BOSTON: LeBron James will belong in the top three NBA MVP finalists until he retires or until Father Time strikes with a chase-down block just as stunning as the one James put on Andre Iguodala.
But at 32 years old, James surely knew that his MVP days were over. And since it is a regular-season award, the league’s announcement Friday night that James will finish no higher than fourth is partially his own doing, in the same realm as the Cavaliers’ decision to give up on the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference after back-to-back April debacles against the Atlanta Hawks.
If James cared about the regular season, he wouldn’t have rested in five games and missed the last two with a supposed right calf strain. He would have heard the Houston Rockets’ James Harden touting his candidacy by saying he hadn’t rested. He would have pushed himself harder in games that didn’t matter, averaged more than 26.4 points, 8.6 rebounds and 8.7 assists, the latter two career highs.
But that would have been foolish.
James in chasing only two things — one tangible, one ethereal.
Larry O’Brien trophies and a ghost.
The ghost is Michael Jordan, whom James admitted at his basketball camp last summer is what drives him now. And to surpass the ghost, to be generally accepted as the greatest of all time, James needs championships, not individual awards.
In the MVP battle, Jordan leads James 5-4. When it comes to titles, Jordan has a 6-3 edge. The only MVP that really matters is Finals MVP, which Jordan also leads 6-3.
Sure, MVP snubs sting, as James admitted to Jason Lloyd of the Athletic in Toronto during the conference semifinals. On Friday as he was leaving TD Garden after a 130-86 romp over the Boston Celtics, the biggest playoff victory in franchise history, James told a small group of beat reporters, “Fourth, huh? It’s been a long time since I’ve been fourth.”
It’s been since 2008, the year before James won his first MVP, the year after he led the Cavs to their first Finals appearance, where they were swept by the Spurs.
Even “Fourth, huh?” carries a measure of presumption, since voting results won’t be released until June 26, when the NBA presents its first televised awards show on TNT. James finished third a year ago behind the Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry and the San Antonio Spurs’ Kawhi Leonard, who was included among this year’s three finalists with Harden and the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Russell Westbrook.
James said he didn’t know about the NBA announcement until he was asked about it in the postgame news conference after the Cavs opened a 2-0 lead on the Celtics in the conference finals, with Game 3 Sunday night in Cleveland.
“No, I didn’t see it. And what are you going to do about it at the end of the day?” James said.
“My only job is to try to be the MVP for this team every night, put my teammates, put our franchise in position to be successful and ultimately compete for a championship. For me, I know what I bring to the table. This league knows what I bring to the table.”
While some of his teammates reacted incredulously to the notion James isn’t among the top three players in the league, James Jones, who has been to six consecutive Finals and won three titles with James in Miami and Cleveland, was nonplussed.
“I don’t care about the NBA’s awards. I always say it’s a marketing tool,” Jones said. “At the end of the day if you’re winning, no one cares who gets the award. At the end of the day we know who our most valuable player is and who makes this thing go and makes us play at a high level.”
Jones said James gave up caring about individual awards when he left the Cavs after the 2010 playoffs.
“That was primarily the reason that he left, to go somewhere he felt he had a chance not only to win, but to learn how to become a greater winner in the postseason. And how to be able to lead elite players, hall of fame-caliber players. And he did that,” Jones said.
Tristan Thompson and J.R. Smith were just as stunned by the fact that one of the 100 media voters for All-NBA put James on the second team.
“Somebody’s trippin’,” Thompson said.
“Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion. But I don’t see how you could not put him in at least the top three,” Smith said. “It’s crazy, but it’s all good. I like it like that.
“It’s almost like when Jordan was playing, he could have won it every year. They wanted to give it to somebody else. It’s fine. Another chip on his shoulder, which helps us.”
Smith and James are close. Smith waited to ride with “the King” on the last bus Friday, even though he was dressed long before James went to the podium. Smith knows what motivates James.
“He’s driven by a totally different monster,” Smith said. “Like he said earlier, he’s chasing the ghost. Right now that’s the only thing that can literally compare to him.
“He’s just in a totally different space. When he’s playing like he’s playing — not hesitating on his jumper, transition 3s, pull-up 3s, pull-up jumpers not even with his feet set — he’s just got an extreme, extreme confidence, running in like a supreme being type of mode. That’s what we need him to be in to win this thing.”
As Channing Frye noted, James’ consistent greatness has become boring, even as he’s seemed to raise his all-around level of play in his 12th postseason appearance.
But MVP voters have done the Cavaliers a favor. “Fourth, huh?” confirmed what Smith knew, that James had just been given another chip on his shoulder.
In chasing the ghost, in his quest to become the greatest of all-time, James needs championships. Jones is right that the MVP award has become a marketing tool. But the snub will help James lead his teammates in what seems like an inevitable third consecutive clash with the Warriors in the NBA Finals.
On June 26, James may be sipping red wine on a patio in some foreign land, Larry figuratively by his side and the ghost even closer than ever.
Marla Ridenour can be reached at mridenour@thebeaconjournal.com. Read the Cavs blog at www.ohio.com/cavs. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MRidenourABJ.