History Awaits LeBron James If He Can Keep His Cavaliers Focused in Game 7
CLEVELAND — LeBron James can shut up every person who ever doubted him with one more win.
Of course, it wouldn't just be any victory.
It would cap the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history: No team has ever survived three consecutive elimination games and prevailed after being down by a 3-1 count.
And it'd be against the greatest team in NBA history, the 73-9 Golden State Warriors, led by the first-ever unanimous NBA MVP in Stephen Curry.
This would be enough for James to never again sweat that his legacy would be shortchanged or his killer instinct criticized, or that his Decision was irredeemable.
With a victory in Game 7 Sunday, James could always—always—point to this achievement as proof of all that he is.
Now there's just the matter of doing it.
And doing it is, bottom line, unlikely.
In any sport, three consecutive games of getting keyed up mentally with the knowledge that you need much more than your normal effort is incredibly draining. Once is doable, maybe twice. But three times is basically superhuman.
Even if James can do it, this is still a team game that will require other Cleveland Cavaliers to perform in a brutally hostile environment that the Warriors earned with that magnificent regular-season record.
The Cavs were already a little too happy in the locker room after their 115-101 Game 6 victory, as if something had been accomplished in their home finale. Their notoriously failure-fed Cleveland fans sensed the same, lingering inside the arena long after the final horn—with hooting and hollering and car horns still honking past 1 a.m. on the downtown streets.
It's human nature to start feeling good about coming back from such a daunting deficit, which could take the edge off just enough for an opponent that has been underachieving but is now more motivated than ever to bounce resoundingly back.
The Cavaliers are still in a bad spot, and if they don't still feel the wall at their backs, then they will most certainly lose Sunday.
Still, it is possible for James to do the unexpected and make Game 7 just as all-encompassing as his Games 5 and 6.
His suddenly sharp outside shot makes him nearly unstoppable, and it does include a sustainable technical adjustment to leave his hand in the air longer on the follow-through.
"Been getting on him all year," J.R. Smith said about LeBron's shooting adjustment.
James is also uniquely prepared to handle this uncommon challenge from a life lived as a Goliath, even when he is on teams that are more like Davids, as the Cavs are in this series. Much has been and will always be expected of James, whose ceiling has long been established as superhumanly high.
He knows what the biggest moments feel like, and he especially knows what the biggest failures feel like.
"Every year you lose in the Finals," he said in late September before this season opened, "it gets worse and worse."
To that end, James wasn't indulging the success of Game 6.
Even though he said he was feeling "chill," James shooed his sons out of his corner locker after the game, and he ended his postgame interview abruptly on his terms ("I'm done") to get on with his physical therapy.
Here's some advice for LeBron:
Set a noticeable tone that Game 7 is a business trip like no other. Board that 2 p.m. Friday charter flight to San Francisco with some sort of plan to make clear to all around you that this is totally different.
It would be jarring for James to show up as a locked-in jerk who won't talk to the guys; that's not his style. Instead, he'll likely lead the way he did in Game 6—by sharing his confidence ("You all get stops, and follow me and I'll take care of it" is what Smith said they were told to start the game) through what Iman Shumpert called "constant communication."
Whatever James does has to be authentic to him, but it has to make his teammates understand the gravity of where they stand.
Richard Jefferson is one of the sharpest, most mature guys on Cleveland's roster, yet he is falling right into the trap that could derail this comeback.
Right after he got done late Thursday night explaining how much a championship would mean to him—and how perceptive James was in approaching him in Jefferson's pensive moment on the team plane after winning the East by saying: "Richard, I know. I know"—Jefferson sounded like a man who felt relieved.
"Tell us that there's anything to lose," Jefferson said so adamantly about Game 7 that he was practically shouting it.
Jefferson's point was that all the pressure is on Golden State to back up its historic season and not lose three consecutive games for the first time under Steve Kerr at the worst possible time.
But therein lies Cleveland's problem.
Even though they aren't full strength, the Warriors are going to go into Sunday wanting it more and getting what they want more—unless the Cavaliers do something to maintain the extreme urgency on their side.
Unless LeBron does something to lead his team to rise above human nature.
After pushing all the way to the final game of the regular season in order to make history, now the Warriors have to go to the max in the NBA Finals. So what. It just deepens their resolve.
James can't just say it's Game 7 and all that jazz. Even another great passing, scoring and defensive game by him won't be enough.
He has to tap into his deepest pain to find something downright inspirational to share as the team leader.
It's only right that a burden of this magnitude requires James to dominate physically and break new ground mentally.
To have all your sins, perceived or genuine, erased by winning a single game would be like magic, after all.
Kevin Ding is an NBA senior writer for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter, @KevinDing.
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