Originally posted on 06/03/2016:

To be fair, it seems Lebron can never take a night off in the playoffs and have his teams still thrive. Curry and Klay both took the night off last night, and Golden State still ran away with the victory. Hell, Jordan took a whole year off and the Bulls still almost made the Finals. In fact, in Jordan's absence the Bulls tallied only TWO fewer regular season wins than the year before.

Furthermore, people routinely pile on Lebron for "bad games" that are actually very good games. Again, one could point to last night... far from Lebron's most dominating performances, but not a dismal effort by any stretch. It's just that Lebron is held to such impossible standards, that if any hairline crack in the armor shows, his detractors come out in full force to storm the castle.

The burden of expectations that Lebron has had to shoulder for his career are unlike that of any other player in the history of professional sports. If he's not single-handedly putting an entire franchise on his shoulders and winning titles year in and year out, that's somehow spun to be "failure."

Just the fact that someone can even seriously consider James a "bust" in any capacity shows how jaded the public is, and how skewed the criteria is for calibrating James' career versus any other flesh and blood being.