Thelonious Monk with 18-year-old Lew Alcindor (soon to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) in the kitchen of the Village Vanguard, New York City, March 1966. Photo by the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter.
1 Bifurcation: Best Player and MVP
We NBA trackers have become resigned to the idea that the MVP trophy does not always go to the league’s best player, a designation that Lebron (“King”) James has universally owned, in seeming perpetuity, for over a decade. After James had claimed four of those trophies in five years (1), starting in 2014, various selected MVP’s came and went: Durant, Curry, Westbrook, some of them even repeat pretenders to the true King’s throne.
More recently, however, there has been a resurgence of great centers and all-court players tall enough to play center — highly skilled giants — so overwhelmingly gifted as to be legitimate contenders for the King’s crown.
Giannis Antetokounmpo, the prototypical unicorn forward, has the size to play center, but possesses such stunning all-court gifts that deploying him at forward (or even point guard) enhances his overall productivity, and more fully utilizes his varied offensive arsenal. Deservedly he was awarded consecutive MVP trophies, the second of which was in the 2019-2020 Bubble Season, when COVID-19 necessitated a shortened season.
At that point, the cognoscenti first began to question whether LeBron, who missed lengthy stretches of several seasons due to injuries, remained the true King. Then followed repeat MVP’s by a different kind of unique big man, a true center, but like no other ever: Nicola Jokic. And runner-up both years was fellow seven footer Joel Embiid, in many ways a throwback dominant center, with size and strength in the tradition of Wilt Chamberlain, but along with a shooting touch and ball handling skills to rival Jokic’s. Embiid is currently the league’s leading scorer, averaging above 33 points per game.
Yet, still there is Lebron! Just what has he been doing in his thirty-ninth year, as the light becomes dimmer, as his Lakers continue to sputter, and others intrude into the conversation of who is the “best player on the planet,” if not the GOAT?
Well, there have been injuries, but also another title — with yet a third team, in the bubble year, and finally, he has shattered Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s long-thought-to-be unbreakable record of 38,387 points with a stretch of games that culminated in an average of 34 points, throughout the entire month of January!
On the night of February 7, the record was within reach. Needing 36 to break Kareem’s record, Lebron took just three quarters to get there. The game then stopped. It seemed time had done so as well. Lebron stood with Kareem, both men exuding pride, love, and joy. The end seemed nowhere near.
The flame can’t last forever, we tell ourselves, though the possible opportunity to play with his son Bronny, now eighteen and a McDonald’s high school All-American — though just 6’2” — has been suggested as a possible motivator for James to stay around.
For the current season, during which he missed over two November weeks before roaring back to lead his disappointing and struggling Laker team, Lebron’s average has reached 30 points, (along with 8.5 rebounds and 7.1 assists), for what would be only the second time in his nineteen-year career. He has averaged at least 25 points per game in all but his rookie season, when he could manage “only” a paltry 20.9 as a nineteen year old directly out of high school (2). Is he not still deserving of consideration in arguments about who is the best, arguments now usually dominated by fans of Jokic and Antetokounmpo?
2 Trifecta: MVP, Best Player, GOAT
While not only being part of a very small number of players (with Jabbar and Michael Jordan) everyone seriously considers to be GOAT (Greatest of All Time) contenders, James — uniquely, as he developed — blurred (if not obliterated) the traditional bifurcation of GOAT candidates into commanding Big Man (a la Wilt) and greatest all-court player (a la Oscar Robertson, and later Michael Jordan).
Only James could bring together these competing archetypes (3), and now, as he enters — we think — the twilight of his reign, he has become the game’s all-time leading scorer, even though, unlike Michael, he has never been predominantly a scorer. Rather, extreme versatility, unselfishness, and multi-dimensionality are his defining attributes. For good reason, he has been said to be as much in Magic Johnson’s lineage (4,5): exceptional passer who, like Oscar before him, was too big for others at his position, as in Michael’s. In reality, he has followed in both their developmental lines, and brought them closer together.
Recall when Bird and Magic changed the locus of significance and domination away from the center position, years before the simultaneous appearance of three young gifted athletic centers David Robinson, Akeem (later Hakeem) Olajuwon, and Patrick Ewing breathed new life into the center position, with Shaquille O’Neal and Tim Duncan soon following in their footsteps.
Also recall when Magic returned from retirement as a power forward. And that Wilt, until 50, had multiple suitors urging him to give them 10-12 minutes, nonpareil defensive rebounding, and signature “rim protection,” at back-up center.
Can we really rule out James playing at a high level into his mid 40’s? The way the center position is now played, it would be an ideal spot in which Lebron could grow old. Or, equipped with his late-career outside shooting touch, he could continue as a distributor point guard.
The mere credibility of such disparate options speaks volumes for his uniqueness and versatility, for his being the unifier of opposite archetypes. Position-less basketball is the order of the post-modern day, but only James (having dramatically improved his outside shooting) has fully mastered all five positions (whether or not they still exist notwithstanding)!
3 Former Team-mates with Opposite Trajectories
It is both fitting and ironic that Lebron’s epic accomplishment took place the same week that Kyrie Irving “moved on” from yet another jilted and disappointed franchise, continuing in the trail of his having demanded a trade from Cleveland after winning a championship with James in 2016. Jealous of the limelight, Irving then “moved” on to Boston, where he fairly trashed a promising young team that has since rebooted and bounced back.
Along the way, he claimed that the world was flat, fomented anti-Semitism, deserted his Brooklyn team-mates by refusing to be vaccinated, helped get Steve Nash fired as Coach, and betrayed Kevin Durant, his fellow defecting mercenary whom he calls his best friend. After Brooklyn acceded to his wish to be traded, he said he felt “very disrespected” by the Nets, and said that the “greatest lesson he could share” was that he learned from his experience to get to know the people in an organization before committing. Profound!
Irving’s off-court life has been a disgrace, whereas James, in his off-court life as mogul, Black spokesman, community activist, and entrepreneur, (might one even say “public intellectual/activist”?) has undergone a remarkable transformation from the immature self-glamorizing dude that told the world he was “taking my talents to South Beach.”
That said, Lebron has never done anything more reprehensible than immaturely making himself a laughing stock with poorly chosen language on that orchestrated televised afternoon when he first abandoned Cleveland (6). And later came full reparation: after winning two championships in Miami, he returned home to bring Cleveland its long-awaited first title!
His presence alongside Kareem as he accepted the award was both noble and majestic. Both command full admiration, even awe.
In his blog the next day, Kareem wrote: “Bottom line about LeBron and me: LeBron makes me love the game again. And he makes me proud to be part of an ever-widening group of athletes who actively care about their community.”
May King James cap his epic career, sometime in his mid-forties, with a title for L.A. in a seven-game series that ends with Brony, after taking a pass from Pops, making that same jumper Irving hit in in 2016.
NOTES
1 In 2011, sandwiched between Lebron’s two repeats, Derrick Rose was the first recipient of this brand of charity-masquerading — as — parity. Rose, indeed, had an MVP caliber season; so, decidedly, did Lebron, and it seemed a good idea to spread the wealth. Who knew it would become a habit?
2 Bob Pettit, who was the first player to record 20, 000 points had a similar career scoring arc, averaging over twenty in every one of his eleven years, with the first 10 as a first team all-star.
3 Pettit’s 20.4 average as a rookie, and 22.5 his last season (injury-shortened) were the only times he was under 24.6, and he went as high as 31.1, twice being the league’s leading scorer. Pettit broke the all-time scoring record (29.2) in the 1958-59 season, the year before Wilt entered the league and rendered all previous records obsolete.
3 Discussed previously in First of The Month. See Author page: https://www.firstofthemonth.org/author/bob-liss/
“Impact, Impact, Impact: Anxiety and Lebron James” June 1, 2011
“Lebron Gets It” July 1, 2012
“Ain’ Time Yet: Colliding Eras in Lebron’s Stormy Reign” August 1, 2013
“Everything’s Been Returned That Was Owed” June 24, 2016
“True to the Game, Like Lebron” June 1, 2018
“Cultural Capital” March 1, 2019
4 And would it really be unreasonable to place Magic on the short list of GOAT candidates? At least until James passes him in all-time assists, which is projected as due to happen later this season. Or at least to so opine, if he is judged on the basis of his pre- AIDS career, and what its trajectory suggests he would have been, had he not been infected.
5 It is notable that only Larry Bird, Wilt Chamberlain, and Bill Russell were three-peat MVPs. And then there was Kareem, with six! Lebron can’t catch him here, though it may be argued that he was robbed! Russell and Chamberlain had each other as peer competitors, as did Magic and Larry Bird, but when Magic had to defer to AIDS as then understood, he expressed regrets at having “left Michael too soon.”
6 That unfortunate piece of public relations gaffery proved seminal in pioneering the concept of the super-team, and giving players more bargaining power.