LeBron James' Game Is Missing Miami Heat so Far

Not all is well with the Cleveland Cavaliers.

There’s the 5-5 record and the mediocre 1.9 scoring differential, sure, but there’s also the grim stuff that’s undergirding it. This is a basketball team with problems.

Kevin Love is shooting 38.9 percent from the floor, looks lost and is playing, in the words of Grantland’s Chris Ryan, “like he has concrete in his sneakers.”

LeBron James, Kyrie Irving and Love—the troika Ohio has pinned its title hopes to—were all among the NBA’s top five in minutes entering Wednesday’s loss to the San Antonio Spurs. The workload isn’t sustainable and James, who’s logging more time on the floor than he has since 2010-11, has been vocal about it.

“For me, I don’t want to do that all year,” James told ESPN.com’s Dave McMenamin, adding, "I really think that it might be a good idea for our guys to play some shorter stretches harder rather than longer stretches."

There’s also the matter of James’ performance in general—his 24.25 player efficiency rating, according to Basketball-Reference would be the lowest since his rookie year if it persisted—the occasionally overaggressive Irving and the continued presence of Dion Waiters in the rotation, of whom the less that’s said the better.

It’s enough to make one wonder, just maybe, if James doesn’t have second thoughts about leaving the Miami Heat for his hometown team.

While Miami has been inconsistent—Chris Bosh’s up-and-down play epitomizes the yo-yoing Heat, who are 6-6 after getting shellacked by the Los Angeles Clippers on Thursday—the team LeBron won his two rings with would be considerably more stable with his presence. That goes without saying, obviously, but this doesn’t: James might be more stable too.

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LeBron is struggling in Cleveland. But while some of it can be chalked up to simple growing pains—as Heat fans know, it can take more than 10 games for a group of individuals, however excellent, to coalesce into something like a team—many of his issues can be pinned to what he left behind as much as to where he landed. The Heat miss LeBron, but he might miss them too.

Consider James’ efficiency from the floor. LeBron had a true shooting percentage of 56 when he joined the Heat in the summer of 2010. In four years in Miami, James upped that to a staggering 62.2. Now, granted, a lot of this is due to the natural maturation of his game and his commitment to harnessing his (equally staggering) abilities. But it’s also due to the uniquely talented players who surrounded him in Miami and the genius system Erik Spoelstra built to get the most out of each of them.

With the mid-range threat Chris Bosh posed, Shane Battier, Ray Allen and the corner-three brigade, and the still dangerous Dwyane Wade, defenses somehow couldn’t sell out to stop the greatest basketball player on the planet. LeBron got looks he wouldn’t have gotten elsewhere—and hasn’t since he left.

But past performance, as we’ve heard ad nauseam, is no guarantee of future results. LeBron saw an aging core, a team that was slipping and decided the time was right to get out of Miami. He figured he could do better. He was probably right. 

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But that doesn’t necessarily mean Cleveland was the right move. While James’ return to Ohio was probably about more than just basketball, as he argued in Sports Illustrated, winning certainly played a pretty large role in his calculus. And by that criteria at least, there were better landing spots for James.

To wit: When LeBron was still on the open market, Nate Silver of Fivethirtyeight.com ran some numbers to ferret out what team, with the addition of James, would be the best. After forecasting a handful of contenders and a few of the league’s flagship franchises, Silver found that two organizations stood out above the rest: The Clippers and the Houston Rockets.

A James-led Clippers team projected to 66-16, Silver determined, while the 2014-15 Rockets could have expected to win 69 games with LeBron. The Heat and Cavaliers each projected to 52 wins with James.

“There’s room for concern about how well James, Harden and Howard would mesh together — something that statistics like SPM may not capture well,” Silver wrote. “But this would be a really, really good problem for Houston General Manager Daryl Morey to have.”

Though, after Cleveland added Kevin Love, Silver bumped its projection to 63 wins, it’s still clear that, in a strictly basketball sense, LeBron could have picked a a better situation than Cleveland. 

It wasn't just about basketball, of course. Even those who thought the aforementioned Sports Illustrated essay was little more than a crisply executed PR play recognize that James has deep ties to the area, was badly stung by the harsh and histrionic reaction to his initial "Decision" and is eager to vindicate himself to a region of the country the economy might have left behind, but he never really did. 

We might be second-guessing James' choice to head back to the Cavs, but I doubt he is.