ESPN insider request: Is Lebron James having best finals ever?

[Derivative]

http://espn.go.com/nba/insider/story...al-finals-ever

[Nilocon165]

If they win then undoubtedly yes

[MintBerryCrunch]

Let me save you time, the answer is yes.

[feyki]

Lespn .

[Bankaii]

Nah not yet.
But if he drops a 30/10/10 game and they win it will undoubtably be up there with 91-93 MJ and 2000-02 Shaq.

[Doranku]

No, he played like shit the first four games of the series.

[K.dot ShowTime]

He needs another historic performance to be in the conversation

[Odinn]

The answer is no anyway.

[ArbitraryWater]

The answer is no anyway.

Its a yes if he caps it off playing at just 75% of what he did the previous games.. take it from the great Zach Lowe:
"LeBron being LeBron, he's never had two consecutive games like that in his life, I thought he was better in game 6 even than he was in game 5, and I just feel like, you know I remember after the Heat won their first title, you had posted immediately after the final buzzer a piece called 'The End of all that', which was just like 'I'm so glad that he won, because I just don't wanna hear about it anymore'. I don't wanna hear about he's not clutch, he's not this he's not that, and yet we've just kept hearing about it.

He's 2 of 4 in the finals, and blah blah blah... what was Jerry West's record? And what was Wilt's record? And what was Jordan's record?

Like this to me, this would be, this would really be the end of all that. If he leads the greatest comeback in finals history, and has another game thats even 80% of what he just did, in laying waste to the Warriors by himself, well I guess not in game 5 when Kyrie matched him scoring wise, but just, Kyrie can't match the blocks, he can't match the rebounds, he can't match the assists, if he does that, and he does it on the road in game 7 where teams never ever win, to me, it's the greatest, one of the greatest all-time championship series performances ever. It ends all the noise about him, that has driven us crazy for 10 years, its over. At that point, if you are barking about LeBron's mental fortitude, you are on the margins of life."

[senelcoolidge]

No, he played like shit the first four games of the series.

This. So why is this even up for debate. It's like these people only live for the moment.

[ArbitraryWater]

No, he played like shit the first four games of the series.

right.

Through 4 gms the dude was already better than any Kobe series.

This is through 4 gms: 25/11/8 on 48%



The standards are so wildly different for certain people...

[oh the horror]

No, he played like shit the first four games of the series.

This. People need to slow the hell down on this board.

[ArbitraryWater]

This. People need to slow the hell down on this board.

on this board? You act like this board is friendly towards LeBron.. him going for the GOAT achievement is the consensus most places else lol

[NBAGOAT]

No, he played like shit the first four games of the series.

I mean Lebron played great game 3. I still put some MJ or Shaq series above him but even they weren't great every game.

[Hey Yo]

[QUOTE=Derivative]

"Is LeBron James putting up the best NBA Finals performance ever by an individual player?

Have any of the NBA's biggest stars, from Michael Jordan to Wilt Chamberlain, shined this brightly on the biggest stage?

After James put together another 41-point double-double to help his Cleveland Cavaliers force a deciding Game 7 on Sunday, it's worth considering how his Finals compares with the best in NBA history. James is now averaging 30.2 points, 11.0 rebounds and 8.5 assists per game and leads the Finals in all three categories -- plus steals and blocks, too.

Ranking LeBron's Finals by points, rebounds and assists

If we're looking for the best Finals ever, we have to start with basic player stats. After all, throughout the Finals careers of Chamberlain and Bill Russell, the NBA merely tracked points, rebounds and assists by players. For that matter, we don't even have assists before 1960, so I used that as my cutoff.

It doesn't make sense to just use raw points, rebounds and assists per game because that doesn't take into account the decline in pace since the high-scoring 1960s. When Elgin Baylor averaged 40.6 points per game in the 1962 Finals, he accounted for a lower percentage of the total points in the series (17.5 percent) than James did in averaging 35.8 points last year (18.5 percent).

I used similar measures (the percentage of series totals for both teams) for rebounds and assists. Surprisingly, adding those three percentages yields a top 10 made up exclusively of post-1978 Finals and headlined by James' last two.

NBA FINALS PRODUCTION

PLAYER TEAM YEAR PTS% REB% AST% TOTAL
LeBron James CLE 2015 .185 .145 .227 .557
LeBron James CLE 2016 .148 .136 .208 .493
Michael Jordan CHI 1991 .162 .088 .243 .492
LeBron James MIA 2012 .143 .130 .219 .492
Tim Duncan SAS 2003 .142 .192 . 153 .488
Magic Johnson LAL 1991 .096 .107 .264 .467
Shaquille O'NealLAL 2001 .170 .180 .116 .465
Magic Johnson LAL 1988 .106 .070 . 277 .453
Kobe Bryant LAL 2009 .169 .071 .213 .453
Magic Johnson LAL 1987 .116 .098 .239 .452

The best pre-merger Finals by this performance were Bill Russell in 1962 and 1963, at .448 and .441, respectively. Those are followed by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1974 (.427) and a pair of Chamberlain Finals six years apart (.425 in 1964 with San Francisco and .414 with the L.A. Lakers in 1970).

If James' 2016 Finals can be said to be better than any before 1978, that allows us to use more advanced measures to rank how he's played. After all, while he certainly carried a heavier load than anyone else a year ago, it's hard to call James' 2015 Finals the best ever when he had a .477 true shooting percentage. James has been much more efficient with more help this time around.