LeBron James’ legacy is still being written

TALKING about how people talk about LeBron James is impossible to do accurately, because everyone talks about him differently. There are devoted fans who consider LeBron the best basketball player ever.

LeBron James is going as strong as ever.

There are those who think 90 percent of the criticism of LeBron over the years is silly, but still think LeBron is just the second- or third-best player ever (behind Michael Jordan and maybe Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). There are those who consider LeBron vastly overrated, or who rate players most reasonable people rate much lower to be on par with LeBron. And there are people in every crack and crevice in between.

So it’s impossible and inaccurate to say “the way people were talking about LeBron last year, you’d think his legacy was a fixed story unable to change as his career continues,” because people never talk about LeBron or his legacy in any single way. So let’s be careful how we frame this.

It seemed as though LeBron’s tough 2018-19 season with the Lakers gave a lot of folks license to begin to write the end of his basketball story, and place an upper limit on where he could end up on the all-time list of basketball players.

For the people who went down this path … what now?

We don’t know if LeBron will win a fourth championship and make a 10th NBA Finals series. (A 10th conference championship would tie him with Kareem for third all-time behind Bill Russell and Sam Jones.) We don’t think LeBron will win a fifth MVP due to the exploits of Giannis Antetokounmpo and James Harden. He’s on track for first-team All-NBA a year after being left off a decent number of ballots. He should be No. 1 in all-star voting given his name and market and the quality of his play.

But we do know LeBron has been awesome (26-7-10 with high-effort defense), the Lakers are very, very good — 4.5 games up on the Clippers in the West, tied with the Bucks for the best record in the NBA at 24-3 — and we do know LeBron will be back in the playoffs, where he has historically been even better than in the regular season.

It’s pretty clear, 27 games into this 17th season of LeBron’s career, that his story has at least another chapter to go.

He won three championships in five years between 2012 and 2016, and famously appeared in eight straight NBA Finals series with the Heat and Cavaliers. The Lakers are on track to make that nine Finals in 10 years and perhaps four titles in a decade. He’s 3-6 in the Finals right now, and that’s used as a knock against him regardless of the Herculean task of getting his teams to the Finals in the first place. How will the narrative change if he gets back alongside a legitimate superstar in Anthony Davis? Will it discount this latest achievement, or imbue his past triumphs with extra respect?

He’s never been on a team this good where he wasn’t clearly, absolutely the best player. He might be the best player on these Lakers still, even at age 35. But it’s not a no-brainer: Davis is really, really good. Scottie Pippen was really, really good, but not as good as Davis.

Really, LeBron’s present feels like ‘80s Kareem: Abdul-Jabbar was a dominant, MVP-caliber player who also had dominant, MVP-caliber Magic Johnson with him (as well as James Worthy and other good players). If you would have written Kareem’s story at age 35, you would have missed out on three top-five MVP finishes and claiming the all-time points record (still held), blocks record (now claimed by Hakeem Olajuwon), games record (now claimed by Robert Parish), and minutes record (still held).

LeBron’s story in the NBA clearly isn’t finished. He’s about 15 games from passing Kobe Bryant on the all-time scoring list, and he’s marching up various milestone lists. And most importantly, he’s not done mattering in the standings and thus in the playoffs. Write the end of his story if you want. Just make sure you use a pencil, because it’s not over yet. – bbc.com