“I always make the right play,” LeBron James famously said. This is not true. Even if you argue that it is true, the “right play” on paper is not always the WINNING play.

“He’s one of the best basketball minds that we’ve ever seen,” we keep hearing. This is just an opinion. It’s an overblown, silly opinion at that.

You might be thinking that our opinion is no better. We agree that we’re on equal footing here. The difference is, we feel we are observing, while others may be simply seeing what they’re told to see. Moving on.

LeBron was a giant man playing point forward. He didn’t ever need above average “skills” or supreme intelligence, when he could just bulldoze.

No one is claiming that LeBron doesn’t have highlight reels. AAU players have those. Recreation center twelve-year olds have those. You can make anyone look good by picking a few uncontested dunks or flashy passes out of a lot of game video. You can make anyone look bad in the same fashion. The point is, we observe patterns. We want a bird’s eye view of things. We don’t mind being wrong, because it’s not about a particular person or persons. It’s about what and more importantly how those people did what they did. The pattern reveal that how LeBron got the stats and accolades is at best questionable, and whatever intelligence was involved was more about manipulating our perception of him than working the game honorably.

“We already know what type of basketball mind LeBron is,” said former NBA player Kendrick Perkins in 2024. “I think he’s one of the most brilliant minds to ever touch [the basketball]. But, when you start making it a case where you’re the smartest person in the room all the time, that’s a problem.”

Perkins told some truth here. However, we do believe Bron’s “brilliance” is overhyped.

But even if we concede that he is a competently smart NBA player, he’s still not as smart as he or his supporters say. When you watch entire games in context, rather than highlights, this will become obvious. Better to take Larry Bird’s “basketball IQ” and never look back. Of course, Jordan was smarter on the court, too. Does that last sentence bother you? Cognitive dissonance can be painful. We have been wrong; all of us are at times. What you do with the correction is all on you.

What Perkins said at the end of the above quote is indicative of a person’s true intelligence. A person who is smart for real, knows that he doesn’t know everything and never will. An intelligent person submits to authority. Good leaders are good followers.

Now, go back and find instances where LeBron has been teachable, coachable, accountable. Find reputable coaches and teammates who say that he has any of those qualities. Almost every view of this person is: You can’t tell him anything. Got a rebuttal for that?

In the book The Jordan Rules, B.J. Armstrong is quoted about MJ’s mind:

He saw Jordan not only as the greatest player in the game, but as a man perhaps to good for the game. “Everything comes so easy for him,” Armstrong marveled. “He can do anything anyone does and do it better than them. In a way, I think he’s too good.” Jordan was a genius of the hardwood, so Armstrong went to the doctor his mother worked for and borrowed some books on genius [and] took some from the library. He read about geniuses in different professions, how they felt about themselves and viewed the world, how they related with others and how others good along with them. “I felt if I could understand him better I could play with him better.”

Ever hear people call LeBron a basketball genius? Maybe a few times, but not in the same way that multitudes of folks admire Jordan’s mind. You at least have likely heard people say that LeBron was smart on the basketball court. We suggest that he was more book smart than street smart or instinctive, if we can apply that to this game. Jordan had large measures of both varieties. This, again, is why it’s not just about volumes of numbers. Jordan’s numbers do stand up historically; however, it’s how he collected those statistics. Some of you will never understand why that matters.

In one episode of his podcast with J.J. Redick, who was then months away from taking over as L.A. Lakers’ head coach, LeBron bragged about being able to run or “flip” plays since he was a boy. He wanted the listener to admire his brain. When he spoke about anything, he usually sounded like he was trying to stay on topic, or script. He wanted us to see him in a certain light. It didn’t work over here. How about for you?

We have used the term “manipulation” or one of its forms several times here. This person LeBron is a manipulator. To some of us, this is plain to see, and we are not okay with that. Some of you don’t believe that he is a manipulator. And some see that he is a calculating individual but wave it away, justifying it in the name of controlling his own destiny, or whatever “believe, conceive, achieve” new age magic that people are into these days.

LeBron is a manipulator, and manipulation is different than intelligence. Yes, it takes smarts to move people around like pieces on a checkerboard, and to get them to do what you desire.

However, truly smart and/or wise people don’t burn bridges in pursuit of personal happiness. Wise men and women know that when a person rises in the world’s eyes, there will be a letdown eventually, and that person will likely meet some of the same folks they stepped upon on the way down.

He came out of high school directly to the league, after driving a Hummer vehicle around as a teenager. He had the perks; he had the adoration from a child. He may have had a father figure, but we keep getting told that he didn’t need one, and by proxy neither do our youth who admire him. After all, LeBron “made it” without a strong daddy around him. Mama did it all, according to the story.

Lebron reaching this status with no father consistently present is partly why a “children don’t really need a daddy” talking point has developed in American and specifically black American culture. He’s supposedly proof that only mama is necessary, and in fact she can usually just play both roles to raise a kid. You will notice that many of LeBron’s supporters are also without real men in their development years.

Maybe you’re thinking, “You don’t need a father to turn out okay.” Not in every case but having both father and mother working together to rear the child is more ideal. And, if your father was absent in whatever way, did you really turn out fine? People with mental or emotional issues usually don’t see they are off. They think everyone else is.

So, this young man who since his preteen years was being prepped to be the chosen one, with no male around to pop him in his chest when he got out of line, has been in a state of arrested development for two decades-plus. Once you see all of this, you can understand why his followers think and attempt to reason the way they do. Their template is Peter Pan. And that’s dumb.