The regular season is the regular season, but I remember Cleveland beating the brakes off the Lakers each time they’ve met. I almost just chalked it up to LeBron is just a bad matchup for most of the league. 😀

No shot? It could have been interesting. 

The Magic caught fire and somehow conjured up modern basketball that year. 

The Cavs were completely bamboozled by it all. All the shooters. Small lineups. It was wild. 

The Lakers were much more conventional. The Cavs were built to play a team like the Lakers. 

Those Lakers teams mistakenly get attributed as a Kobe carry job when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I was doing this query today to see who might qualify for 2026 as every champion has had at least 2 players with more than 5 LAKER (formerly known as eRAPTOR) WAR in the regular season, and the 2009 and 2010 Lakers had 5 such players, which is tied for the most of any champion along with the 2017 Warriors, 96 Bulls, 87 Lakers, and oddly enough the 77 Blazers.

Your chance was LeBron playing at a level only a handful of players have ever been able to reach. I wouldn’t say they had a great chance but LeBron could win games single handedly.

That Orlando team was clearly better than the Cavs, only Lebron doing Lebron things made it a bit interesting.

Problem was not the Lakers being good, was Cavs being bad.

He was actually a pretty decent player when healthy. If he’d stayed healthy in his prime he’d have been a guy who’d give you 18-20ppg pretty easily…..unfortunately, his knees turned to absolute Jello pretty quickly….I think he had virtually no cartilage left in one of his knees after like 3 surgeries on it when he retired.

He’s on the Knicks pre and post game.

NBA live… 2005 🎶

Bro….nba live 05 was absolutely peak. I loved that game

He is on Knicks MSG broadcast team for past few years

He graduated from syosset or Roslyn (long Island) and came into the TGIFridays in Manhasset before he was drafted. Dude thought he was such hot shit, but the girls he brought in were long Island 8s at best.

Imagine wanting to be king shit of Manhasset TGIFridays.

Didn’t tip well either; calculated exactly to 15%.

More like wally herbiack

I think SVG is mostly just bullshitting but also it’s not like you needed a lot of gameplanning for Delonte West, Big Z or Varejao. Delonte played one-handed, Varejao was just a run and dunk guy, and Big Z at that point was basically a statue who hit 15-foot jumpers.

They were a solid unit defensively but on offense it was all LeBron, and a little Mo Williams.

He retired after the series lol.

He was a beast 4-5 years before and a super underrated player. But yeah crazy statement. Maybe SVG is just misremembering.

Z was good!

Its a pet peve of mine when they talk about Lebron not having an all-star on his team and thats what made his team trash.

The nuggets won the championship with only Jokic as an all-star, but people considered their starting 5 the best in the league. Make a better argument.

Letting Ricky Davis go was a net positive. He was a losing player with a bad attitude

Ricky Davis was awful. King of empty stats. Loved him in fantasy!

jesus christ, luke jackson was the 10th overall pick and couldn’t even manage 75 career games. that’s depressing

Horrible draft picks. Horrible trades. Zero vision for how to put a team around someone who was on track to be the best player in the league very quickly. The Decision was a shitty way to announce he was leaving and most Clevelanders were blinded by that, but the organization holds most of the responsibility for it at the end of the day.

Some fans don’t realize that LeBron was drafted as the final piece of a championship core. 

Wagner/Bron/Booz/Z

It was already in place. That team makes at least 3 Finals runs. 

Then Wagner got sick. And the owner botched the Boozer extension. 

From there, they made bad moves, but people also forget the dearth of talent in the league at that particular moment.

There just weren’t very many good players to acquire. 

It was so bad that people were talking about contraction as a solution to raise the talent floor and people like LeBron thought it was a good idea. 

They had to let Ricky Davis go. There’s a recent interview out there with him where he straight up admits he refused to let Lebron lead the team, and he was going out there every night with the goal to just get his stats. He said he can now admit Lebron was their best player, even as a rookie, and running the offense through him was what was best for the team, but he refused to defer to a 18yr old rookie.

They also got screwed by the Boozer debacle, and in hind sight never should have made that handshake agreement and let him become a FA.

I wish lebron got drafted by a competent franchise.

They had a chance to trade JJ Hickson for Prime Amare and they didn’t lmao. Incompetency at its finest

Lebron 2007 vs Detroit in the playoffs had a game that he scored the last 25 of the cavs points or something absurd. Single greatest performance ive ever seen still. 

The league was way weaker then, so I just dont think doing what he did is repeatable. The talent level is insanely high nowadays. 

He made the right choice leaving Cleveland and then leaving Miami when they were about to regress badly. If he stays there, being all loyal or whatever, wins 1-2 at most and never leaves, ain’t no way people are talking about him as a GOAT level player because of the ring culture, even if he played exactly the same level of basketball. Instead he leaves, wins, then as the Cavs are getting better comes back and wins. Unfortunately for him, KD decides to join the Warriors and his window pretty much ends there

The East was a joke. If you put LeBron on the same teams (1st Cavs stint, Heat, 2nd Cavs stint) in the West he doesn’t even make 5 finals.

Don’t forget Sasha and Luke!!!

You forgot about the Bynum hype that never materialized

Nope Bron averaged 34 in both those series. In the series vs the Magic he averaged 38.5 ppg and it still wasn’t enough lmao

He would’ve got embarrassed, it’s a real shame it never happened so that this fraud doesn’t get to be “unanimous top 2” or whatever nonsense

Not so sure. The Lakers were better, but it would have been a grind for them. 

The best way to attack those Cavs was pace, space, and threes. 

The Lakers with Fisher and Kobe didn’t play that game. 

And Z could have actually been utilized with Pau on the court, unlike the small ball Magic lineups. 

Tired of the LeBron Stan’s acting like LeBron was playing on the bobcats. He didn’t have super teams, but by the time it got to 07 and onward the Cavs fielding some decent teams that even won 60 games. The Cavs failures were largely on LeBron in the playoffs.

In 07 finals the games were decided by an average of 5 points against the spurs and lebron shot like 16% on all shots not at the rim. If he shot even 25% from the field they were winning games against the spurs. His team was good enough to keep the games close even with him being awful.

In 2010 the Cavs were the favorites to beat the Celtics. They were a 60 win team with a 2-1 lead over the Celtics in the playoffs. Lebron proceeded to have 19 turnovers in the final 3 games and shot 38%, 21%, and 38% from the field. He went 2-13 from three in those games as well. One of the worst playoff meltdowns by an mvp in nba history, and may possibly be the worst.

Poor LeBron, if only he had better teammates he could have won as much as Kobe and Jordan.

Wade, Bosh, R. Allen, Irving, Love, Davis, Rondo, Dwight, and Luka… that’s it! Imagine he had some real help, he would totally have more than 4 rings by now.

You wouldn’t believe how many people disagree with him (well, at least claim to disagree with him). It’s kind of an obviously true statement, but it still needs to be said

Mo Williams was really good. Boobie Gibson was probably the 7th or 8th best player on those rosters

Went way too far down the roster. Boobie was not a feature of their offense; also, nobody calls him Daniel except the government.

this hedo turkoglu disrespect is unacceptable

? The year they beat Cleveland, Orlando had 3 all stars (Howard, Rashard Lewis, Jameer Nelson), not to mention Turkoglu and a whole bunch of great role players.

I kind of disagree. That Magic team was a precursor to the modern NBA with their emphasis on the 3 ball, it was a 4 out system with shooters.

Man those Lewis, Turkoglu, Howard, Nelson teams were fun to watch.

They had a super serum team

They were all jacked up on steroids for that series and got punished after. How’s that not super?

Man I loved watching LeBron + shooters and defensive players. It was awesome seeing him go to work

Pls don’t compare Antawn with Pau.

Don’t be that low

Pau Gasol led the grizzlies to better records than Kobe did the Lakers one or two seasons.

Antawn Jamison led the cavs to one of the worst records in history after LeBron skipped town