LeBron James might be the only person invested in the fate of the Cleveland Cavaliers who didn’t show any signs of panic when the Indiana Pacers went up 2-1 with a comeback road win on Friday. LeBron’s teams hadn’t lost a first round playoff game in half a decade. For the Cavaliers to lose twice in three games seemed like a sign the reign of LeBron was ending.
The Pacers are good and the Cavaliers were clearly still figuring out their identity after turning over half of the rotation at midseason. Really, that’s all the Cavs have been doing since early February. Heck, before that, the Cavs were really just trying to figure out how to play in a new world without Kyrie Irving. Injuries — particularly the untimely post-trade injury to Kevin Love — only delayed and warped that process. Indiana is a particularly funky, anachronistic foe, making the playoff adjustments even weirder.
It’s all been a big mess for the Cavaliers this season, and going down 2-1 in a first round playoff series seemed to herald doom.
You wouldn’t know it watching LeBron, though.
This is a hallmark of LeBron’s personality: the dude never panics. He doesn’t even panic when he perhaps ought to panic! (I’m reminded of the 2011 NBA Finals, when he couldn’t get clean looks and needed to attack aggressively to escape Shawn Marion and dislodge Tyson Chandler but just ... didn’t.) LeBron is one of the most calming forces the game has ever seen, and it’s not fake on-court coolness. You see it both on the hardwood and at the podium. He’s just remarkably chill about what’s happening around him and the team.
As the Cavaliers contemplated what it meant to be down 2-1 in the first round, LeBron reminded everyone that he led the team back from a 3-1 deficit to a 73-win Warriors squad in the NBA Finals just two years ago. (That’s right: LeBron sort of invoked the classic “never forget that the Warriors gave up a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals” joke). If LeBron could beat a 3-1 deficit in the Finals, surely a 2-1 deficit in the first round isn’t a problem.
We can all rationalize why the situations are different, of course. And in the wake of Friday’s game, we did. We talked about the lack of top-level talent around him, we investigated his role in the unreliable Cleveland defense. But LeBron, at the very least, never let on that he was at all concerned that the Cavaliers would lose this series.
In a way, that refusal to panic became a self-fulfilling prophecy. LeBron declared that there was no reason to worry, and that calmness helped Cleveland survive another patented furious Pacers comeback to win Game 4 and even the series. Calmness wasn’t just a reaction to a loss: it was a path to victory.
LeBron is the one constant Cleveland has relied on all season. The Cavaliers have played almost three dozen different starting lineups this season. Only LeBron has had a place in all of them. Love starts every game, but injury knocked him out at the most critical juncture of the season. George Hill has been a consistent starter since arriving in February, but injury knocked him into street clothes for Game 4. The rotation has been a whirlwind of bodies. Tristan Thompson went from DNP-CDs in the first three games to first-quarter minutes in Game 4. Kyle Korver is starting despite coming off the bench almost all year. Cedi Osman is out of the rotation despite starting at various points this season. The other three midseason newcomers — Jordan Clarkson, Rodney Hood, and Larry Nance — are getting sporadic crunch time minutes. Even coach Tyronn Lue had to miss games down the stretch due to health.
It’s fitting, then, that Cleveland counts on LeBron’s steady calm to guide them through the storm here in the playoffs. His talent is so enormous that we too often overlook how his personality shapes his teams. Moreso than other all-time greats, he exudes a coolness in the face of crisis that infects his team.
Perhaps in the regular season that too often manifests as a relax, devil-may-care attitude that costs wins and results in tough playoff seeding. (One imagines that LeBron would rather not being dealing with the Pacers right now, though Miami would have posed its own annoyances due to physicality.)
But there’s a real benefit in standing tall and resolute in the face of a storm. LeBron may not fully believe in the team around him, and that lack of faith could result in him leaving Cleveland this summer. For now, though, it’s the team he has, and he’s going to tell us he believes in it until the Cavaliers’ season is over.
That faith — in himself, mostly, but in the other guys too — carried Cleveland to a survival victory in Game 4 and could get them out of the first round. Given where the rest of the East stands right now, with Boston and Toronto locked in 2-2 series against inferior opponents, that faith could get the Cavaliers all the way back to the NBA Finals.
Well, that faith and LeBron’s basketball brilliance. Without that, the faith is empty. It works because LeBron can back it up.
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