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The season before LeBron James won back-to-back NBA championships with the Miami Heat, LeBron’s heavily-favored Heat team laid an egg against the Dallas Mavericks in the 2011 Finals–gifting them their first ever NBA championship.
The Heat held a 2-1 lead going in to Game 4, and lost three straight to lose in six games. The easy scapegoat was undoubtedly LeBron James. In the series LeBron averaged just 17.8 points per game, an 8.9-point drop from the regular season, the largest point drop-off in league history. Of that 17.8 ppg, the then 27 year old James averaged just three points in the fourth quarter. Not to mention, a dismal -24 plus-minus in the series-clinching Game 6.
Bottom line: the back-to-back league MVP at the time looked very pedestrian. And his sulky attitude in the series didn’t help much.
Eddie House, fellow Heat teammate in 2011, was at the twilight of his career and looking to add a ring to his finger next to the one he earned with the Celtics three years earlier. Not a bad idea to hitch your wagon to LeBron, Wade, and Bosh.
Unfortunately, House’s career would end with the sour taste of the 2011 Finals still lingering and on Wednesday’s episode of Undisputed, he claimed James could never be considered the greatest of all time because he quit on his teammates that year.
House said, via Sporting News:
“I can’t get over the fact he didn’t show up in Dallas,” House said. “Not only because I was on the team, but the fact he was the best player and everybody was dependent on him to show up and do what he does, and he was M.I.A. He had a bad series. No, a bad series. Jordan never had that. People killed James Harden for having a bad series last year, right. ‘Oh no, he ain’t as good as he is,’ but you going to say somebody who quit in the Finals, at the end of everything, when all the marbles are on the table, that he’s the greatest of all time? I can’t buy it. I can’t buy it for that reason right there.”
It’s one thing for talking heads to claim that LeBron mailed it in during the series, but for his own teammate to lambaste him like that, yikes.
[h/t Sporting News]