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LeBron James: 'I understand that teams get together to try to beat me'

LeBron James knows that the NBA is after him. It was the case in 2002, when his Cleveland Cavaliers selected raw Dajuan Wagner as a tank pick in the draft a year before LBJ became eligible for selection. It was the case in 2006, following James’ first trip to the playoffs, and he certainly acted as the NBA’s pinshot (even with other players winning champions while James sat through June) during LeBron’s final few years in his first go-round with the Cavs.

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It drove teams, and the league’s front office, batty in 2010 when he jumped to Miami. His presence and eventual 2012 title win during a lockout-addled 2011-12 turn pushed the league into all sorts of anti-LeBron maneuvers, and the push to prevent James from barreling past you has acted as the impetus for all manner of would-be contenders in the years since.

The man is used to his ears buzzing. They’re ringing at this point. Franchises (the basketball-minded ones, at least) base entire offseasons around getting past LeBron James. Whether that means stopping him or out-scoring his team or some holy mixture of both, squads and turned out each October with James as the focus. From a talk with Joe Vardon at Cleveland.com:

“I know teams switch and pick up new coaches or new players, and their whole goal is kind of they want to beat me,” James told cleveland.com, in a candid discussion about the upcoming year and his place in the sport at age 31, in this his 14th season. “It’s never just about me, but I always hear them saying, ‘We gotta beat LeBron.’ It’s not just me on the court, but I understand that teams get together in this conference and across the league to try to beat me.”

This only happens in the NBA. No NFL team is cobbled together with a certain opposing quarterback in mind, and no crew of Major Leaguers is hired to stop one particular pitcher, or one left-handed bat boasting an OPS that breaks the thousand mark. LeBron James hasn’t won this league’s MVP in years, Golden State won 73 games before Kevin Durant joined them, and yet LBJ is all anyone can think about.

LeBron James watches the clock. (Getty Images)
LeBron James watches the clock. (Getty Images)

For good reason. Think of the waste, first.

LeBron’s team in Miami was cobbled together to set the tone, yet it still had the league’s two powerhouses of the time in mind. The Celtics and Lakers had just battled to a near-draw in the 2010 NBA Finals in the weeks before LeBron made it to Miami, and seemed well prepared to take on James’ new South Beach culture in the years that followed despite the advancing age of the classic participants in question.

The C’s fell hard in the 2011 playoffs to Miami, though, while the Lakers imploded during an embarrassing 2011 second round sweep at the hands of a Dallas club that nobody suspected would go on to take that season’s title. Those Lakers would be gone forever, and though Boston would take Miami to the limit in 2012; it was the Celtics’ playoff push that year that finally forced James into acting like the sort of every-possession supernova that wrests championships away from those that seem to know better.

The Celtics and Lakers (even including a Los Angeles team that featured Dwight Howard and Steve Nash alongside Kobe Bryant) are no more, and there is little guarantee beyond the halo of hope that has an Al Horford-led collective of Greenies from Boston pushing LeBron’s Cavaliers into anything rough this spring. The Oklahoma City Thunder were traipsed in 2012 prior to the team’s ownership’s move to oust James Harden, further felled by injury and, eventually, familiarity breeding contempt.

The Chicago Bulls actually had a better record than James’ Heat in his first two seasons with the club, but LeBron held those Bulls at arm’s length during the 2011 Eastern Conference finals before Derrick Rose’s ACL tear gave Chicago all the excuses it needed to pack it in. The Indiana Pacers once looked like a suited equal, and now they’re pinning hopes on a 20-year old to push them back into relevance.

The San Antonio Spurs were hardly “vanquished” (the team truly should have taken two titles from Miami) by James, but the vicissitudes of dynasty have the franchise a full step behind LeBron’s current Cavaliers despite winning ten more games than Cleveland in 2015-16. Those early Mavs? Gone. Last year’s Toronto Raptors barely register, and those side-to-side swipers from Atlanta never made a dent before Horford moved on.

Those last Golden State Warriors – the ones who could barely get past a badly injury-stricken James-led Cavaliers team in 2015 before bowing down in seven games last June? – in a way, we’ll never see them again. Kevin Durant’s presence may indeed push them beyond any reasonable expectation of what we should anticipate when art and commerce lay together, but the only untold story behind Durant’s move to Golden State comes teetering onto page after hearing the idea that, somehow, the Durant-less Golden State Warriors just weren’t enough. Not as long as LeBron James was around.

That’s ash on the floor. LeBron ran the summer, yet again.

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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!

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