McCurdy: Assessing the legacy of LeBron James
The legacy of LeBron James is secure.
In the history of the NBA, it's him, Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in one order or another.
Maybe some have Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain in the mix. Surely there are a few contrarians who think Magic Johnson or Larry Bird or Oscar Robertson should be in the conversation. Same goes for Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, Tim Duncan, Steph Curry or Kevin Durant.
But the consensus list is James, Jordan and Abdul-Jabbar somewhere among the top three all time.
This isn't a comparison column between the three. If you love Jordan, you love Jordan. If you think Kareem is the best, Kareem is the best. Some favor LeBron and feel he's the best to ever play.
What's silly is all the talk of LeBron's legacy. after a failure to make the playoffs for just the fourth time in his career.
He just completed his 19th season in the NBA.
Only a rare few have played that long in the league, and he's the only one to be doing it at an All-Star and All-NBA level this deep into his career.
That counts for something.
Pulling a page from Chamberlain, he decided he wanted to lead the league in assists, so in 2019-20 at the advanced age of 35, he led the league in assists with 10.2 per game.
This year when the Los Angeles Lakers season was in ruins, he tried to become the oldest scoring champ, trumping the Jordan title earned at age 35. James came close, averaging 30.3 points at age 37 to finish behind Philadelphia center Joel Embiid's 30.6. It was the second-most points he's averaged for a season and only the third time he's crested the 30-point plateau for a year.
He's an 18-time All-Star. He will likely be an 18-time All-NBA pick as a top 15 player in the league.
He earned Rookie of the Year in 2003-04. He was named All-Star Game MVP three times including as late as 2018. Six times he made the NBA's All-Defensive teams, proving he was truly a two-way star during his athletic prime.
His four league MVP trophies, trail only the six by Abdul-Jabbar and the five by Russell and MJ.
Russell won 11 NBA championships, and no one is touching that. John Havlicek won six with Russ and two without him. Abdul-Jabbar has six rings as does Jordan. Magic, Kobe and Duncan earned five.
James has four championships, but he's earned them with three different franchises, something no other all-time great can say. He was the Finals MVP in all four of those wins.
As far as making the NBA finals, LeBron's 10 appearances are only behind the 12 by Russell and 11 by Russell teammate Sam Jones. It puts him on par with the 10 from Abdul-Jabbar, which is one better than Jerry West and Magic.
Statistically, James will likely pass Abdul-Jabbar as the NBA's all-time leading scorer next season and should become the first-ever 40,000-point career scorer.
Throw in the assists and rebounds, the triple-doubles, the shooting, the highlights, the big moments and all the other Elias Sports Bureau historical stuff he's accomplished and will accomplish, and the legacy of LeBron James is secure.
But ...
His legacy could have been more if LeBron James could have stayed out of the way of LeBron James.
His first tenure with the Cleveland Cavaliers was pocked by desperation trades and panic signings all in the hopes of keeping him happy instead of organically building a team of peers around him that made sense.
He made the Finals in 2007 with Larry Hughes, Drew Gooden, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Anderson Varejao, Eric Snow, Sasha Pavlovic, Damon Jones, Donyell Marshall and Daniel Gibson — hardly the 1986 Celtics or 1987 Lakers or the 2017 Warriors.
The next year they shook up the roster with the midseason acquisitions of Delonte West, Ben Wallace and Wally Szczerbiak. In 2009, the big get was Mo Williams at guard. In 2010, the Cavs resorted to bringing an end-of-the-line Shaq with past-prime vets Antawn Jamison and Anthony Parker.
No wonder James left for South Beach to join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh even though he was allegedly on-board with all those moves with Cleveland. Going to Miami paid off with four trips to the Finals and his first two titles, but it could have been more. Losing to the Mavericks in his first season with the Heat will always be a blot on his resume, especially with the way his looked in that series.
For his return to the North Coast, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love joined him to form a new big three and it worked. They should have won in 2015 if not for playoff injuries to Love and Irving. The Cavs did win it all in 2016. It took Golden State forming a super team with the acquisition of Kevin Durant to thwart them the next two years in the Finals.
A pair of basketball savants who sometimes struggled to collaborate, James ultimately failed to connect with Irving, and he's got to own at least half that fallout.
Seeing a dead-end situation in Cleveland during that 2018 season, LeBron took his talents to Hollywood a year after Irving was traded away.
However, it didn't take long for James to get grouchy playing alongside talented but young players like Brandon Ingram, Lonzo Ball, Kyle Kuzma and Josh Hart. He wasn't content to groom and mentor, so three of them and nearly a decade worth of draft picks were blown out for All-NBA power forward Anthony Davis. It worked in the short term. The Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA championship in 2020.
Still, as he has shown throughout his career, James remained impatient and the Lakers kept tinkering, the roster becoming a moveable feast. This past offseason they gave away all of their remaining flexibility and most of their role players for an ill-suited Russell Westbrook.
Los Angeles didn't make the playoffs, and 2022-23 doesn't look favorable.
LeBron's got to own some of that, too.
If James doesn't make the Cavaliers feel like he has one foot out the door during his first stint, if he doesn't tighten up against Dallas in 2011, if he becomes the bigger person and gives Irving room to do his thing more often while stroking his ego, if he embraces the young Lakers instead of immediately giving up on them, if he waits for Davis to join via free agency instead of trade, if he doesn't sign off on the Westbrook deal, maybe he's caught Russell for Finals appearances and Jordan for rings and Abdul-Jabbar for MVP awards.
With 12 Finals appearances, six rings and a couple more MVP trophies — along with all the other records and milestones — his claim for No. 1 atop the NBA universe would be unassailable.
Instead, someday LeBron will have to look at LeBron and wonder if things could have been better if he had been more forthright and less passive-aggressive, if he had massaged egos and toned down his own, if he had been a better judge of talent or been more patient.
As it is, his career turned out pretty darn good. No matter the ending, the legacy of LeBron James is secure.
With Jordan and Abdul-Jabbar, he keeps elite company. There's nothing wrong with that.
Rob McCurdy is a sports writer at the Marion Star and USA Today Network-Ohio and can be reached at rmccurdy@gannett.com, 419-610-0998, Twitter @McMotorsport and Instagram @rob_mccurdy_star.
This article originally appeared on Marion Star: McCurdy: Assessing the legacy of LeBron James
