dominance of LeBron James

Blame Dwane Casey.

This is not a “Fire Casey” take. He is a good coach, has built the foundation of everything the most successful run in Toronto Raptors history has been, and very well may win Coach of the Year as a result. Quibble with the micro-decisions all you’d like, but Casey’s only real macro-failing the last three years is an inability to beat LeBron James. And to hear James tell it, Casey deserves blame because this version of James—the seemingly ever-improving best player in the world, maybe the best ever—is a monster of his own creating.

To understand, you have to go all the way back to the 2011 NBA Finals, when Casey worked as Rick Carlisle’s lead defensive assistant. It was then that Casey earned his reputation as a defense-first coach and made his case to be hired as head coach of the Raptors. Faced with a talent disadvantage despite Dirk Nowitzki still being in his peak, the Dallas Mavericks had to get creative to stop a Miami Heat “Big Three” that had rounded into form after a shaky start to an alliance that would eventually lead to two championships.

It was far more nuanced than “zone James up,” but Casey’s zone elements stagnated the Heat, who hadn’t quite figured themselves out to the degree where they were matchup-proof. James averaged a pedestrian-by-his-standards 17.8 points and 6.8 assists, the Heat offense scored just 103.3 points per-100 possessions, and the Mavericks won the title in six. James, still without a ring to that point, had to, unfathomably, get even better.

“I wasn’t that good of a player in that series. I wasn’t a complete basketball player,” James said Thursday after hanging 43 points and 14 assists on Casey and the Raptors in a 128-110 Game 2 loss. “Dwane Casey drew up a game plan against me in that ‘11 series in the Finals when I played Dallas to take away things I was very good at and tried to make me do things I wasn’t very good at. So he’s part of the reason why I am who I am today.”

James’ respect for Casey is evident in the complete disrespect he’s shown the Raptors the last three years. It’s unclear to what degree James’ apparent psychological hold over them is intentional, but he’s won eight straight postseason games against Toronto since famously claiming that a 2-2 series in the Eastern Conference Finals didn’t qualify as adversity. One of the most cerebral assassins in the sport, James has made a point of knowing every Raptors action and every wrinkle of their game plan. He has spun balls in the faces of their defenders, feigned drinking beer, and while he’s paid lip service to their improvements, he’s never once showed concern.

Squint, and you can see James’ visceral knowledge of how to beat the Raptors as the most respect he can offer, a mix of pettiness at the title Casey helped deny him and a desire to avoid returning to that feeling against anyone other than the Golden State Warriors. Squint harder, and maybe he just doesn’t think about them at all. It’s an ambiguous image, and with or without Casey, maybe James becomes the player he is today, anyway.

Who James is today, by the way, is a player without enough flaws to game plan for. In 2011, the zone was designed not only to exploit a team that hadn’t forged its offensive identity quite yet but to take advantage of James’ biggest offensive weakness, his shooting. While James has improved across the board almost annually, most notably as the league’s deadliest playmaker out of the post, eliminating shooting as a weakness has perhaps been his most important development.

Up until 2010-11, he’d shot 32.9 percent on threes. He has shot 36.2 percent since. You can’t zone James up when he himself can shoot and is surrounded by one of the best 3-point shooting supporting casts in basketball. You still dare him to shoot—it’s preferable to him getting downhill toward the rim or drawing extra attention in the post—and rookie OG Anunoby did as admirable a job as anyone can in forcing James into difficult looks and making him a jump shooter.

James knew it was coming, and the casual ease with which he decided to tilt that strategy on its axis is remarkable. Kevin Love remarked after that he could tell James was in for a special night as early as shootaround, with James calling out the type of shots he’d be hitting ahead of time. He’s that smart, that well-prepared, that confident, and that good.

“Well, I pretty much know the scouting report on me is going to be to dare me to shoot jump shots and keep me out of the paint, not allow me to go to the free-throw line,” James said. “Over the course of my career, I just try to put a lot of work into other facets of my game to try to neutralize their game plan. I work extremely hard on my jump shot.

“Tonight was just a byproduct of that. They kind of laid off me a lot and I was able to make some shots, some jump shots, and I felt good going into the stretch of the game.”

There is a rich irony in the way in which James once again demoralized the Raptors on Thursday. Casey’s most admirable accomplishment yet as a coach may be how he re-designed the Raptors system with the same core and the same staff, resetting the culture on the offensive end of the floor to modernize the team’s attack in nearly an instant. To deliver what could be a death knell to this core—or at least any earnest belief they’ll eventually overcome him—James did the exact opposite, turning the clock back for one of the most prolific mid-range performances in recent playoff history.

Where to start? James was 17-of-26 on contested shots, for one, the most contested makes ever in a playoff game according to ESPN Stats & Info. He hit seven fadeaway jumpers in the second half alone, tying for the most in the playoffs in the last 15 years. He hit nine non-paint twos in a game the Raptors only attempted seven as a team, because the shots James was killing them with are supposed to be archaic and inefficient—James did what any smart defense wants him to do in 2018, and while three is greater than two, James is greater than many things, including, sometimes, the laws of mathematics.

Watching him operate like this is truly incredible. The Raptors were a very, very good team this year. They won 59 games, and by metrics like net rating and SRS, they were the strongest team in the Eastern Conference by a wide margin. Even Vegas gave in, and oddsmakers are surely going to take a bath on James being a two-to-one underdog to open the series. The immense workload he carries, the fatigue he talked about after Game 7, the difficulty the Cavaliers had in beating Indiana, and a general feeling that James has to be beaten at some point, it all conspired to momentarily confuse James’ greatness, which should never have been in doubt. He gave just enough for a good number of people, author included, to once again feel kind of dumb for expecting anything but the result so far.

(The series is not over, but James has never lost when up 2-0, the Raptors have never won a postseason game in Cleveland, home teams losing the first two games have won a seven-game series only five times ever, and the soundbites coming out of Game 2 did not give the impression of a Raptors team that has the impossible within them.)

This type of soul-crushing dominance is rare. Those who watched Michael Jordan in his prime say it felt like he never lost. He did, of course, but his losses came with a vastly different media landscape and eventually built to a 6-0 record in the finals. James’ losses have been more obvious, on grander stages, and been cause for far more disassembling. The sport is designed now for every game and every play to be a referendum, and James’ vulnerabilities have been sifted for like a veritable needle in a haystack of exceptional. But he is basketball’s true Ace, and the times he's come up short have served the purpose of making him even better or were due to some confluence of once-in-a-lifetime factors for a juggernaut opponent.

He’ll likely lose again this year, because the Golden State Warriors—who beat him once and then lost before going out and acquiring another MVP to assure themselves they’d take the rubber match—have their own brand of predictable dominance going for them. In that sense, there is symmetry in James’ career in how he is measured and how most every other team is measured by him.

Casey, for example, is a very good coach whose highest high is defined by how he helped slow James and whose current low is defined by his inability to do so the last three years. The Raptors are one of only three teams, with the Cavaliers and Warriors, to get out of the first round three years in a row. They’ve won 50-plus games in each of those years, and they’ve won four playoff series. They may even bounce back here and make this a competitive series. But it will be a third year in a row of running into James and, in all likelihood, coming up short. Such is the enormity of James that the best five-year stretch in the history of a once-moribund franchise that wandered the wilderness of mediocrity for two decades before this point will be described in terms of the shadow he casts.

This is who James is. He can take a very good team and render a year of important, meta progress wholly insufficient. He can take what a defense is aiming to do to him and just beat them that way, setting records for outmoded jump shooting, tying career bests for playmaking, setting new NBA records for limiting turnovers, and breaking or matching a bunch of other historical marks that only exist because we keep searching for them for new ways to contextualize his greatness. He can foster a great deal of doubt, become an underdog, and stare down those odds with disdain.

This is who he has become.

Blame Dwane Casey.