The LeBron James Rivalry Guide
About three and a half years ago I wrote something called “The LeBron James Teammate Index.” The LeBron James Teammate Index was a scientific and mathematic study that determined the relative effectiveness and likeability of twenty players LeBron played alongside during his first thirteen seasons in the NBA. Today, in the spirit of that exercise, I give you the LeBron James Rivalry Guide. I felt as though this was a necessary sequel because since LeBron James entered the NBA as an 18-year old in 2003, being called the Next Michael Jordan, he’s been a marked man.
The LeBron James Teammate Index (the LJTI, from here on out) and the LeBron James Rivalry Guide (LJRG) are similar in that they each offer a visual aid to give the reader an exact approximation of where each subject stands in comparison to his counterparts. From there, every subject will be further evaluated in a brief, yet precise transcribed section authored by the conductor and creator of the trial.
That previous paragraph is a fancy pants way of saying: I found this website where you can easily make charts without really knowing what an X-Axis or Y-Axis are. So I plugged in some names (of both players and franchises) and numbers and Voila, they gave me a chart! After you look at the chart, you can read why I gave certain subjects certain scores in the two categories: Animosity and Effectiveness. There are 15 subjects in total on the chart, and then there’s a special section with unconventional LeBron James Rivals too.
Stephen Curry
There hasn’t been a single player who has posed as big of a threat to LeBron James over the last sixteen years than Stephen Curry. I say this not only because of Curry’s winning record versus LeBron James in the NBA Finals, but also because there was a two-year window where, for the first time since around 2006, the “Face of the NBA” Championship Belt was not in LeBron James’s possession. That’s not to say that from 2007 to 2015 LeBron was consistently the most popular player in the NBA. But Ric Flair wasn’t the most popular guy in the NWA in the 1980’s, but he was the top guy, ya know what I’m sayin’? Even if you didn’t like LeBron during his first Cavaliers run, or during his time in South Beach, he was The Man and as Ric Flair told us, “To be the man, you need to beat the man.”
Well not only did Stephen Curry beat The Man in the 2015 NBA Finals, he followed that Championship up with a regular season rampage that included 73 wins and the league’s first unanimous MVP victory, enough of a statement that it sparked the first legitimate “Alright, so maybe LeBron’s time at the top of the league is over with” conversation. LeBron heard the chatter, and with his back against the wall facing a 3–1 deficit in the NBA Finals, The King led a comeback for the ages that concluded with him holding the Larry O’Brien Trophy, the Bill Russell Finals MVP Trophy, and the Face of the NBA Championship Belt.
My read on the situation is that there isn’t really any serious animosity between the two sides. But I do think LeBron was at least mildly annoyed that he was nudged out of that top spot by Steph when he was still in the tail-end of his prime.
Kevin Durant
There are three things I’m nearly certain of:
1. Kevin Durant has a much bigger problem with LeBron James than LeBron has with Durant. But I think that’s probably how it works with KD and everybody in the NBA, save for Russell Westbrook. Westbrook would probably prefer bludgeoning Durant with his 2017 MVP Award than ever playing with him again.
2. Durant’s issue with LeBron probably is rooted in the fact that he feels he deserves the appreciation LeBron has gotten over the last decade. I mean, to me, this sounds like a wee bit of jealousy:
“So much hype comes from being around LeBron from other people. He has so many fanboys in the media. Even the beat writers just fawn over him. I’m like, we’re playing basketball here, and it’s not even about basketball at certain points. So I get why anyone wouldn’t want to be in that environment because it’s toxic. Especially when the attention is bulls–t attention, fluff.”
Now while I don’t think there was any serious animosity in that statement, I do read it as “PAY ATTENTION TO ME!” Sure, KD went on to say “Just get out of the way and let us play basketball,” which is a statement he’s made many times … in his press conferences, and on social media, and on “The Boardroom,” the ESPN+ show Durant stars in and produces. Let’s just let KD play basketball, guys.
3. Of any player on this list, Durant is probably the most logical and most worthy rival of LeBron James. Whether you think his move to Golden State was “weak” or if the two titles he won with the Warriors deserve to have asterisks next to them, he’s one of the dozen or so most talented basketball players ever, and totally unafraid of going shot for shot with LeBron in the biggest moments imaginable.
The Detroit Pistons
Aside from “expectations” and a dreadful supporting cast, the Detroit Pistons were the first major hurdle that LeBron James had to clear in his NBA career. Led by Ben Wallace, Chauncey Billups and Richard Hamilton, the Pistons were the class of the Eastern Conference in the 2000’s, finishing with two NBA Finals appearances and six consecutive berths in the Eastern Conference Finals. In 2006, LeBron’s first go-round in the Playoffs, the Cavaliers took a 3–2 lead over the Pistons in the 2nd Round, but Detroit eked out a two-point win in Cleveland in Game 6, and then held the Cavaliers to 61 points in Game 7. Cavaliers not named “LeBron James” shot 9 for 41 from the field in that Game 7. Again, the biggest hurdle for LeBron early in his career was a supporting cast that was as stinky as rotten tuna.
The following year, this time in the Eastern Conference Finals, Cleveland headed to Detroit for a crucial Game 5 with the series tied 2–2. The result: A performance so good that Steve Kerr, then an analyst for TNT, blessed it as “Jordanesque.” LeBron finished with 48 points, including 29 of Cleveland’s final 30 points in the 4th Quarter and two overtimes. It was that night LeBron captured that aforementioned “Face of the NBA” Championship Belt.
And since LeBron’s “48 Special” performance in the 2007 Playoffs, he’s won 38 of his next 48 meetings with the Pistons. The rivalry is over.
Dwight Howard
Dwight’s Orlando Magic upset the 66-win Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2009 Eastern Conference Finals, but there’s no serious documented bad blood between LeBron and Dwight Howard. Shit, these two even filmed a McDonald’s commercial together in 2010. But almost nobody likes Dwight Howard, so there’s some intrinsic low-level animosity here.
Paul Pierce
I hate to do it — and I also love to do it because it’s less work for me and let me tell you, this Bingeable thing has been a lot of work — but I want to run back something I wrote about Paul Pierce three years ago.
“LeBron was deemed the chosen one as a Junior in high school in 2002. He had people at his feet praising him as a 16 year-old, and for the most part, that was the case his entire early NBA career. The one exception, the one guy who never backed down from “King James,” the one guy who always went at him was Paul Pierce. Pierce and LeBron nearly got into a fight in the locker-room area after a pre-season game in 2004. The bad blood between these two didn’t start in 2008 when they met in the Playoffs for the first time. It started before LeBron James was of legal drinking age.
And time after time, the lesser-known, lesser-physically gifted Pierce got the better of LeBron. In 2008 LeBron outscored Pierce 45–41, but Pierce’s Celtics got the better of LeBron’s Cavs. In 2010 the heavily favored Cavaliers were upset in Round 2 by Boston, in large part because Paul Pierce pestered LeBron so much defensively in the last three games of the series. Pierce, for the most part, always had LeBron’s number, and he always reminded him of it. He was always yapping, always trash-talking, always doing whatever he could to gain the mental edge on his physically superior rival.
When Pierce buried that dagger three over LeBron in Game 5 in 2012 (and subsequently yelled “I’m Cold Blooded!” as he was strutting up the court), I think it pushed LeBron to the breaking point. I think LeBron’s stoic destruction of Boston in Game 6 was more than just a basketball player being motivated for a win or go home Playoff game. I think Pierce took it to a point where things were personal. I think, as a man, LeBron knew he had to respond in some tangible way in Game 6, and he did that by killing Boston’s Big Three.”
The Boston Celtics
It took LeBron four attempts in the Playoffs, but he did finally put away those Big Three Celtics in 2012 with an icy evisceration that just as closely resembled Hannibal Lecter’s escape from a make-shift jail cell in Memphis as it did any sort of prior basketball performance. But credit to Danny Ainge and the rest of the front office in Beantown, after LeBron and the Heat tore down what was built in a single offseason in 2007, the Celtics rebuilt their roster on the fly and were the primary Eastern Conference challenger to LeBron and the Cavaliers during his second tenure in Cleveland.
It’s my belief that the Boston Celtics will end up being remembered as LeBron’s greatest rival. He’s faced Boston in the Playoffs as many times as he’s faced the San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors combined, and there have been meetings in every stage of his career. Most importantly, the bad blood is real. There is and always has been palpable tension between the Celtics, their fans and LeBron. Boston is the one place where you never hear a smattering of cheers for the King, a rarity in today’s NBA when the secondary ticket market allows so many out of town fans to get seats to see their team on the road.
It will remain this way. Maybe someday there will be a begrudging mutual respect between the two sides, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing the fans in Boston giving LeBron the classy send-off that many legends get on the road when they’re on the verge of retirement. With that said, I doubt that LeBron would even want it in Boston. It wouldn’t be genuine. Whether that’s because of the Pierce/LeBron rivalry, LeBron’s overtaking of Larry Bird as the greatest Small Forward ever, or just because people from Boston are, um, let’s call it “Enthusiastic,” I just don’t see it happening.
Carmelo Anthony
When LeBron and Carmelo were selected 1st and 3rd respectively in the 2003 Draft, fans wanted these two to be the Bird and Magic of the early 21st Century. The belief was that they would be equals, both fixtures at the top of the league for years to come. It just didn’t work out that way, and as soon as it was clear that these two weren’t equals the media largely abandoned that narrative. To put this in perspective, LeBron has made All-NBA 1st Team two more times than Carmelo has made All-Star Games.
It’s worth noting that Melo and LeBron are great friends and have been since they came into the NBA, but perhaps there are hard feelings because Melo was left out of the Banana Boat picture. For that, Melo gets half a point in the animosity category.
Joakim Noah
There’s an alternate reality in which Joakim Noah and the Chicago Bulls ended up LeBron’s defining rival. This is an alternate reality in which Derrick Rose never tears his ACL, Jimmy Butler never gets traded, Tom Thibodeau is still coaching in Chicago (and searching for a throat lozenge) and the Bulls, one of the most promising young teams in the entire NBA in 2011, probably end up with a Finals appearance or two this past decade. Cut to every single Chicago Bulls fan out there setting their slice of deep-dish pizza down to wipe away the tears.
Of course, this isn’t the reality we live in. The one we live in robbed us of a prolonged Bulls run in the Eastern Conference, and it robbed us of Joakim Noah being something more than the Bill Laimbeer to LeBron James’s Michael Jordan. Noah, a Defensive Player of the Year and 1st Team All-NBA Center in 2014, fizzled out as quickly as the Bulls chance of being a contender did, but his testy relationship with LeBron James defined the Eastern Conference Playoff picture in the early 2010’s.
It’s unclear where the animosity between these two stemmed from. Noah has always been a mouthy pest and LeBron’s ego could certainly rub people the wrong way, so it could just be a case that these two were preordained to bicker. Noah offered pleasant holiday wishes with LeBron during a December 2009 blowout while LeBron shooting free throws. Six years later, after LeBron dropped an Akron Hammer on Noah and promptly started him into virtual irrelevance, Jo responded how any man in the heat of competition would, shouting at LeBron — and pardon Joakim’s French — “Fuck you! You’re still a bitch!” No holiday wishes have been exchanged since then.
Lance Stephenson
Lance Stephenson was Joakim Noah with less respect around the league, crazier in-game antics, and a similar positional designation to LeBron. Lance wanted more than anything to be LeBron’s equal … or at the very least, he wanted to be known as the NBA’s premiere “LeBron Stopper.” Instead he’ll likely go down as the dude who strums the air guitar like a madman and once blew in LeBron James’s ear in the middle of an Eastern Conference Finals game.
Gilbert Arenas
DeShawn Stevenson
One of the many similarities between LeBron James and Michael Jordan is that they both briefly owned the Washington Wizards in the first decade of the 21st century.
Kyrie Irving
When I wrote the LJTI, I didn’t include Kyrie in the chart because I felt I needed to wait until after the 2016 Playoffs to make a fair judgment. He was a player that I admittedly wasn’t a fan of — it was a Duke thing — and his 2015 postseason got cut short with a knee injury, so it only seemed fair to hold off for a few months. Well, then his happened:
LeBron and Kyrie toppled the 73-win Golden State Warriors and brought the city of Cleveland their first championship since Jim Brown was tuckin’ away the pigskin at Cleveland Stadium for the Browns. All was great in Northeast Ohio and I was ready to vault Kyrie to the top of the list of my favorite LeBron teammates … until it was clear that this was a team that wasn’t nearly as tight as they were the previous year. And then after their title defense sputtered in the NBA Finals, rumors started circulating that Kyrie was being a standoffish weirdo during the Cavaliers title defense. He requested a trade, got shipped up to Boston — shout-out to the Dropkick Murphy’s — and added his name to the list of LeBron rivals.
We were robbed of LeBron whooping that weirdo ass in the 2018 Eastern Conference Finals a Kyrie/LeBron showdown in the Eastern Conference Finals in 2018, and it’s plausible that Kyrie’s presence in that series could’ve prevented LeBron from making an 8th straight NBA Finals appearance. But Kyrie’s departure from Cleveland was effectively the final nail in the coffin of LeBron’s time in Cleveland. So for that, his effectiveness score gets bumped up a point or two.
Kobe Bryant
I don’t know what Kobe stans would be the most upset about: the fact that I didn’t write about Kobe first, the fact that I didn’t save Kobe for last, the fact that I don’t think Kobe is LeBron’s primary rival, the fact that I listed Kobe as a rival at all for LeBron — I can hear them yelling, “FIVE RINGS TO THREE! THAT’S NOT A RIVARLY!” — but man, when the conversation comes to Kobe and LeBron they’ll find a way to get all bent out of shape about something.
It’s a shame that these two never hooked up in the NBA Finals, but it’s an even bigger shame that the acceleration of this rivalry is largely the responsibility of the most hard-headed members of these two respective fanbases insisting that the other player isn’t in their guy’s class. If LeBron and Kobe felt the way that their fans do about each other, they would’ve gotten into a fist fight on the court every single time they played each other. Not a good look for the faces of the NBA.
In reality, the fact that these two never had their long-awaited Finals showdown may be a good thing for all parties involved except for those in the NBA league office who were hoping to cash in on a Lakers/Cavs payday in the 2009 Finals but got Lakers/Magic instead — nothing says Pay Day like clunky Dwight Howard post-ups. I know this goes against the conventional line of thinking, but sometimes it isn’t a bad thing to leave people wanting more or wondering “what if.”
San Antonio Spurs
Next up are those eternal San Antonio Spurs, the greatest post-MJ NBA dynasty and the perfect foils for LeBron James. The Spurs and LeBron are the two best examples of sustained excellence in professional basketball in the 21st century, though they operated in much, much different ways.
The Spurs dynasty was built with the goal of keeping a consistent organizational structure intact. They valued a quiet and business-like approach both on and off the court and were carried by the same core for over a decade, winning NBA Titles 15 years apart with the same Head Coach (Gregg Popovich) and same face of the franchise (Tim Duncan). LeBron James hasn’t had the same Head Coach, General Manager or best teammate for more than five consecutive years. The only things consistent about The LeBron James Dynasty have been LeBron James and drama.
As philosophically different as these two sides are — and this schism is what makes them such great rivals — there is a very clear and deep mutual respect between the two sides, largely because of their ability to push each other. LeBron James and the Heat are the only team that managed to top the Spurs in the NBA Finals. The Spurs are the only team that managed to hand LeBron James two Finals losses without having to turn themselves into a Goliath during free agency.
Dirk Nowitzki
It’s been eight years and I’m still not ready to talk about the 2011 NBA Finals, but I am willing to acknowledge that Dirk Nowitzki outdueling LeBron AND Dwyane Wade in the Finals after they were caught on camera apparently mocking him for being sick was sehr legendär. That’s German for “ very legendary.” We’re all bilingual now. You’re welcome.
