Can LeBron James pull off his second-greatest NBA playoff feat?
The way this Lakers season has taken should be considered one of the franchise’s great what-ifs, it could have been, we’ll never know…
Shared regret for a legion of Lakers fans who, throughout the 15-2 March, were vibing with their team, screaming with enthusiasm like 6-year-olds and riding hard on Luka Doncic’s MVP campaign.
But then things changed – Doncic’s Level 2 hamstring strain and Austin Reaves’ Level 2 oblique strain – and now it should be obvious: With two of their three best players sidelined indefinitely, we should expect the Lakers to close the book on this season soon, unless …
Unless LeBron James can achieve the second greatest feat of his 23-year career.
Unless he can carry the Lakers past the highly favored Rockets in a best-of-seven series that begins Saturday at Crypto.com Arena.
Unless the Lakers’ latest superstar – in what could be his last fight on this team or in this league, no one really knows – can hold the door long enough for Doncic and Reaves to recover and re-enter the fray for the second round.
Yes, the Lakers are relying on a 41-year-old player who started the season sidelined because of sciatica.
Their season rests entirely on the broad shoulders of the team’s willing third wheel.
It’s all about the guy who capped off the regular season by winning his 70th conference player of the week, who won four NBA titles and three gold medals, but who couldn’t have made it through the first round of the last playoffs if it had taken the Minnesota Timberwolves more than five games to beat the Lakers. Recall that James suffered a grade 2 sprain of the medial collateral ligament in his left knee during the decisive defeat.
So don’t hold your breath. But you shouldn’t rule out LeBron either; the kid from Akron has already defied all odds.
He would tell you he beat them all the time, from his early days to where he is now, a billionaire basketball player-slash-businessman, he scored more points than anyone, ever. He makes history every time he steps on the field, including sometimes with his son Bronny.
If the famous meme is to be believed, even LeBron can’t believe this is his life.
LeBron James passes Sacramento’s DeMar DeRozan for a reverse dunk.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
However, he believes he is the GOAT.
He said it on an episode of ESPN’s “More Than An Athlete” in 2018, as he reflected on how the Cleveland Cavaliers came back from a 3-1 series deficit to beat the 73-win Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals two years earlier: “I said to myself, ‘That one made you the greatest player of all time.'”
No team had won more regular season games than Stephen Curry’s team in 2016. And no team had rebounded from a 3-1 championship round deficit until LeBron’s Cavaliers. That’s largely thanks to his back-to-back 41-point efforts in Games 5 and 6, and his comeback in Game 7, when he scored 11 of his 27 points in the fourth quarter and made the iconic series-saving chase block that set up Kyrie Irving’s game-winner.
A beaten fourth-seeded Lakers team beating the fifth-seeded Rockets in the first round will not surpass that number. Nothing will.
It won’t make a difference to the big GOAT either. debate; if that 3-1 comeback didn’t do for you what it did for LeBron in your personal pantheon of greatest players, there’s no point in having the conversation.
But winning this series against an athletic, physical, long-winded Rockets team that has won nine of its last 10 games? Consider this the second most impressive achievement of James’ decades-spanning career.
Create a real problem for Houston and do it without Doncic, who had 36 and 40 points respectively in the Lakers’ last victories against the Rockets?
Bounce back from terribly depressing injury news to take down the best rebounding team in the NBA?
Just the 3-1 comeback would be close. That would be a more astonishing feat than his other three championships, including the one with the Lakers in the difficult confines of the Orlando bubble.
That would top LeBron’s 45-point explosion to save the Miami Heat from elimination against the Boston Celtics in 2012, or the game in which he scored 29 of the Cavaliers’ final 30 points to help topple the top-seeded Detroit Pistons in the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals. Or any other major victory your dart might land on.
It would be that monumental of an upheaval. That an unlikely outcome. That epic.
And that’s why almost no one outside of the Lakers believes in them.
Lakers forward LeBron James starts a fast break against the Spurs.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
All six CBS Sports experts picked Houston; NBA.com has the Rockets winning in five games, the Athletic did so in six games. Eleven of ESPN’s 12 tipsters have gone with the Rockets, and the betting sites have them all as heavy favorites, with DraftKings favoring Houston by 4.5 points in the first game – in Los Angeles.
Let’s be realistic, rational thinking suggests the obvious: it’s over.
Unless …
Unless James can play with Father Time and pull off another odds-defying dead lift for the ages.
