LeBron James has left a trail of shell-shocked and disappointed opponents throughout his impressive 22-year NBA career. “King James” has earned his nickname not only for being a four-time NBA champ, but for the way in which he lorded over the Eastern Conference for so long, at one point getting to the Finals eight years in a row.
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LeBron has always drawn praise for his court vision and his ability to make his teammates better, which makes it easy to forget that this is the same guy who is the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. Throughout his career, he’s had many stretches where he just beats a team nearly single-handedly.
One of those instances occurred in the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals against the Pistons. This was LeBron’s fourth year in the league, and despite being on a Cavs team that was laughably undermanned otherwise, LeBron dragged that team to the first Finals appearance in his career, and the first in Cleveland’s franchise history.
Chris Webber appeared on The Dan Patrick Show yesterday, and he reminisced about the time LeBron dropped 48 points, including the final 25 all in a row, on his Pistons in Game 5 of that series, a streak which included the game-winning layup in double overtime to give the Cavs a 3-2 series lead. OK, maybe reminisced is the wrong word here.
When reminded by Patrick that LeBron nearly hit the half-century mark in that game, Webber laughed and responded, “Thanks, I’ma call Rasheed Wallace and remind him of that … That’s something that hurt Rasheed the most as a defensive player, that it was one guy on the floor that we couldn’t stop. Whatever he did, he hurt our feelings and kept us from a championship.”
LeBron James was a one-man wrecking crew even early in his career
That Pistons team was no tomato can. They had beaten Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal and the Lakers for the title just three years prior, and still had mostly the same core of Chauncey Billups, Rip Hamilton, Rasheed Wallace and Tayshaun Prince. Webber was at the tail end of his career, but he still averaged 11.3 points and 6.7 rebounds in the regular season in his only year in Detroit.
Webber never did win a ring, but he’s a Hall-of-Famer who had a great career by any other measure. Seeing him shake his head and laugh when remembering that game just puts into perspective how incredible LeBron has been. When you make even a Hall-of-Famer feel completely helpless, you must be something special.
Even against a team as talented as the Pistons, LeBron was clearly the best player in that series. That wasn’t enough in the Finals though, as he and the Cavs ran into a Spurs buzzsaw, getting swept 4-0. That’s when Tim Duncan prophetically told LeBron after the series, “This is going to be your league in a little while,” then cracked him up by saying, “I appreciate you letting us have this year.”
Duncan and the Spurs didn’t let LeBron have it quite so easily after that year, as they met two other times in the Finals, in back-to-back years when LeBron was on the Heat. The first time, Miami won in seven after Ray Allen saved them with his famous shot in Game 6, but the Spurs got revenge a year later, effectively ending the Heat dynasty and sending LeBron back to Cleveland.
