Tom Knott: LeBron is OK with alone time

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen

By Tom Knott

LeBron James is threatening to purge the 45-year championship drought of Cleveland, a city that wallows in its sports misery.

This is a city that has not celebrated a championship in the three major sports since 1964, when the Jim Brown-led Browns defeated the Colts to claim the NFL title.

This is a city that puts its most gut-wrenching sports moments in capital letters, from the Drive to the Fumble to the Shot. No detailed explanation is necessary if you are from Cleveland. Each moment encapsulates the suffering of Cleveland, the tired Rust Belt city that has been unable to reinvent itself.

James is the Ohioan in a Yankees cap looking to deliver Cleveland from its anguish. His personality may be hard to stomach - the crying, the whining and sense of entitlement - but his floor game is a model of efficiency.

You can debate his charisma and capacity to transcend the game in the manner of Michael Jordan. You cannot debate his dominance and ability to be whatever his team needs during a particular stretch of a game: scorer, ball distributor, defender and decoy.

That was James squeezing the life out of the Pistons in Game 1 of their series. That was James finishing with 38 points, eight rebounds, seven assists and not one turnover in nearly 41 minutes.

The Pistons took their medicine with nary a fight, save for when James was on the bench taking a rest.

What the initial peek of the NBA playoffs suggest is this: James and the Cavaliers are not going to be seriously challenged en route to the NBA Finals.

The Celtics appear to be in more trouble than originally imagined without Kevin Garnett. A Cavaliers-Magic meeting in the conference finals, if it comes to that, promises to be tepid, nothing at all like the Cavaliers-Celtics showdown in the conference semifinals last spring.

That series produced a memorable Game 7, in which Paul Pierce and James traded one basket after another and revived memories of the Larry Bird-Dominique Wilkins Game 7 duel in 1988.

James is ascending to rarefied air as a force all his own. He is not the next Jordan or Bird or Magic Johnson. Each of those legendary figures had a celebrated support system.

Jordan had Scottie Pippen, plus Dennis Rodman in three of his six championship seasons. Bird had Kevin McHale and Robert Parish, and Johnson had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and James Worthy.

James has Zydrunas Ilgauskas and Mo Williams, decent enough players but hardly game-changers. Ilgauskas, who turns 34 next month, is four years removed from his last All-Star appearance and is not nearly as active as he once was. Williams is a nice shooter but limited otherwise.

James is so good that he is mocking the NBA's conventional wisdom that championship-caliber teams are built with three special talents. That is the model in Los Angeles, San Antonio and Boston. The latter two teams are now in trouble because of the absence of an essential piece.

The Cavaliers have no such concerns, so long as James stays healthy. Their roster is adaptable enough that an injury to Ilgauskas or Williams would merely result in more minutes going to Anderson Varejao and Ben Wallace or to Wally Szczerbiak with no profound drop in production.

That reflects the remarkable power of James, the first one-man band with a genuine opportunity to lead a team to an NBA championship.

Allen Iverson could not do it in Philadelphia. Tracy McGrady grew tired of the singular load in Orlando, as did Pierce in Boston before help arrived in 2007. And let's not forget that Kobe Bryant nearly sulked his way out of Los Angeles after he tried the one-man gig.

James did not just fashion an MVP season. He obliterated the would-be challengers, Dwyane Wade and Bryant, by leading the relatively modest personnel of the Cavaliers to 66 wins.

And he just may be the one to extinguish a city's sports curse.