The worst playoff loss* of LeBron James’s career, to the best of my recollection, was his 2011 Finals loss to the Dallas Mavericks. LeBron left Cleveland the previous summer and signed with Miami for the express purpose of winning championships, took on heaps of shitty PR in the process, and practically gave up the MVP which ought to have been his birthright. He and the Heat were widely expected to blow through the Mavs’ collection of elder statesmen and high-end defensive role players, flex on the league as a whole, and take the first step in forging the steel dynasty of the future. This did not happen.
Instead, Lebron severely underperformed, wrangled in by Tyson Chandler’s rim protection and a kind of unidentifiable malaise, while Dirk Nowitzki was downright heroic, loopily driving to the rim against whatever defender he got, drilling jumpers as if in a fugue state, and unleashing his totally unblockable one-legged fadeaway all over the midrange.
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Seven years later, the Cavaliers floundered to a fourth place finish in the East, while the Toronto Raptors were the best team in the conference pretty much all year. Dwane Casey, an assistant on that Mavs team of destiny, did everything he could to make their squad better, modernizing the offense, making some smart bench acquisitions. It was a team of dudes who have played nearly entire careers on the fringes of people’s attention, making themselves a force to be reckoned with. After the Cavs barely made it past Indiana to play yet another series against Toronto, This is it, finally, you thought. The Raptors Team You Can Believe In.
But here we are, watching an older, wiser LeBron uncork the one-footed fadeaway, that instrument of his past embarrassment, as Cleveland takes a 3-0 series lead on the Raptors. Wielding the weapon of his vanquishers, he has made the New Raps the Old Raps once more: poor and sad and defeated. It is a moment of pure poetry, certainly, but hold the glass to your nose and breathe in, sniff deeply and detect the notes of something else deep in its bouquet:
Sadism.
Watching LeBron come off a series where his squad looked deeply vulnerable and proceed to whip the Raptors’ asses for the third year in a row, I have been made to wonder: at what point does excellence cross the threshold of pure immorality? Is it really necessary, is it adding much to his life, to personally annihilate the poor Raptors like this? What could possibly drive someone to do this to one group of dudes, game after game, year after year?
Seeing a fanbase with so much hope not a week previous, transmuted on the spot into vomiting messes, you wonder: is this fair? Didn’t they deserve success as much as that Mavs squad of the recent past, a franchise and a group of dudes who were incomplete separately but found success in communion? Why did it have to end like this, why will their squad get tossed into an egg bath of chaos, just because there was nothing they could feasibly do about the best basketball player since Michael Jordan?
LeBron has so much. Couldn’t, WOULDN’T, a kinder person just embrace the quiet victory of letting go, setting aside the monumental effort that comes with the desire for victory? Couldn’t he just let the playoffs run their course, score 30 a game and look good doing it, then rest, sitting on the mountaintop and watching the remainder of the playoffs pass him by while a happy universe quietly sings his praises even in defeat?
Is an honorable bow-out, taking a moment to relax and reload, so unacceptable to LeBron? And does he have to not just BEAT the Raptors for the THIRD YEAR IN A ROW, but personally sweep them while the rest of his team stands around? Does he have to apply a power dribble in transition, squeeze the precious oils out of their bodies, gently rise into the air, and subtly apply those oils to his big ol’ face as the ball drifts through the air and drops through the net?
Shouldn’t he have shown mercy in this matter and let the Raps save face after a year where they really did everything they could to be the best they could possibly be? Why not give a small kindness to this team that has given him so much? Did he have to not only BEAT the Raps, but embarrass them, imprison them in history as Jordan did the Mark Price Cavs, the Clyde Drexler Blazers, or the Patrick Ewing Knicks?
True greatness, I submit, true MORAL greatness, would have allowed LeBron to let this one go. But the drug of victory emits such a tempting call, even for a man with his strength and power. The thrill of seeing your enemies embarrassed and scattered to the wind, to destroy your inferior enemies in front of a national TV audience is the ultimate thrill, vicious and acidic and immoral. LeBron once seemed too moral, too kind, for this sort of pleasure, for the same indulgence that fueled Jordan or Tiger Woods or Bjorn Borg.
But here he is now, full aflame in celebration of that most savage of victories, the pose of the Christ taking on the sins of humanity in his celebration,** arms spread in MOCKERY OF GOD, so deep is the pleasure he has derived from destroying the Raptors. In claiming this victory, LeBron will have committed a sin so monumental that the pleasure it creates matches, perhaps even exceeds, THE LORD’s capacity to forgive the amount of suffering it has caused. To celebrate in the wake of the destruction it wreaks is, frankly, inhumane.
*Boston 2010 is also an acceptable answer, thought I might argue that our man eventually got his revenge and was playing with a team that won, like, 10 games after he left. Also it doesn’t function for my thesis, so who cares.
**This does make Kevin Love the cross, but unfortunately I will have to save deep analysis of this fact for another entirely too metaphor-laden post sometime in the future.
