HOW, exactly, did a team featuring the greatest player in basketball history, flanked by a pair of three-time All-Stars, get to be seen as an against-all-odds underdog? Yes, you heard that right: LeBron James (pictured), who on June 19th brought his hometown of Cleveland its first championship in a major American professional team sport since 1964, is the greatest player ever. Not Jordan, not Kareem. And certainly not Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors’ sublime point guard and the winner of back-to-back Most Valuable Player awards, whose performance in the finals’ deciding game was a damp squib as his supposedly invincible club went down to defeat. Look it up: according to Box Plus-Minus, the best all-in-one summary statistic of a player’s contributions that is available for most of the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) history, Mr James already stands alone at the top for career value, in both the regular season and the playoffs. Yes, the metric doesn’t cover the first four years of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s career, and yes, the jury’s out on whether Michael Jordan’s four-and-a-half seasons of mid-career retirement should count against him. But Mr James is only 31, and he has many years of basketball left in him. If he hasn’t surpassed them already, he will by the time he’s done.

It’s hard to pinpoint when expectations dwindled for King James and his new-ish supporting cast. Even though he tried to keep them in check by saying the Cleveland Cavaliers were “not ready” to win a title in his Sports Illustratedarticle announcing that he would return to the team that drafted him, betting markets instantly anointed them the favourites for the 2014-15 season. Sure enough, Cleveland made it to the finals. And although they were vanquished in the end, LeBron managed to win two of six games against a dominant Warriors squad almost single-handedly, while his second and third fiddles, Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving, were both injured. With the Cavaliers starting the 2015-16 campaign at full strength, leading statistical forecasting models like FiveThirtyEight’s CARM-ELO pegged them once again as the most likely team to win.

But Mr James’s quest to bring the Larry O’Brien Trophy to Cleveland was quickly overshadowed when Golden State kicked off this season with 24 consecutive victories, making their 2014-15 championship look like a mere warm-up. Playing an exuberant, up-tempo, aesthetically pleasing game built around suffocating defence, whiplash-inducing ball movement and unprecedented volumes of long-distance shooting—with many of Mr Curry’s volleys launched from far enough to merit an international dialling code—the Dubs seemed to have broken the sport. They set a new record for regular-season victories with 73 in 82 games, besting the mark of 72 set by Mr Jordan’s 1995-96 Chicago Bulls. And if anyone looked likely to challenge the Warriors, it was the San Antonio Spurs, who actually compiled a better point differential than Golden State.

The Cavs, meanwhile, were reduced to a mere afterthought. Despite playing in the far weaker Eastern Conference—they enjoyed the softest regular-season schedule in the league—Cleveland won a pedestrian 57 games, barely besting the good-not-great Toronto Raptors for the top mark in the East. Mr James’s overall production was still in line with his (unfathomably good) career averages. However, his uncharacteristically poor percentage from three-point range sparked concerns that he had lost his outside shooting touch. Mr Irving’s defence was as porous as ever—he ranked 12th from the bottom in the entire NBA, according to ESPN’s complex, all-in-one Real Plus-Minus statistic. And Mr Love’s output remained a shadow of the numbers he used to put up before coming to Cleveland.

Meanwhile, Mr Curry was elevating his game to unprecedented heights. The New York Times ran a feature comparing his artistry to ballet, and FiveThirtyEight simply declared him “the revolution”. Soon, a consensus emerged that the torch carried by basketball’s best player—which Mr James has held without dispute for the past decade—wasbeingpassed. Even Mr James himself tweeted of Mr Curry, “Never before seen someone like him in the history of ball.” The Warriors faced a scare in the Western Conference finals, falling behind the star-studded Oklahoma City Thunder by three games to one. But they rattled off three straight victories to advance, securing a finals rematch against Cleveland, and then raced out to a three-to-one lead of their own. There appeared to be little room for doubt that King James’s long reign had come to an end.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the fait accompli of back-to-back Warriors championships: Mr James refused to be dethroned. In the fifth and sixth games, both Cavaliers victories, his performances were the stuff of legend: 41 points, 16 rebounds, seven assists, three steals and three blocks in the first contest; 41 points, 11 assists, eight rebounds, four steals and three blocks in the second. Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight crunched the numbers and called this run the second-best stretch of Mr James’s storied career. To be sure, the Warriors weren’t quite at full strength: Draymond Green, their under-sized, intense, do-it-all forward, was suspended for Game Five for kicking opponents where it hurtsone time too many, and Andrew Bogut, the seven-foot-tall (2.13-metre) anchor of their defence, was lost for the season after hurting his knee. But the games weren’t close—Cleveland won by 15 and 14 points—so it’s hard to claim that even a fully loaded Warriors squad would have closed out the series in either one.

One for the ages

That set the stage for a climactic Game Seven, held on Golden State’s home court. After the first six matchups were all decided by double-digit margins, this one more than lived up to lofty expectations. It was fiercely contested from the tip-off, with 20 lead changes and no margin greater than seven points.

It was not hard to see why the Warriors won 89% of their regular-season games and the Cavs just 70%. For the first three quarters at least, Golden State methodically probed Cleveland’s defence until one of their players achieved just enough separation from his man that a fellow Cavalier was forced to help. Within seconds, the Warriors would make two, three or four precise passes as the Cavs frantically sought to rotate, until the ball found its way to the hands of an open shooter or a player racing towards the basket. Mr Green, mostly known for his versatility, defence and toughness rather than his long-range marksmanship, had a game for the ages, draining six of eight three-point attempts as he led his team with 32 points.

In contrast, Cleveland barely seemed to have any coherent offensive strategy whatsoever. Most possessions involved Mr James biding his time far from the hoop until his team had only about eight seconds left to shoot; he would then drive towards the basket on the left side, and improvise once he got there. Drive-and-kick, or inducing a defender to abandon his man so you can pass to him for an open shot, is a staple strategy in basketball, but it only works if you have far better shooters than the Cavs happen to employ: Cleveland made a paltry six of its 25 three-point attempts. Plan B was to feed the ball to Mr Irving, a lithe, slashing guard who gets to the hoop so fast that it is inadvisable to blink when he is dribbling, and hope he could work his magic. Continuing a series-long trend, Mr Love, who has twice finished fourth in the NBA in scoring, was virtually invisible on the offensive end, contributing just nine points.

But even if the Cavs’ offence wasn’t a textbook demonstration of team basketball, it worked. The virtually unguardable Mr Irving made defender after defender look silly, scoring 26 points in often-spectacular fashion, including the game-clinching three-pointer as Mr Curry sought in vain to defend him one-on-one. In contrast, the King didn’t have his best shooting day, and rarely beat his man to the basket. But with his historically unique combination of height, strength and quickness, he didn’t have to: once near the rim, he could simply shoot over a smaller defender; draw a foul and score from the free-throw line; or pass to a fellow Cavalier left unguarded. Despite his teammates’ mediocre shooting, he still got the ball to enough of them in favourable situations to amass an outstanding total of 11 assists. Even J.R. Smith, a player with a well-deserved reputation for taking the most ill-advised long-range shots in the NBA, proved his worth with back-to-back three-pointers early in the third quarter, which helped erase Golden State’s halftime lead. Although most of these shots were closely guarded, the Cavs’ stars were simply talented enough to get them to fall despite the pressure.

Meanwhile, on the defensive end, Cleveland took a quantum leap forward from their lacklustre performances during the regular season. Although no club could ever hope to prevent the Warriors from getting their share of uncontested three-pointers, the Cavs did an admirable job on the whole of closing out on Golden State’s marksmen. The sharpshooting “Splash Brothers”, Mr Curry and Klay Thompson, made just a third of their shots and a quarter of their three-point attempts, while coughing up seven costly turnovers. Cleveland’s defenders were particularly effective in the final quarter, when they disrupted so many plays that the Warriors’ pass-oriented wing players essentially gave up on whipping the ball around the court, and started chucking up contested shots. The Warriors drained just 39% of their field-goal attempts in Game Seven, a far cry from their 49% mark during the regular season. Some of that underperformance may just have been Mr Curry and Mr Thompson happening to hit a cold streak at an inopportune moment, but the Cavs still deserve credit for keeping up the pressure.

In particular, Mr Love, often regarded as a defensive sieve, miraculously smothered and stifled the far more agile Mr Curry on a key possession as the clock wound down. And Mr James, whose defensive acumen is often overshadowed by his offensive brilliance, put his keen instincts and remarkable ability to anticipate plays on display. The game’s most memorable moment is likely to be the King racing to catch up with the Warriors’ Andre Iguodala, and reaching from behind to swat what should have been an easy basket into the backboard in the game’s final minutes. Mr James has borne a superhuman workload in recent years, and it is a testament to his commitment to conditioning that a man of his size can still beat everyone up and down the court at an age when most players have already lost a step.

It’s fair for Warriors partisans to note that some of the same excuses that could be made for Cleveland last year applied to them this time around. Although no one would equate the loss of Mr Bogut, who sat on the bench 73% of the time during the first four games of the series before getting hurt in the fifth, with the combined absences of Mr Irving and Mr Love during the 2014-15 finals, Cleveland took full advantage of Golden State’s lack of a bona fide rim protector. They scored two-thirds of their field goals from within a few feet of the basket. In particular, the 6’3” Mr Irving might have been more inclined to settle for jump shots rather than driving all the way to the hoop if he had known that he would have to shoot around seven-foot behemoth of a defender if he got too close. The Warriors also suffered from a lack of second-chance opportunities following their barrage of missed shots, corralling a mere seven offensive rebounds on 46 opportunities (at a league-average rate, they would have secured 11). A few more “Kobe Assists” could have gone a long way towards closing what wound up being a four-point deficit. But with Mr Bogut on the sidelines, there was little competition for Mr Love, who collected 14 rebounds, or Mr James (who grabbed 11, putting him in double figures in three statistical categories).

May the best team lose

It’s fair to say that the weaker club probably prevailed on June 19th. It took a combination of legacy-defining performances by Mr James and Mr Irving, and off nights for Mr Curry and Mr Thompson, for Cleveland to eke out a closely fought victory. But the NBA could in fact use far more fluky champions.

Unlike college basketball’s annual “March Madness” tournament, whose guaranteed diet of upsets makes it must-see TV, the NBA can be almost mind-numbingly predictable. In a sport like football, a single lucky goal can represent the entirety of the scoring for a match. In contrast, pro basketball has so many scoring events per game that random fluctuations tend to cancel each other out. As a result, in a typical year, the league’s best team will win 75% of the time; a historically great one like the record-setting 2015-16 Warriors can approach 90%. In the 20 seasons before this one, the team with the best regular-season record won the title fully half the time; eight of the ten that didn’t reached at least the semi-finals. When two juggernauts go head to head, like the battles between Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics and Magic Johnson’s Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s, the result is some of the most compelling rivalries in all of sports. But in the absence of a worthy adversary—think of Mr Jordan’s second title, over the Portland Trail Blazers, or Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal’s first, against the Indiana Pacers, the playoffs can feel more like a methodical march towards a pre-ordained destination than genuinely suspenseful entertainment. After Golden State completed their triumphant comeback in the Western Conference finals, this season certainly looked the same way: the best team in NBA history was up three games to one in the finals, with two of the last three potential games on their home court. And then, somehow, they lost. Such a welcome reminder of the reason they play the games—that anything can happen—should keep fans glued to their television screens for decades to come.

The other reason to rejoice in the Warriors’ defeat is its likely effect on the popular perception of King James. Strange as it may sound, LeBron has been somewhat underappreciated over the course of his career. He has always been cursed with unattainable expectations. Long before graduating high school, he was hailed as Mr Jordan’s heir. He was only 22 when he led an otherwise mediocre team to the finals; two years later, the Cavs finished with the best regular-season record in the league but fell short at the hands of the defending champion Boston Celtics. Famously, neither Mr Jordan or Wilt Chamberlain managed to do any better early in their careers, and both faced the same vapid questions Mr James did about whether they had what it takes to win a title. (The answer, of course, was no: what all three needed was better teammates.)

When Cleveland proved unable to provide him with a sufficient supporting cast, he decamped to Miami, and was promptly demonised for orchestrating the union there of three star free agents: himself, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. That revealed a disturbing double standard under which teams are only considered “genuine” or “authentic” if their rosters are selected by (older and usually white) front-office executives, rather than by the (young and usually black) workers that actually produce the entertainment. When he struggled in the new super-team’s first finals appearance, pundits rejoiced that he had gotten a much-deserved comeuppance, and been exposed as a choker unfit to join Mr Jordan in the pantheon. His two rings with Miami were somehow tarnished by the original sin of that roster’s creation, and his valiant but doomed effort in last year’s finals reinforced the notion that he could only win with an undue amount of help.

Only now has Mr James delivered the feel-good narrative necessary to salvage his reputation in the public eye. After his dalliances in South Beach, he returned home a grown man willing to assume the burden of delivering a championship to his long-suffering Rust Belt town. He mentored the talented Mr Irving into a maturing star, and shrugged off the disappointing contributions from Mr Love. He stared down a 73-win steamroller and a three-to-one deficit, and willed his club to three straight victories. And as he writhed in pain from falling on his wrist with ten seconds to go, then got up and nailed a free throw that iced the victory, promptly collapsing back onto the floor in tears once the final buzzer sounded, the triumph clearly meant so much to him that any fan with a heart had to share in his joy. No longer will anyone accuse him of not knowing how to win: his teams have now claimed the same number of titles that Mr Jordan’s had by the same age, and reached the finals twice as often.

Fans shouldn’t have needed this tale of redemption to recognise Mr James as not just the greatest player of his era, but the greatest of any era. Mr Curry’s plodding performance in this year’s finals will hardly dent the public’s adoration of him—as a (relatively) little man (he stands 6’3”) who gracefully dances around giants, he will always be a uniquely relatable superstar. The contrast highlights a central paradox of fandom: even as we pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of watching mankind’s greatest physical feats, we tend to discount the achievements of the most physically gifted athletes as morally unimpressive, cheering instead for less imposing specimens to triumph through hard work, discipline, teamwork and ingenuity. There are troubling racial undertones to this brains-over-brawn trope—the 6’10” black centre Bill Russell quite fairly complained that commentators did not give him sufficient credit for his intelligence, and anyone who knows the sport will tell you that Mr James has the best basketball IQ in the league. Meanwhile, Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson recently argued at ESPN’s The Undefeated that Mr Curry owes at least some of his mainstream popularity to the fact that he is a lighter-skinned black man.

Nonetheless, the tables have now turned. After spending his entire career bearing the load of Jordanesque promise and regularly being judged to have fallen short, Mr James for the first time was written off for dead, and roared back to life. But it’s our expectations of LeBron that have oscillated, not LeBron himself: it just takes one quick look at the stat sheet to see he is the same player now as when he was 20. If we are ever fortunate enough to witness another player like him, hopefully it won’t take 13 years for us to count our blessings.