You might as well etch it in stone now and include it on his Hall of Fame plaque.
LeBron James, choker. LeBron James, loser.
LeBron James, MIA — not Miami, but missing in action.
James shrunk yet again from the moment in Game 6 of the NBA Finals, while the Dallas Mavericks and Finals MVP Dirk Nowitzki rose to the occasion to defeat the Miami Heat and clinch the franchise’s first NBA championship.
James had 21 irrelevant points, and again disappeared in key moments when the Heat needed him the most. He turned the ball over and passed it as if he didn’t want any part of the ball, not as if he was “distributing” it.
In “crunch time” — the last five minutes of the game with the score within five points — James did not score in the NBA Finals.
That won’t disappear with future NBA championships for James, at least not with the Heat. This is now part of his legacy, along with his surrender against the Boston Celtics last year when James was in a Cleveland uniform but already looking toward South Beach as the destination for his talents.
There is no redemption story in James’ future. He is not Nowitzki, who redeemed his team’s 2006 collapse against the Heat in the finals with his MVP performance — taking over the fourth quarter of games, including 10 points Sunday night — in these finals.
Despite Nowitzki’s accolades, no one ever considered him in James’ class. James has been compared to Michael Jordan, and now those comparisons seem even more foolish. When you are in that rarefied air, you don’t get to fail, and fail and fail.
If you are a star on the level of James, redemption comes after a fall, not a failure.
Jordan entered the league in 1984 and didn’t win an NBA crown until 1991. But Jordan averaged around 35 points a game in the playoffs before his Chicago Bulls won their first of six NBA titles.
James, who averaged 26.7 points per game in the regular season, averaged just 17.8 points per game in the finals against Dallas — the largest discrepancy between regular-season scoring average and finals in NBA history, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
No, there will be no redemption for James.
James is Alex Rodriguez, who is hardly considered a leader despite finally winning a World Series with the New York Yankees in 2009. And Dwyane Wade is Derek Jeter, who was the captain of the championship Yankees teams.
James was right when he tweeted, following the criticism after his eight-point performance in Game 4: “It’s now or never.”
It’s never.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
