NEW ORLEANS — The doubts won't doom LeBron James. The questions about his athleticism at his supposedly advanced age—two weeks short of 30—won't even fluster him, no more than the oddly-assigned Luke Babbitt could on most possessions Friday.
"You can look at it in a bad way or a good way," James said late Friday night of recent critiques of his explosiveness, after tying his season-high 41 points on an economical 24 shots against the New Orleans Pelicans. "I’ve expanded the rest of my game. I’m still out there making plays. My athleticism, obviously I’m not the 18 year old kid I was before. But I can still do the things I need to do to be successful."
The aches? They won't often impede his efforts either. His left knee began to bother him in the third quarter of Tuesday's win against Toronto for reasons he couldn't identify, before it swelled on the flight to Oklahoma City. The injury caused him to miss one game and, after it swelled again on the short flight to the Bayou, made him believe he might miss another.
But he didn't miss it, and he then went on to make eight shots in Friday's first quarter, including a couple of slams.
"I felt good in my test before the game that I was put through," he said. "Just try to go out and help our team win. It was a little bit unsuccessful though."
It was.
That's because his team's defense—not James' supposed declining athleticism—is really the single thing that, at times, can still prove too much for his offensive exploits to overcome.
That was the unmistakable message of the Cavaliers' 119-114 loss to the Pelicans, who played without their superstar, Anthony Davis, for the final 41 minutes after a chest contusion briefly left him struggling to breathe. Without their All-Star power forward, who had made his first four shots, the Pelicans still made 55.7 percent of their attempts overall, including 42.9 percent on 28 heaves from behind the arc.Ryan Anderson made eight of those after making eight in the team's first meeting. His only obstacle Friday was too much idle time, left alone to let his mind wander before launching.
"We weren’t code red on their code [red] guys," James said. "Ryan Anderson is shooting 31 percent from the 3-point line. You just take our two games he played us he’s probably shooting 80 percent from the 3-point line."
Anderson is at 61.5 percent from deep against the Cavaliers this season.
He is at 27.6 percent against everyone else.
"Just not focused, that’s all it is," James said. "You’re not focused. A couple of them came off our plan, our principles, but a lot of them didn’t. Allowing him to get air space and not getting up into him and making him do something maybe he didn’t want to do. A great shooter like that, you can’t let them do what they want to do and that’s exactly what we did."
Lack of focus sounds familiar, because it's what the media have shown of late by dwelling a bit too much on the force with which James delivers his dunks. First, he's still scoring at a rapid rate, just doing it in a slight different and less efficient way than in the past few seasons. Second, it's not news that he will need to adjust over time; he has actually been acknowledging the inevitability of athletic decline for some time.
While he has indicated that he would like to play until he's 40, he knows he won't be exactly the same guy then that he is now, nor is he exactly the same guy now that he was in his first Cleveland stint.
Prior to the 2014 NBA Finals, I asked him whether he could see himself changing his game, taking the example of another (albeit stylistically different) star in Tim Duncan. He spoke of changing it already since he signed with Miami, with less isolation and more post-ups. That trend seems to have reversed with the Cavaliers, but the rest of his reply that June day still applies.
Source http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2298610-cavaliers-achilles-heel-is-team-defense-not-lebron-james-purported-decline
No comments:
Post a Comment