“I’m not promising a championship,” wrote LeBron James in the 2014 press release-cum-open letter in Sports Illustrated that heralded his return to the Cleveland Cavaliers. “I want to win next year, but I’m realistic.” Of course, nothing about James has ever been realistic. One crucial fact—the otherworldliness of his ability on the court—has occasioned a science-fictional life. His acquaintance with an absurd, ever-intensifying celebrity began in high school, and, in response to that fame, and to the varied fruits of his talent, he has been trailed ever since by an antiphony of hosannas and heckles, overstated in both directions. The Sports Illustrated essay was an admirable attempt to curb expectations, but the terms of the basketball-watching public’s engagement with James have been clear for far too long: we have seen nothing quite like him, and so we accept from him nothing less than the heretofore impossible. Nike notwithstanding, there are no mere “Witnesses” to James’s greatness. We have waited, worried, praised, parsed, criticized, kvelled, but never been content simply to watch. This—a kind of mutual activeness—is the real joy of fandom in the LeBron Era: James is a rich text, a better subject for exegesis, for a kind of participatory reading, than any player before him. (In this respect, at least, he bests Michael Jordan, comparisons with whom, in the coming weeks, are inevitable. Jordan was a great individual player who then became a “winner,” and an exceptionally “ruthless” competitor. But, while Jordan’s competitiveness has occasioned some retrospective psychological profiling, he was not, during his playing days, laid out on the Freudian couch the way James has been.)
Last night’s thrilling N.B.A. Finals finale—Cavs 93, Warriors 89—will be pored over for years to come, and rightly so. This latest of James’s three N.B.A. titles will eclipse the rest as the prime evidence for his place among the likes of Jordan, Magic Johnson, Bill Russell, et al. Though the specifics of James’s performance—a 27-11-11 triple double in the final game, two forty-plus-point outings before that, an underwhelming supporting cast, save Kyrie Irving—his triumph over the Warriors will be remembered mainly as a perfect piece of narrative. He was prophetic in that open letter, if unsuccessful in taming the fans: that first year went bad in the Finals, and so this was an unlikely redemptive exercise, something out of a string-scored sports movie. Game 7 started punch for punch. There were good signs for the Cavs: some aggression on the boards and on defense from Kevin Love, and a continuation of Kyrie Irving’s series-long adventure in impressive shotmaking—several mid-rangers skidded off the glass and through the net. James was calmly himself—a diet of drives to the rim and placid dishes to the open shooters around and behind him. Still, the most impressive thing happening was the reëmergence of the Warriors’ Draymond Green as a dominating factor in the series. Green hit three after three, at one point executing a balletic crossover-to-lefty-layup that threw his home crowd into cheering fits. At the half, Green had already amassed twenty-two points, six rebounds, and five assists, testament, yes, to his indispensability, but also, indirectly, to the idea that his suspension from Game 5 was a death knell for his team. I expect the sequence that gave rise to the suspension, a flick of Green’s fist toward James’s groin, in Game 4, to garner Zapruder-level scrutiny as LeBron’s legend—and the bittersweet story of the 73–9 Warriors—carries on. There’s something in it for the conspiracy theorists (the fix was in!), the advocates for James’s genius (the step he took over Green’s body before Green swiped at him might be read as a bit of canny baiting), and, perhaps rightly, those looking for a scapegoat: Green’s got a long summer ahead.
Anyway, the Warriors were up seven at the half, and, given the fact that Steph Curry and Klay Thompson were due for their customary breakouts, there was every reason to think that they’d hold on.
Not so. In the third, Kyrie Irving—who may be the series’s main beneficiary in terms of new esteem, fully deserved—started in, again, with the layups. At one point, he hopped off the wrong foot, then flung an angular volley toward a corner of the backboard, where it dove, as if magnetized, through the rim. Irving has proved himself one of the great H-O-R-S-E players in recent memory. More back and forth; more inching toward the game’s close; more unstoppable drives and passes from James. James was especially impressive on defense, where, late in the game, he ruined what should have been—what would_ _have been, against any other gravity-bound player—a routine fastbreak by soaring into a fearsome, chasing block of Andre Iguodala, who looked as though he’d seen, and been directly addressed by, a six-foot-eight-inch-tall ghost. The game, still tied toward the end—and therefore still ripe, perennially ripe, for lit-critical attention—was won by another Irving dazzler, a totally guarded three-pointer that sailed through the hoop and into posterity.
The series, and the season, ended in tears, as these things often do. After several hugs, James crumpled floorward in dramatic fashion, holding his face. Expert that he is on the topic of his own person, and on the insane but somehow understandable attention that he attracts, he had to know that he was enacting an ending (one, as Irving later said, “for the books”)—at least until we ask for another.
