LeBron James didn’t even bother to wait for the game to finish. With around 15 ticks left in the contest, he left the court and headed straight to the locker room. Clearly, he was in no mood to exchange pleasantries with the visiting victors, and he made sure to tell all and sundry why in his post-mortem. “We blew it,” he said. And he was right. For the better part of 46 minutes, the Lakers proved the equal of the league-leading Bucks. For the better part of 46 minutes, he proved superior to Giannis Antetokounmpo, the preemptive Most Valuable Player. Unfortunately, they imploded in the last two, and in such a way as to make the worst of the worst blush in embarrassment.
For James, the result was reflective of his situation, and he was only to keen to show his frustrations. On the day Antetokounmpo was mortal, the other Bucks stepped up in the crunch. And on the day he was extremely productive on both ends of the floor, the other Lakers didn’t — or, to be more precise, couldn’t. So he wound up being a sore loser, his disposition betraying his increasing, if reluctant, acceptance of the inevitable: He will be missing the playoffs for the first time in 14 years, the Finals for the first time in nine years.
True, there’s still a chance the Lakers will turn their fortunes around with inspired play for the remainder of the season. There is, after all, still a fourth of their 2018-19 campaign to negotiate, and National Basketball Association annals are littered with examples of teams doing exactly what they hope to. Then again, James’ dismay is predicated on harsh reality: He’s already doing his best under the circumstances and, yet, they remain in a struggle for form. Even when they seemed to be in the groove prior to his Christmas Day injury, they never got to string together more than four victories. And, nope, they haven’t won two straight outings in six whole weeks.
That said, James will most certainly try to keep his singular streaks going. For all his pronouncements about not requiring anything anymore to prove himself, it’s precisely because he aims to keep building on his legacy that he’s exasperated with all the setbacks. The other day, just about everybody else owned up to the collapse against the Bucks. In the end, though, he knows the buck, no pun intended, stops with him. It’s part and parcel of greatness. He has thrived in success, and to do so anew, he needs to own up to the failures and act accordingly.
Anthony L. Cuaycong has been writing Courtside since BusinessWorld introduced a Sports section in 1994.
