The evolution of LeBron James Standard Hero, above Lead Media
How James always stayed one step ahead of the defenses designed to stop him
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LeBron James walked into the NBA able to hang 25 points on a good defense. I mean that literally: The first game he ever played as a pro, on Oct. 29, 2003, came against a Sacramento Kings team that had finished the previous season second in the league in defensive efficiency … and he scored 25 points.
It wasn’t the highest-scoring debut the NBA had ever seen; that record, like so many others, belongs to Wilt. But it was (and still is) the high-water mark for an 18-year-old — a “mesmerizing” performance, as The Associated Press put it, that featured “skills no teenager had ever displayed at this level” and more than lived up to the towering hype surrounding the No. 1 pick in the 2003 NBA Draft.
"I was just fortunate to get some shots, and they fell through,” James told reporters after the game. “Most of the moves I used in high school, I could use here."
It’s true: Much of what James put on display that first night in Sacramento, he’d already showcased at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio, where he’d become one of the most decorated and highly touted prep players ever. LeBron had drawn comparisons to Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady and Magic Johnson as a sophomore; he was anointed Michael Jordan’s heir apparent, The Chosen One, before his senior year ... in high school.
He was, as Ian Thomsen wrote in his 2018 book, “The Soul of Basketball,” “the most gifted prospect the NBA scouts had ever seen … the anticipation for his greatness was almost universal.” It’s a long road from anticipation to actualization, though — and an even longer one from that first one-dribble baseline pull-up to the shot that moved James ahead of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and into position as the all-time leading scorer in NBA history.
ames entered the league able to score 25, yes, but he didn’t enter fully formed. Reaching this point took a step-by-step, year-over-year process that saw LeBron develop from an overwhelming physical talent into a precise, multifaceted craftsman — a process that, in some ways, traces the evolution of NBA offense over the past two decades.
LeBron opened his NBA account by running off a screen for a pull-up, but he wasn’t exactly playing like Rip Hamilton as a teenager. His game wasn’t built on the purportedly lost art of the midrange jumper; it was, and remains, predicated on a peerless gift for getting into the paint. According to Cleaning the Glass, shots at the rim or from “floater range” (outside the restricted area, but inside the foul line) accounted for 58% of James’ field-goal attempts as a rookie; have accounted for 59% of his attempts this season; and have made up between 47% and 66% of his shots in every season in between.
Even as an 18-year-old, James’ unprecedented combination of size, strength, speed and skill made him both a physical marvel and a marvel of physics — able to explode past perimeter defenders at the point of attack, accelerate through the crowd in the lane, stay on balance through contact without getting knocked off-course and dish out at least as much punishment as he took in the process.
“As big as he is, you got to hope he don’t just run you over and give you a concussion,” longtime NBA swingman Stephen Jackson said in Chris Ballard’s 2010 book, “The Art of a Beautiful Game.”
As big as he is, you got to hope he don’t just run you over and give you a concussionStephen Jackson
That strength, paired with James’ famously ambidextrous excellent finishing touch, has made him the premier interior scorer of the past two decades. James has shot 70% or better at the rim in 17 of his 20 seasons (including this one). He has led the league in points scored in the paint per game three times — 2012-13, 2013-14 and 2015-16 — and has ranked in the top five in 13 seasons (including this one). The 17,778 points (and counting) that James has scored in the key alone would be good for 84th on the all-time scoring list, even if he’d never made a single outside shot or free throw.
“Once I work up a head of steam,” James said in “Basketball: A Love Story,” “there’s nobody who can stop me.”
What could stop him, though, was the sort of traffic jam that kept you from working up a head of steam in the first place.
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Fixing a flaw
The early-2000s NBA scarcely resembled today’s spread-out, free-flowing ecosystem. Teams tended toward plodding play — the fastest-paced squad of 2003-04 (Jeff Bzdelik’s Nuggets) averaged fewer possessions per 48 minutes than this season’s slowest (J.B. Bickerstaff’s Cavaliers) — and rarely ventured out into the deep end of the pool. This season, 38.7% of teams’ field-goal attempts have come from behind the 3-point arc. In LeBron’s rookie season, it was just 18.7%.
The league he entered was a largely elbows-and-in enterprise — the sort of tight squeeze where, when you ran a pick-and-roll up top, you might reach the other side of the screen and see eight or nine bodies inside the arc, at least a handful of which were parked in the paint. Even the biggest, strongest and quickest slashers would struggle to consistently carve a path through all that congestion; in a related story, James took more than half of his attempts from midrange as a rookie and attempted more shots outside the paint than within it.
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Those condensed coverages revealed one of the few flaws in young LeBron’s game: an inconsistent jumper. He shot just 33.2% from midrange as a rookie, and 29% from 3-point range — 72nd out of 74 players to launch at least 200 triples that season. (Another sign of how times have changed: 112 players have already attempted that many this season.)
That next step began in earnest the following summer. From Ballard’s “The Art of a Beautiful Game:”
Just as Tiger Woods remade his swing at the height of his career, James spent the summer of 2008 quietly reconstructing his jumper, working with Cavs assistant and former NBA sharpshooter Chris Jent five days a week, for an hour and a half per session. Over that summer LeBron worked to develop what Jent described as a “calmer” shot. This meant better balance — when shooting on the move, James had to contend with the considerable momentum created by his weight — and keeping his shooting elbow locked at his side so that, as James put it, “The ball will go straight instead of veering off sometimes.”
The brick-by-brick rebuild focused first on finding the right form and then on developing more comfort from distance — from one-handed shots to one-dribble jumpers and free throws before extending out to midrange and beyond. Year over year, James’ percentages ticked up. By the final year of his first stint in Cleveland, he was up to 40% from midrange. By the time he won his first title in Miami in 2012, he was up to 38% from deep. And when he faced the Spurs again in the 2013 Finals, he felt fully prepared to beat that coverage if San Antonio dusted it off.
“If you go [under] my pick-and-roll now, I'm going to shoot. And I'm confident I'm going to make every last one of them,” he told reporters. “I'm a better player, and you can't dare me to do anything I don't want to do in 2013."
It’s not the enduring image of that classic series; Ray Allen from the corner in Game 6 will always hold that distinction. But it was James who dominated Game 7 to secure Miami’s second straight title, shooting 9-for-20 away from the rim, including 5-for-10 from long distance, and finishing things off with a 19-foot jumper with 27.9 seconds to go — a measure of revenge best served ice cold, after six long years in the freezer.
