12. LeBron James
It’s not just that he’s still, when he feels like it, the best basketball player on the planet on both ends of the court.
It’s not just that he’s still this good at this age, and with this much tread on the tires (over 52,000 combined minutes between regular season and playoffs. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA’s all-time leader, is at 66,297).
It’s that he’s been the unquestioned best basketball player on the planet for a longer consecutive period of time than anyone else, ever.
(You can argue he took the mantle from Kobe as early as 2006, when he won the All-Star Game MVP – not an insignificant award, considering it’s usually a you-know-what-swinging contest among the game’s best – finished second to Steve Nash for regular season MVP, and was First Team All-NBA. At the latest, it was 2008, when he finished first in PER, usage rate, scoring average, VORP and box score plus-minus. So it’s between 11 and 13 years…take your pick. Even if you choose to skip over the period from June 1993 to March 1995 and run Jordan’s time consecutively, Mike’s reign was 11 years. No one else comes close.)
Will he slow down? Probably. But with his passing, vision, frame and an improved shooting stroke that’s apparently here to stay (36 percent on 4.9 3-point attempts per game, down from over 40 earlier in the season before the Cavs began their annual mid-season swoon), is there any reason to think he can’t be a top-10 player for another, what…three? Five? Seven seasons after this one?
So let’s take all that and throw it into a box. Into the same box throw the fact that he’s about to be a free agent and the signs are all pointing in one direction: West. Take out of the box the fact that he has a no-trade clause, because if we don’t, this whole discussion is pointless. Lastly, add in the fact that Cleveland is one of a handful of teams that, should a rolled ankle befall the Warriors at the wrong time, at least have a prayer of taking home the title this year.
Look in the box…where does all that stuff leave us in terms of slotting the man who is easily the toughest player on this list to rank?
Put yourself in Dan Gilbert’s shoes. You already brought the city of Cleveland a championship, so you have some currency with the crowd. LeBron already crossed them once, so if you got out ahead of him this time and set up the Cavs for a post-LeBron future that is almost certainly coming, you’d be looked at as a hero, right?
Not if James came out after the trade and said he had no desire to ever leave his hometown again and the whole reason he never came out and said exactly that was to prevent management from getting complacent. Now, not only have you needlessly traded away the best player of his generation, but you’ve robbed yourself of at least one (and possibly multiple) title shots in the process.
To protect yourself, you’re only trading LeBron for an absolute sure thing, which is why he ends up here. Could you argue that having five more guaranteed years of John Wall, for example, is more valuable than just the rest of this season with LeBron and merely the chance of him returning? Of course…but the Cavs aren’t making that deal. Not in a million years.
(The Wizards, on the other hand, would think long and hard. They haven’t been to an NBA Finals in four decades. Such futility makes you do funny things…funny, Ian Mahinmi-shaped things)
But for a surefire young stud like Ben Simmons or Karl-Anthony Towns? Cavs fans would be upset about it for 1.78 seconds and then realize “Holy $#!+, we just got an All-NBA caliber talent in his early 20s for a guy whose jersey I once burned and whose replacement jersey I was probably going to burn again in five months! Sign me up!”
So there. That’s how the best player in the world ends up outside the top 10 on a list of the most valuable assets in the NBA. Remember, direct all vitriol-filled hate to @JCMacriNBA.