“I always make the right play,” LeBron James famously said. Yes, but 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.
He was a giant man playing point forward. He didn’t ever need “skills” or supreme intelligence, when he could just bulldoze.
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No one is claiming that LeBron doesn’t have highlight reels. AAU players have those. You can make anyone look good by picking uncontested dunks or flashy passes out of a lot of game video.
“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. We do believe Bron’s “brilliance” is overhyped. But even if we concede that he is one of the smartest NBA players ever, he’s still not as smart as he or his supporters say. Better to take Larry Bird’s “basketball IQ” and never look back.
What Perkins said at the end 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. Almost every view of this person is: You can’t tell him anything. Got a rebuttal for that?
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.
So, this young man who since preteen was being prepped to be the chosen one, with no male around to pop him in his chest when he got out of line or too arrogant, 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.
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