I.

Very few viewers, fans, sports journalists on the “beat,” historians of the game, aficionados, and even the players themselves[i]—in other words, very few people with anything more than the most frivolous interest in and familiarity with the 2012 NBA would dispute this brief trans-Pacific dispatch’s first premise, viz., that LeBron James is and has been for the past several years the best basketball player alive. Just watch the games. James’ all-around superiority is as close to incontrovertible as any sort of subjective assessment gets. There are better shooters, passers, dribblers, penetrators of the lane, players of both on- and off-ball defense, (slightly) bigger bodies, (very slightly) higher jumpers, one or two “grown men” (in former NBA player-cum-analyst Marc Jackson’s signature formulation) gifted with a touch more fearsomely hewn physiques, point guards more adept at setting teammates up for easy buckets, wingmen with greater wingspan, easier lateral agility, thus better primed to opt for alternate routes when angling through labyrinths in motion of defensive rotations between them and the rim,[1] and post-players his size who exhibit less reluctance to receive the ball “down low”; but there is no one who combines all of these attributes in one moving somatic unit, puts them to such unrelentingly uncanny use—the statistical production is unrivaled, and varies little from one night to the next, though even now, in this post-Moneyball era of arithmeticized performance metrics, there are still subtleties that cannot be assessed beyond their context in the actual ebb-and-wane of the game, its flow; I see him complete plays each night that no one else in the NBA would even try—and with such seeming ease. He is the best. Has been for several years.