The Cleveland Cavaliers made themselves immediate championship contenders by re-signing their prodigal son, LeBron James. As anyone who vaguely follows the NBA knows, LeBron is pretty good. There’s a reason he’s a four-time MVP. He scores, rebounds, passes and defends as well as any single player in the league today, and maybe ever. He’s the ultimate package, if ever there was one. But there’s also a reason James only became a two-time NBA champion when he left the Cavs, where he toiled as a one-man team tasked with carrying an unbelievable load on the court: he needs help.
That’s because he went to the Miami Heat to join forces with fellow All-Stars Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. With their talents combined, they ruled the Eastern Conference on their way to four-consecutive NBA Finals berths.
James is now in a very similar, or possibly even better, situation in Cleveland, where he’ll have superstars in Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving to play with. With their new Big Three, the Cleveland Cav’s odds in their next game of the NBA season are -2 against Portland.
As good as LeBron is, Love and Irving will arguably have an even bigger impact in how the Cavs’ season pans out. Any team with LeBron will be good, but whether they are contenders or not will be determined by James’ surrounding cast.
At age 29, James has already endured something of a career’s worth of mileage on his body when you add up all the regular, postseason and even international games he’s played. All that wear and tear has started catching up to James in the form of a troublesome back injury which crept up last season and has persisted even in Cavs training camp.
James realizes that he can’t continue at this rate, and acknowledges that for the Cavs to truly be successful, he’ll need to be fresh for another long postseason run. That means Love and Irving need to step up and take the lead. Their King demands it of them.
