LeBron James May Go Down As The Greatest Loser Ever

Last edited Wed Jun 17, 2015, 12:34 AM - Edit history (1)

Hypothetically, if Cleveland doesn't come back win game 6 and game 7 it has to be something for Cleveland lore to put down the greatest finals performance ever and still lose the series. (According to metrics Andre Igoudala is putting in the best performance for Golden State).

LeBron James’s Cleveland Cavaliers might be trailing the Golden State Warriors 3-2 in the NBA Finals. The Cavs might, as their Vegas odds suggest, have a mere 12 percent chance of winning the NBA championship. But according to just about every statistical measurement available, the self-proclaimed “best player in the world” is having a series for the ages.

Build a bare-bones performance metric that simply adds a player’s points, rebounds and assists and then divides by the number of games the team played,1 and James’s 2015 finals ranks as the best of the past 30 years.

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So at either pole of the complexity spectrum, James has been the top player of these finals. (Neil Greenberg of the Washington Post and ESPN Insider’s Kevin Pelton came to similar conclusions using a few more metrics of varying intricacy.) And from a historical perspective, output of this level usually leads to winning the NBA Finals and the NBA Finals MVP: Every player near James’s combined total of points, rebounds and assists ended up garnering MVP honors.

In a vacuum, then, James’s performance has been so historically strong that it would be a shame for him not to win the award.

But on the other hand, if the Warriors win the series and the MVP goes to James, it will be the first time that a member of the losing team has received the honor since 1969, when Jerry West of the Los Angeles Lakers won in spite of the Boston Celtics’ championship. And, as Pelton notes, the culture of denying MVP honors to a nonchampion has grown in the intervening years, across all sports.

In the NBA alone, nine players since 1985 have been the best player in their series by PAR through five games yet failed to win the MVP after their teams lost. (To a certain extent, this also speaks to what can happen between Games 5 and 7 of a series between closely matched teams.) In 2011, Dwyane Wade — then James’s teammate on the Miami Heat — outplayed Dirk Nowitzki to a greater extent than James has outplayed presumptive Warriors MVP candidate Stephen Curry4 thus far yet still lost the award to the Dallas Mavericks star. So as great as James has been, it might not be enough to justify the award if Cleveland loses the series.

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As Tom Haberstroh wrote over the weekend, James’s physical workload during these finals has been termed “unfathomable” (among other things) by sports science experts. At the limits of human endurance and on-court influence — through his shooting and passing, James was involved in 70 of Cleveland’s 91 points in Game 5 — there may be no numbers that can do justice to how irreplaceable James has been for the Cavaliers in this series.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/lebron-james-may-go-down-as-the-greatest-loser-ever/

Hopefully Cleveland wins the series so James can get credit for this.