(animated orchestral music)
- LeBron James is one of the best NBA players ever,
and he has validated his excellence
by winning a whole lot.
There's a good chance James will retire
having played more playoff games
than these career leaders, and of course,
several of LeBron's playoff runs
have ended in a championship.
But before the rings, there were times
when people questioned whether LeBron
would ever lead his team to a title.
And one playoff failure in particular
sticks out among the others as a moment in which LeBron
was perceived as not just losing,
but shrinking, choking, even quitting
and doing so at a time when critics
were eager to see him fail.
This is LeBron James' worst playoff performance.
June 7th, 2011, Dallamus, Texamus.
LeBron and the Miami Heat led the NBA Finals
two wins to one after winning Game Three in Dallas
just two nights prior.
LeBron assisted the basket that made the difference
in the final minute of Game Three,
but he did give Dallas one more chance
by bricking a three in the closing seconds
of a merely okay individual outing.
In general, LeBron had been relatively quiet in the Finals,
opting to play second or third fiddle
and distribute the ball while the other Big Three gents,
especially Dwayne Wade, handled most of the scoring.
But so far so good.
And if LeBron and company could grab another road win
in Game Four to make the series three-one,
they'd have two chances to clinch the whole thing at home,
winning LeBron his first ever NBA Championship.
People would probably still grumble about LeBron
needing help to finally win a ring.
After he started this Game Four
with a forced air ball floater and a bricked three,
he took to just dumping the ball off
even against single coverage by a smaller player.
That led to nice assists to Bosh and Wade
who both had great first halves.
So let those people grumble.
You don't win the NBA Finals by yourself.
LeBron knows, he tried once.
It went poorly.
Any investigation of LeBron's worst playoff games
must pause at his first trip to the Finals.
That was with the '07 Cavaliers,
a team whose next best player was,
I don't know, Zydrunas Ilgauskas?
Larry Hughes was the only Cav besides LeBron
who even approached reliable scoring.
James put the whole team on his back
in that '07 playoff run.
It was incredible and gave us some legendary LeBron scenes.
But in June, his back carried more weight
than it could bear.
LeBron's first career Finals game
was probably his worst playoff performance
up to that point, a four-of-16,
six-turnover outing, and a Game One loss to the Spurs.
Are you okay over there?
LeBron attacked but got gobbled up by a San Antonio defense
focused on stopping him and him alone.
James said afterward, he would simply have to play better
for Cleveland to have a chance.
They did not have a chance.
They got swept.
So you can appreciate LeBron's relative comfort
deferring to his costars in 2011.
It felt good to have costars.
James finished the first half of this Game Four
with just four points on one-of-four shooting
with two turnovers.
But Wade and Bosh were cooking,
and the Heat had a two-point halftime lead.
Lead or not, James might have been wary
of swinging too far in the direction of deference.
Just a year before this in LeBron's final home game
of his first stint in Cleveland, he got booed.
That was Game Five of the 2010 Eastern Conference Semifinals
against the Celtics.
James started that game missing his first seven shots.
Discouraged and nursing a sore elbow,
he kind of curled into a ball against Boston's defense,
looking very unlike himself.
LeBron stopped attacking.
He seemed resigned to loss and reluctant to lead a comeback.
He finished with 15 points on three-of-14 shooting
in the loss.
And as his hometown fans booed, all anyone could do
was anticipate a departure,
a departure that, of course, ended up coming to pass
and put LeBron among two elite new teammates,
put him on a damn stage predicting
how many rings they'd win, then put him back in the Finals.
So a year later, you could feel
the narrative forces at play.
LeBron tried to be a hero and failed in 2007.
He got passive and failed in 2010.
Even if he succeeded in 2011, he'd get criticized
for doing so in the comfort of other superstars.
That wouldn't have been fair,
but it's a preferable outcome to what actually happened,
which was more failure.
LeBron asserted himself a bit more
in the second half to get decent looks
against Dallas's increasingly zoney defense,
and he just whiffed them.
He sealed off Shawn Marion nicely and blew the finish.
- [Announcer] Chandler, it's gonna roll out of bounds.
Miami ball.
- [Seth] He outran the Mavs
in transition and blew the finish.
He caught and fired a wide open three and blew it.
He earned a couple free throws and blew both of them.
He found a pull-up look out of the pick and roll
and blew it.
In the fourth, the scores started
to reflect LeBron's struggles.
Miami led by as much as nine,
but James helped Dallas get back into it
by traveling and forcing a bad pass to Bosh,
then chucking a tough brick over DeShawn Stevenson.
Miami surrendered their lead, then struggled
to get a clean look on their final possession.
- Miller puts it up, air ball! (crowd cheering)
And that's it!
- They lost Game Four, squandering a crucial chance
to pull way ahead in the series.
While Bosh and Wade's numbers held up fine in defeat,
LeBron's were sad.
He attempted just 11 shots and hit only three
four eight points.
He grabbed nine boards and tossed seven assists
but turned the ball over four times
and committed four fouls, a horrid line.
But not his worst ever going purely off statistics.
Basketball Reference, the best website on Earth,
uses a helpful metric called game score.
It's not an end all, be all, but for this exercise,
it's a helpful summary.
LeBron has remarkably few inefficient
or even below average playoff games in his career,
but one has the lowest game score by far.
It's this stinker of a Game One against Boston in 2008,
two-of-18 shooting, 12 points,
more turnovers than assists, bad.
But context matters.
That opponent was the first and best version
of the Big Three Celtics, the eventual NBA Champions.
And LeBron would go on to play a couple great games
in that series, including 45 points to nearly lead
this weak Cleveland roster to a Game Seven victory.
As for the context of this 2011 dud,
well, we've mentioned that LeBron was already taking shit
for forming a super team or whatever,
and that blowing Game Four, a collapse for which LeBron
became the easy scapegoat, made the critical difference
between a three-one series lead and a two-two tie.
We haven't mentioned that after the game,
noted pest DeShawn Stevenson could legitimately say
LeBron checked out on his teammates.
We haven't mentioned that before Game Four,
Dallas's Jason Terry gave Miami some bulletin board material
saying LeBron needed to show he could perform well
for seven games, that he'd done it for Games One and Three,
but could he do it in Game Four?
And, you know, he couldn't.
Jason Terry of all people, came at the King
and the King responded by laying an egg.
Terry even cooked LeBron on more than one occasion
in the fourth quarter.
Then he exploded for 48 points off the bench
across Games Five and Six and got to do
his stupid jet plane celebration a bunch.
Which leads us to the ultimate context for this,
the Heat went on to lose the series in six.
LeBron's turd of a Game Four sparked Miami's downfall
from likely champion to runner-up.
So here at the time was a guy
who couldn't get Cleveland a ring,
joined up with his buddies and still couldn't get a ring
because he sputtered in a pivotal game.
He made Jason Terry look cool.
Jason Terry, the guy who already had the championship trophy
tattooed on his arm.
But there's more.
After Dallas won it all, critics focused
on LeBron's stark statistical drop-off in the series,
especially the super diminished scoring numbers.
And they remembered that day LeBron spent
counting his future rings.
- Not two, not three, not four,
not five, not six, not seven! (crowd cheering)
- [Seth] In response, LeBron got kind of spiteful.
- All the people that was rooting on me to fail,
at the end of the day, they gotta wake up tomorrow,
have the same life that they had before they woke up today.
- [Seth] Not a great look,
but look how far we've come since.
That ugly summer motivated LeBron.
He won a ring and Finals MVP one year later
and a year after that, and then just for good measure,
he returned to Cleveland and did it there, too.
You can find occasional substandard nights
and criticism in between the rings but nothing like 2011.
This game was a deep, dark valley,
though, with plenty of peaks to follow.
Nothing before or since quite matched
the humiliation of that Game Four,
and LeBron himself recommends putting it on
if you want to lull your baby to sleep.
But at the time, this was no laughing matter
for LeBron James.
It was ghastly blend of passivity and excess.
It was failure in the most critical of moments.
It was the most delicious possible fodder
for all kinds of hungry haters.
It was, thankfully for LeBron, not a sign of things to come.
It was a dismal performance in a dismal game
in a dismal series that headlined a dismal summer.
It was the worst.