LeBron James Through The Years

Hi. I’m John. I started this website in 2008, and was its Editor-In-Chief until after the 2010-11 season. I spend lots of time doing law school-y things now, such as going to law school. This season, I’m going to be doing a weekly column, as well as some other things as time allows. Over the past 11 seasons, I have watched LeBron James play basketball an unhealthy amount, and I’ve learned a few things about his game over that time. (These columns will be more varied as the season goes on, but don’t be surprised if the first few are LeBron-centric: I’m still getting to know this brand-new Cavs team, while I have 11 years of intense LeBron-watching under my belt.)

Since LeBron James now plays for the Cavaliers again, I thought it would be useful to go back through the last decade-plus of LeBron, and see how he got from the 18-year old kid out of St. Vincent/St. Marys to the four-time MVP and two-time champion who will be suiting up for the Cavs this season. One of the (many) things I always say is truly incredible as LeBron is that he not only came into the league as the most talented prospect of the modern era and lived up to the hype right out of the gate, but he’s improved and changed his game more from when he was first successful to when he hit his prime as much as any player in NBA history.

Follow me past the jump for more (a lot more):

2003-04 Season: The Start of Something Big

Stats: 20.9 PPG/5.5 RPG/5.7 APG, 48.8% True Shooting, 18.3 PER

LeBron came into the league as a 6’8, 240-pound point guard who could jump out of the gym, was impossibly smooth with the ball for a player his size, could drive and finish with either hand, and could not hit water from the deck of an aircraft carrier with his jump shot.

Looking back at LeBron’s rookie campaign, what’s surprising is that while he averaged 20/5/5, won the Rookie of the Year Award, and lived up to the expectations put on him as the most-hyped rookie in NBA history, he had a tremendously, tremendously long way to go.

To be fair, a lot of the problems with LeBron’s rookie season were beyond his control. First, making him a point guard was a terrible idea, because giving a 6-8 player who gets more effective the closer he gets to the basket the ball 90 feet away from said basket is not a great plan, especially since LeBron didn’t have the pure ball-handling ability of a point guard or understanding of how to run an NBA offense from the point guard spot at that time.

Making things more difficult was the fact that LeBron was playing with Ricky Davis and Darius Miles on the perimeter, who couldn’t space the floor for LeBron with their shooting and thought LeBron’s main job was to give them the ball. This was a stupid thing to think. They were unceremoniously traded for Ira Newble and Eric Williams, and the Cavs immediately became much better simply because Ira Newble and Eric Williams played hard and, more importantly, were neither Ricky Davis or Darius Miles.

Most importantly, though, LeBron couldn’t shoot, and since he had the ball in his hands early in the shot clock so much even after the Davis/Miles trade ended the point guard experiment, he found himself pulling the trigger in situations where his broken jumper wasn’t nearly good enough to cover for his poor shot selection.

That first year, LeBron’s eFG% on shots 82games.com defines as jump shots was an abysmal 35.6%. That takes the added value of threes into account. Josh Smith’s eFG% on jumpers was 35.3% last season. Tony Allen’s was 34.7%. Joakim Noah’s was 35.2%. Just so we’re clear about what I’m saying, LeBron came into the league with Josh Smith’s jump shot. Because of that as well as some relative struggles at the rim (LeBron shied away from contact a bit his rookie season — he was just a scrawny 240-pound kid, after all), LeBron’s True Shooting percentage his rookie year was 48.8%. The Philadelphia 76ers’ league-worst True Shooting percentage last season was 51.0%.

The ability was there for LeBron, and the effect he had on the Cavaliers when he was on the court was immediate, positive, and obvious. However, he still had to make a jump in order to become an effective all-around offensive player, let alone a star. He made one.

04-05 and 05-06: Exponential Growth

04-05 Stats: 27.2/7.4/7.2, 55.4% True Shooting, 25.7 PER

05-06 Stats: 31.4/7.0/6.6, 56.8% True Shooting, 28.1 PER

Three things happened that allowed LeBron to immediately take LeBron from the “incredibly promising rookie” category and put him into the “best player in the league” conversation. First, LeBron grew into his body and learned the game, which is what happens to all rookies who learn to become successful, especially when they came into the league while their body was still developing. For a player with prodigious basketball IQ and physical skills, these normal sophomore leaps were huge.

Second, LeBron learned to shoot. He went from being a 29% three-point shooter in his rookie season to a 35.1% three-point shooter in his sophomore campaign, and his eFG% on jumpers shot up from 35.6% to 39.6%. 40% eFG% on jumpers is essentially the Mendoza line for perimeter players — if it’s significantly below that, opposing defenses can sag off, but at 40%, they have to respect you.

LeBron wasn’t a great shooter yet — that wouldn’t come until much, much later — but he now had to be guarded on the perimeter, and his natural wrist strength and dexterity allowed him to casually bomb in three-pointers off the dribble that most players would have no business attempting. This is how he was able to have an effective perimeter game, despite the fact he didn’t really have a solid, repeatable stroke on his jump shot until his last few years in Cleveland. LeBron couldn’t beat teams from the perimeter, but he could hurt them from there, and that was more than enough.

Third, after LeBron’s rookie season, the hand-check rules came into effect, completely changing NBA basketball forever. If you’re ever going to look for a LeBron conspiracy theory on this site, here’s the one: the year after LeBron came into the league, the rules made it nearly impossible to guard players who could explode to the hoop and finish one-on-one. No player since Michael Jordan has been better at exploding to the hoop and finishing than LeBron James. As you can see, LeBron’s scoring and field goal percentages both exploded after the new rules came into effect. His field goal percentage at the rim soared from 60.4% to 72.5%, and it hasn’t gone below 68.9% since.

In his rookie season, LeBron was really only a high-efficiency offensive player in transition situations. With the new rules in place, half-court basketball could become a lot more like transition than it had ever been able to previously, and nobody benefitted more than LeBron James, with the possible exception of Dwyane Wade. Even without a true point guard, a second scoring threat, or any reliable shooters to speak of, the Cavs were able to ride “give LeBron the ball and get the hell out of the way” to some gaudy individual numbers from James with solid efficiency, and, in 05-06, the Cavs’ first playoff run in a long time, which was ended in a bitter 7-game battle with the Pistons.

06-07: The Lost Season (Cleveland Edition)

Stats: 27.3/6.7/6.0, 55.2% True Shooting, 24.5 PER

This was a very weird season of basketball for LeBron. For the prior two seasons, Operation Route One, for all its lack of creativity, had given the Cavaliers a passable offense and made LeBron one of the best players in the league. The team and LeBron seemingly felt that Operation Route One was causing LeBron and the team to plateau, and wanted something different.

This wasn’t the worst course of action, except for the minor flaw that neither LeBron or the team had any idea what the hell they were supposed to do when LeBron wasn’t driving the ball to the basket. LeBron would generally get the ball about 30 feet away from the hoop, dance around for a SOLID 14 seconds, and then make his move, which would end up in a what-are-you-trying-to-prove jumper or a flaming-bag pass to a teammate. To watch this season of basketball was constant agony. It was to get on your knees and beg a man who could not hear you to move in a straight line towards the basket, for that is where points are made and the best basketball player on Earth seemed to have forgotten this.

Naturally, this season ended with the Cavs making the NBA Finals behind a legendary performance from LeBron in game 5:

That’s peak Early LeBron right there. He’s going to the basket seemingly at will and finishing with authority when he does, and when he’s not doing that, his plan B is drilling impossible shots from all over the perimeter just because he can. There’s a cut off a Zydrunas Illgauskas high-post set for an easy dunk just to make you think LeBron has any interest in making the game easier for himself, but mostly it’s just LeBron being way better at this game than humans are supposed to be at this game.

After that performance and the Boobie Gibson game to seal the series, LeBron and the Cavs were shut down by the Spurs in the Finals, who were able to wall off the paint on LeBron and keep him contained. LeBron was able to muscle Bruce Bowen and take him into the post, but couldn’t do much when he got deep position on him. This did not lead to LeBron deciding to develop a post game.

07-08: The Bounce-Back

Stats: 30.0/7.9/7.2, 56.8% True Shooting, 29.1 PER

Whatever was up with LeBron in 06-07 went away in 07-08, and he picked up where he left off after the 05-06 season. This is when it was obvious that LeBron had become freaking huge — he was officially listed at 6-8, 250 pounds, meaning he’d gained 10 pounds since his rookie season. To use an old Bill James joke, this left open the question of what LeBron’s weight would have been if he’d put his other foot on the scale. LeBron had probably grown an inch since his rookie season, and had clearly put on at least 20 pounds of muscle — he’d gone from a lithe athletic freak to a goddamn tank who could chase down point guards from end-to-end and spike their shots off the backboard.

This is also when LeBron really and truly started buying in on defense, which he’d actually started to do during the Lost Season, to Mike Brown’s eternal credit. The Cavs went from being 20th in defensive efficiency in 05-06 to 5th in 06-07 and 13th in 07-08, and that doesn’t happen without LeBron buying in. The chase-down blocks were the flashy part of LeBron’s defense, but his real skill was his ability to play passing lanes without gambling too much and give help while being able to close unbelievable amounts of distance back to the shooter and get him off the shot without selling out for a block. LeBron also wasn’t a pull-up-the-shorts and hound you man-to-man defender, but it’s really, really hard to go around or shoot over a 6-9, 260-pound dude who’s faster than you are, and opponents struggled mightily against him in isolation.

LeBron wouldn’t make his first all-defense team until 08-09, because whoever votes on the All-Defense team (it ain’t the coaches) are generally a bit slow to recognize when players don’t deserve their all-defense spots anymore (LeBron didn’t deserve his last year), but he was an All-Defense caliber player by this point.

08-09 and 09-10: The LeBron Renaissance 

08-09 Stats: 28.4/7.6/7.2, 59.1% True Shooting, 31.7 PER

09-10 Stats: 29.7/7.3/8.6, 60.4% True Shooting, 31.1 PER

There may be another team like the 08-09 Cleveland Cavaliers, my absolute favorite basketball team of all time. This was a team that was, at the same time, balanced, deep, and completely and utterly dependent on one player. The plan was still Give LeBron the Ball, but there was nuance to it now, because the Cavaliers now had the weapons necessary to make a one-man offense deadly.

At this point, it was apparent that no player since MJ was better at driving to the basket and scoring than LeBron James, and nobody who could score like LeBron James had ever been able to pass like LeBron James. Using these two tenants, Mike Brown and Jon Kuester built an offense. It helped that they now had the players to do so — Eric Snow and Larry Hughes were gone, and in their place were Mo Williams and Delonte West, players who weren’t blindingly fast or capable of breaking down defenses on their own, but could make open shots, drive through open lanes, and find open teammates. All LeBron had to do was create all those openings.

With Williams and West spacing the floor and keeping the ball moving on the perimeter, Anderson Varejao and Ben Wallace making smart cuts to keep the defense honest on the weak side (Ben Wallace used cutting and passing to be FAR more effective than he should have been offensively that season), and gigantic former point guard Zydrunas Ilgauskas keeping the ball moving from the high-post and hitting release-valve 18-footers, LeBron finally had the toys he needed to play with. There were some new sets to free Mo Williams for corner threes on picks, or get LeBron free on the weak-side, but mostly it was LeBron making the defense react on every possession and having four teammates on the floor with him at all times who knew how to make a reacting defense pay.

James’ individual game still wasn’t complete — he still had no real post game to speak of, although he did draw double-teams when put down there, and he was still a bit impulsive with his perimeter shot selection, although he did improve it by taking more 3s and less long 2s — but his teammates were there to fill in the gaps in his game. Instead of a reliable three-point shot, the Cavs had Mo Williams floating around the perimeter, catching his man helping on LeBron, sliding into the spot, and hitting the three. Instead of a post game, there was Varejao barreling down the weak side and flipping the ball into the basket. Instead of a midrange pull-up, there was Delonte West moving the ball from side-to-side and letting LeBron get a deep catch. It was Occam’s razor at its very sharpest.

This strategy worked to the tune of 66 wins and a tough conference finals against Orlando, who were able to use the combination of an unstoppable Dwight Howard and hot shooting to beat a Cavs team that was rolling offensively, including with LeBron, who finished the playoffs with a PER of 37.4. Freaking Rashard Lewis.

09-10 was more of the same good stuff from LeBron, who continued to show more discipline in his shot selection while using his teammates to cover for the holes in his game, but the chemistry of the 08-09 squad was gone with the addition of Shaq (The First Commandment of building around LeBron: Thou Shalt not Play LeBron With Two Guys Who Can’t Shoot), and Boston was able to wall off the paint against the Cavs in the playoffs, force LeBron into some rough shooting nights, and end the first LeBron era in Cleveland.

10-11: The Lost Season, Miami Edition

Stats: 26.7/7.5/7.0, 59.4% True Shooting, 27.3 PER

LeBron was too good to be anything resembling bad in Miami, but he regressed in his first year after “The Decision.” Like in 06-07, LeBron was more hesitant to simply damn the torpedoes and go straight to the basket than he had been previously, but like in 06-07, there wasn’t a great plan B. While the Heat gelled instantly on defense, and LeBron had become a fire-breathing defensive monster by this point, they didn’t have things figured out on offense. With Wade, James, and Joel Anthony all starting, spacing was an issue. Miami went through three starting point guards over the course of the year. James didn’t really take to playing off of the ball.

LeBron seemed content to take more of a passive role in Miami’s offense, and a career-low 28.4% of his shot attempts came at the rim. While LeBron finally took over and led the Heat past the Bulls in the Eastern Conference Finals with some classic performances, he froze up something awful in the Finals, as the Heat and James watched a sure Game 2 victory evaporate in the fourth quarter and James was mostly passive in the final three games of the series, all Mavericks wins.

2011-14: The Ultimate Weapon

2011-12 Stats: 27.1/7.9/6.2, 60.5% True Shooting, 30.7 PER

2012-13 Stats: 26.8/8.0/7.3, 64.0% True Shooting, 31.6 PER

2013-14 Stats: 27.1/6.9/6.3, 64.9% True Shooting, 29.3 PER

The changes that LeBron made from 2010-11 to 2011-12 were more mental than anything else. LeBron got more comfortable with his teammates in Miami than he had been the year before, which was to be expected, although the team didn’t really click offensively until Chris Bosh’s serendipitous injury led to the revelation of Shane Battier as Miami’s starting power forward. James’ 3-point shooting game became better than it ever was in Cleveland, but it wasn’t head-and-shoulders better.

The most important thing to happen to James in the 11-12 season was the gut-check game 6 in Boston, when the Heat were a loss away from elimination and complete failure. LeBron responded thusly:

I don’t usually put a lot of stock in this kind of stuff, but something happened with LeBron between Game 5 and Game 6 of that series. He realized that there was no safety net left for him if he failed, and that the only way for him to avoid crashing all the way to the floor was to take over. The Heat went on to win Game 7, and then LeBron did what he couldn’t do in the 2007 finals and simply bullied Oklahoma City to win his first championship — he barely strayed from the paint, and simply used his size and strength to overpower Durant and the Thunder. There was nothing pretty about it, there was nothing passive about it. It was LeBron doing whatever he needed to do to ensure victory. If LeBron had shown up with that mindset against Dallas, he’d have three rings.

2012-13 is when things got scary from an individual standpoint. A 64% True Shooting from a #1 offensive option should be unheard of, but LeBron had become an elite jump shooter, and he had the discipline to go along with it. Not only did he make 40.6% of his threes, but a career-low 20.2% of his overall field goal attempts were long twos, meaning that James was methodically and surgically taking defenses apart from the most efficient areas on the court.

The Heat’s offense was now a juggernaut, and while the 08-09 Cavs’ offense had been built on LeBron overpowering defenses by using his strengths to boost what his teammates could do, there was now an element of alternating current in LeBron’s offensive game — he had always been able to make his teammates better, but now he had the skills to allow him to let his teammates make him better.

The isolation and pick-and-roll attacks were still there, but they were rarer — LeBron was looking for deeper catches, better cuts, easier driving lanes, and was only taking open shots from the perimeter. The transformation from a once-in-a-generation offensive talent to a complete player who utilized all of that talent was finally complete. Naturally, the Heat had a much harder time against the Spurs in the finals than they did against the Thunder, or would have had with a dialed-in LeBron against the Mavericks, and needed a series of miracles to stay alive in Game 6, but LeBron made the most of his second bite of the apple by burying the Spurs from the perimeter in Game 7.

2013-14 saw LeBron really embrace the role of point power forward. The post, where LeBron once feared to tread, had become a mainstay of his game, and he would bully teams into submission by overpowering his man with a combination of finesse and raw power down low. He made 62.2% of his two-point shots, which is absurd, and remained a threat from beyond the arc, shooting 37.9%. James actually did appear to lose just a bit of his legendary athletic pop, and definitely conserved energy on defense, but he made up for it by replacing what had previously been a youthful, exuberant, and impulsive offensive game with a menacing and calculated application of his strengths, both figurative and literal, against any weakness a defense might present to him.

That’s the player who’s coming back to Cleveland, with the most major change being that he lost around 20 pounds this summer, and is actually the size of a (huge) small forward again instead of a power forward. It was probably necessary for him to make the move as he gets on the other side of 30, as he can’t carry all that weight all around the court for 40 minutes a game any more, but we’ll see if he’s more hesitant to bully defenders in the post than he was last season, or if there will be more of the “vintage LeBron” route-one attacks to the basket from the perimeter than we saw last season.

There are still some weaknesses in LeBron’s game — he could still stand to be a bit more active off the ball offensively, isn’t an elite catch-and-shoot guy despite his shooting ability, and struggles to pull up when going to his strong hand, as that’s a move that requires the kind of elite balance that only a select few possess. But man oh man, am I excited to watch the evolution of LeBron James continue in a Cavalier uniform.