LeBron James: Playing with Championship Mettle Next Step in King James' Maturity

LeBron James is having an amazing year, but the amount of criticism he’s getting for his play in spite of it is preposterous to some. To others, it’s perfectly reasonable and fair.

Is it true that James is a great player for the first three quarters and disappears for the fourth?

How about we start where all good discussions should—with the numbers? Here are the numbers that LeBron has for the fourth quarter compared to his overall numbers.

	FG%	FT%	REB	AST	TO	STL	BLK	PTS
Per Game	0.55	0.76	8.09	6.35	3.37	1.73	0.77	26.66
4th Quarter	0.49	0.78	8.77	6.92	2.77	1.85	0.92	26.77
Difference	-0.06	0.02	0.68	0.57	-0.60	0.11	0.15	0.11

As you can see, the numbers are not that dramatically different, and overall are actually slightly better. His field-goal percentage is down a bit, but at 49 percent, it’s still very reasonable. His free-throw percentage is actually up, contrary to what the general perception is.

His rebounds, assists, steals, blocks and points are all up, and his turnovers are down.

So here’s the reality. With the exception of his field-goal percentage, his numbers are up in the fourth quarter this year. So at least the notion that he “disappears” in the fourth quarter is invalid.

The criticism narrows, though, to the end of the fourth quarter in close games. On that, there is some fairness to the criticism. Through games of March 8, a search at basketball-reference’s Play Index + reveals that James was 3-of-12 on the season when the game was within five points with two minutes or less.

To be fair, basketball-reference hasn’t updated their data yet to include games from this weekend, when James hit 4-of-5 in that situation.

Even if you factor that in, though, and assume that no one above him had any field goals that qualify, James is still only 32nd in the NBA in clutch field goals made in the final two minutes.

There are some mitigating factors. First, the Heat have three players splitting the clutch-time duties. In fact, including the fact that Dwyane Wade’s clutch game-winner against the Pacers was also his seventh, each of the Big Three now has seven shots in that situation.

They also have fewer close games than most teams. They trail only the Chicago Bulls in average margin of victory per game. That means they aren’t playing a lot of games with the score tight in the last two minutes.

All that being said, let’s bear in mind that James more than doubled his production in a single game. That does indicate two things. First, it indicates that up to that point, the criticism was to some degree fair (but not to the degree of the criticism that was received). Second, it indicates that James is turning the corner.

He absolutely drilled that three-pointer with the game on the line, and that was the only reason that Wade was eventually able to win the game with the eventual game-winning shot.

It was with supreme confidence that he handed the ball off to Wade to win the game. People can say that he did the right thing by giving it to Wade (because Wade should be the closer) or that he did it for the wrong reasons (because he’s too “chicken” to take the shot).

Either of those arguments is just silliness on top of silliness, because he made the more difficult shot to put the game into overtime. It’s to the point where some people are so ready to shoe-horn their opinion into this that it doesn’t matter what happened.

What I saw was a supremely confident decision made by James, and that matters more than what the decision was. Wade took and made the shot because James decided to give him the ball, and did it with utmost confidence.

Down the stretch, James played with confidence. When he made the shot, he made it with confidence. When he handed the ball off to Wade, he did it with confidence.

That’s the championship mettle that he’s been missing late in games this year.