The greatest players in NBA history all have their iconic moments, those times when they reached a higher plane with their play. For LeBron James, one of the most important moments of his career came in the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals. This was his second season with the Miami Heat, and to this point, he’d still never won an NBA title despite reaching the Finals twice.
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LeBron was the best player in the league, but he constantly had to hear about how he didn’t step up when it mattered the most. Just the year before, he and the Heat had been upset by the Dallas Mavericks in the Finals, proving that his “It’s gonna be easy” talk when he and the rest of the Big 3 were introduced in Miami was just empty words.
Rajon Rondo remembers what happened next, because he was there to see it first-hand. His Celtics had won the title in 2008 and had lost to the hated Lakers in 2010. Boston’s core group of Rondo, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen were trying to get back for one more chance at a ring, but this was when LeBron leveled up.
Rondo was on this week’s episode of Thanalysis with Thanasis Antetokounmpo, and he spoke about how with a 3-2 lead, the Celtics had absolutely no answer for LeBron in Game 6. “There was nothin’ no one could do,” he said. “And I was very frustrated, ’cause usually I was always able to figure it out, and I couldn’t.”
Rondo led the Celtics with 21 points, but that was no match for what LeBron did. He silenced the hostile TD Garden crowd with 45 points on 19-26 shooting. He was an assassin, and Rondo recalled “That look in his eyes” that told the Celtics that they were not winning that game.
The Heat would go on to win Game 7 and then the Finals over the Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook-led Thunder. They defended their title the next year against the Spurs, but Rondo believes that if the Celtics had won the 2012 ECF, that would have been the end of the Heat as we knew them.
“I feel like if we woulda beat them in that particular game, they were done for, and then he would probably try to figure out somewhere else to go,” he said. LeBron would not be denied though, no matter what the Celtics tried.
“We threw everybody at him, we threw all our best defensive players,” Rondo recalled. “I tried to guard him a couple possessions, he just shoot me out of there like a little fly. He really took advantage of that moment, and he capitalized, and his career went where it is now.”
Every great player and great team has to get over the hump at some point. To be the champ, you gotta beat the champ, and those Celtics were the biggest impediment in LeBron’s path. Maybe Rondo is right that the Celtics could have broken up the Big 3 Heat by winning that series, but instead it was LeBron who put an end to that Celtics era by playing the game of his life.
Ray Allen left to join LeBron on the Heat the next year, and the fading Celtics got bounced in the first round of the 2013 playoffs. LeBron went on to win his second straight title, while Garnett and Pierce were traded to the Nets a week later.
