LeBron James: Injuries May Have Affected Title Count

LeBron James has been one of the most durable NBA superstars we’ve ever seen. He’s never missed more than 20 games in a season, and that only happened once (in 2011-12). The Cleveland Cavaliers‘ hometown hero has often been referred to as a “freak of nature”, a “T-1000” or even an “alien” because of his seemingly unnatural ability to avoid injury while managing to take on monumentally difficult tasks.

And yet, as ironic as it might seem, injuries may have affected his title count. Not his injuries. Oh no. I’m talking about the injuries of his teammates. Let’s just think about this for a minute.

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James managed to take an extremely crappy 2007 Cavaliers team to the Finals, where they got swept by the Spurs. That gives you the initial idea of not only how good the King is, but how used he is to the task of carrying a team where he needs to take them.

Fast forward to the 2010-11 season. James, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade have just joined forces in Miami. Despite a plethora of (shoulder) bumps and jawing along the way, they manage to make it to the Finals. Both Wade and Bosh are healthy. James is too, but he has one of the most odd series ever played by a great player and comes up very small against an inferior team while his partners in crime try to win it all themselves.

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Then: the Heat lose in six games and LeBron undergoes a quiet summer, coming back next season a more experienced, mentally tougher player; and better for it. He and the Heat romp through the season, while Wade deals with more injuries than the year prior (Wade played 76 games in 2010-11 and just 49 in 2011-12).

They make the Finals again, this time against an inexperienced Oklahoma City squad. James goes bananas, never planning to wilt under the brightest lights again. Wade in particular plays all right, but because of James’ brilliance and the collapse of the Kevin Durant–Russell Westbrook–James Harden Thunder, no one really seems to notice.

LeBron finally has his title. Suddenly, everyone believes that because he’s “figured things out,” and that he’ll go on to win many more. So we go on …

The Heat are a machine by this point. An aging, but terrifying, machine. They go on a 27-game win streak and ease their way into the playoffs. They make it to the Finals again. James plays arguably the best series of his life, but it’s not enough. He needs more, as any great player does: he needs his teammates.

Wade is dealing with more issues as time goes on. By this point, he can only seem to give greatness in spurts. In this series, it was every other game. With Manu Ginobli in the same predicament, the two go back and forth, trying to be the final deciding factor.

The two really seem to cancel each other out, and the big blow is perhaps the greatest shot in basketball, made by Jesus Shuttlesworth himself, Ray Allen. James continues his great play, helps the Heat win Game 6 and then go on to take out a tired Spurs team in Game 7.

Two titles.

James drags his squad through his last year in Miami, though no one knows it yet. The franchise acquired Michael Beasley and Greg Oden, thinking they would be worthwhile additions. They were wrong. Wade is hardly able to play with any consistency by this point due to his knees, and the team does all the can to save him during the regular season while loading up the rest of the responsibilities on LeBron.

They make it to the Finals, again, for the fourth straight year. The King shows up to play, but this time, his teammates have no gas left. They’re all too old or too injured, and the bench is light without the help that Beasley and Oden were supposed to provide.

Despite James playing very well, the Heat get blown away by record margins and the Spurs win in five.

This is perhaps where the realization sunk in completely. The realization that if Wade had been healthy during this entire run, things would have been vastly different. They would’ve won the previous two titles, like they did, but more impressively. They could’ve won against the Spurs a second time, perhaps, as well.

But Wade played like a shell of himself, and even Bosh didn’t seem all there. Imagine if that team had won the title again and had a three-peat. LeBron almost certainly wouldn’t have left, and if Wade (and Bosh, of course) had continued to be healthy (or at least had limited injuries), they could’ve become a true dynasty.

But it didn’t happen. James was cost a title and he left, coming home to Cleveland where he was promised many things. Among those things was a young rising star in Kyrie Irving, who played like a spinning top with no direction. Kevin Love joined in soon after James made his announcement and a new Big Three was formed.

Zip ahead to just a few months ago. The Cavs found their way through early turmoil with some of LBJ’s age starting to show, and a bunch of minor injuries affected pretty much the entire team. But it didn’t matter, because they made the playoffs and everything looked great.

In the first round, Love gets tied up and goes down with Kelly Olynyk. Season-ending injury.

Over the next few series, Irving starts to play less and less as his knee and foot begin to fail him. He manages to get all the way to his first Finals, plays in Game 1, and then leaves early only to find out that he has a fractured patella. Season-ending injury.

The Cavs also lost Game 1, which leaves LeBron, much like the season prior, alone on an island with a group of less-than-stellar players to take on his most fearsome opponent yet – the Golden State Warriors.

LeBron goes on to explode and have one of the most insane Finals ever, putting up video game numbers against a great team. But again, without his two star teammates he simply can’t manage it. Not against a team as good as Golden State.

Another potential title down the drain.

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LeBron has been to The Finals six times (five of them in a row). In one of them (2007), he was 22 years old and his squad was so bad that no one can remember the names of five other guys not named LeBron. In two of them, he won (2012, 2013). In two more (2014, 2015), injuries to teammates let him down. Only in one (2011) can you lay any blame on him, and it remains quite bizarre to this day.

The point here is this: injuries have cost James potentially two titles already, maybe more. If he had those two, he’d have a total of four, which would match his MVP total and give him far more legitimacy (to most people) in the G.O.A.T debate.

For all of his greatness, James has been unlucky throughout his career. His legacy holds this in an iron grip. Uninformed fans may state that he didn’t win more titles because he simply wasn’t good enough. This is false.

And now, here we are, just a couple months from the start of the 2015-16 NBA season, and news breaks that Kyrie Irving may not play until January. Another blow. And, perhaps, another disturbing sign of things to come.

This coming so soon after James had posted this to his Instagram makes the news even more bittersweet, not only to Cavs fans but the King himself. How can the man not be having nightmares of having to drag the corpse of Wade through basketball battle with this news?

Make no mistake: LeBron James is even better than his career would lead you to believe.

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