The most remarkable thing about the future hall of famer’s run to the finals this season is how easy he makes everything seem

On Sunday night, LeBron James was playing a different game than everybody else. As he stood at the top of the key, he paused and dribbled, watching the shot clock run down. He did not panic. He did not flinch. And as time all but expired he strode to the rim over yet another overmatched Boston Celtic.

The most remarkable thing about the most remarkable run of the the game’s most remarkable player of his era is how easy he makes everything seem right now. This year’s Cleveland Cavaliers may well be the worst of the eight teams James has led to the finals, lacking another playmaker who would be a legitimate sidekick. The burden of driving towards another championship looks, at times, as if it is James’s alone, and yet he shrugs at his task.

Dribble. Pause. Drive. Basket.

He carved through the Celtics in the final two games of the NBA’s Eastern Conference finals, toying with Boston’s young, fearless players, who were all but helpless to stop him. In the end, Sunday’s 87-79 Game 7 victory could be his finest moment – even more than the championship he finally brought the Cavaliers in 2016 or the two titles won in Miami.

“I’m trying to squeeze a little more from the orange,” he said in an ESPN interview right after the game.

Dazzling LeBron James carries Cavaliers past Celtics and into NBA finals Read more

Funny. It looked as if there wasn’t anything left to wring out. So many times this season – the one that is supposed to be his last in Cleveland – the team looked doomed. A midseason trade brought players good enough to get the Cavs to the postseason but hardly seemed the type to pull them to another finals. The Cavaliers appeared finished in the first round against Indiana and struggled early in the conference finals against Boston.

But each time, James took over, holding the ball, waiting for the smallest lanes to open, a path to the basket that suddenly seemed 100 feet wide as he sliced to the basket.

He had 35 points, 15 rebounds and nine assists in Game 7 and it seemed inferior to the 46 points, 11 rebounds and nine assists in Game 6. Never mind that Game 7 was a grittier, more rugged fight than its predecessor (which was brutish itself). James had the ball for so much of the night, you would think he had scored 55 or 60.

These last few weeks are probably the most impressive of James’s career, even better than that first title in 2016. Back then he had Kyrie Irving to help him. This team does not have an Irving. Everything these last two months has come from James himself. The Pacers were finally beaten in the first round and the Raptors overmatched in the second. But Boston coach Brad Stevens had a plan: he had his players try to wear James down, beating him up near the basket, double-teaming him at times, doing everything they could to make him uncomfortable. For a time, the plan worked. Ultimately, it did not.

“We tried to make him exert as much energy as humanly possible,” Stevens said in his postgame press conference. “But he still scored 35.”

Something struck Stevens as he sat on the interview dais, trying to understand what James just had done to the Celtics. The season is such a grind, Stevens said, a long, treacherous pursuit from first practice in fall to the end of the playoffs in late spring. To make the finals once takes a immense amount of focus each day. James has done so eight times.

“It’s incredible,” Stevens said.

Who knows what happens in the next few weeks? Golden State and Houston are far more formidable than the teams Cleveland have dispatched so far. The run is likely to crumble in the finals. James’s Cleveland legacy may be that one title and a handful of near misses. The chances are he is playing his last games in his home state. That with free agency beckoning he will chase a title in Philadelphia or San Antonio or help to rebuild the Los Angeles Lakers.

The thinking has always been that the championship two years ago absolved him of any debt to Cleveland, that he could leave in peace knowing he had given the city his best. But these playoffs may have created one last great memory: the year he put the team on his back and carried them to the finals.

If this is the end in Cleveland what a finish it has been.