LeBron James is one win away from winning a fourth NBA Championship, and potentially adding a fourth career NBA Finals MVP award to his résumé.
In his 17th year in the league at the age of 35, James has been brilliant in the bubble throughout the playoffs, and the stats say James is having one of the best Finals performances of his career – and he’s had a lot of appearances on the NBA’s grandest stage.
According to one of James’ most vocal critics, though, taking down his former team to win a title with the Lakers will only hurt his case to be the GOAT. During Wednesday’s episode of Undisputed, Skip Bayless made the wild argument that winning the NBA Finals is somehow bad for James’ legacy.
“This cakewalk of a Finals victory actually hurts LeBron’s far-fetched GOAT case more than it helps it.
This is an epic mismatch. This ring should be made of cubic zirconia. Because this one has a big ol’ asterisk beside it.
…. Michael Jordan never had a path this easy to a ring, and obviously – even you have agreed with this – has never had a Finals opponent as weak as the Miami Heat, the fifth seed in the Leastern Conference. I’m sorry, this is disqualified. You saw it from the start, it should have been a sweep. You know it and I know it.”
Bayless has been making ridiculous claims and arguments about LeBron James for years and years, but this may be the single most absurd take we’ve ever heard on Undisputed. Due to a combination of results entirely out of his control, James’ potential fourth title is so worthless, per Bayless, that he’d seemingly be better off recusing himself from the Finals to give the Heat a chance instead of adding a ring to his collection. If James and the Lakers collapsed and lost the Finals, though, Bayless would be the loudest voice grilling LeBron every day on TV. It’s madness.
In the same segment, Bayless said that Jimmy Butler (40-13-11) delivered the greatest triple-double in NBA Finals history in a Game 3 win (which was also the greatest upset in Finals history, per Bayless), and said that the pandemic giving James time off during the season was one of the best breaks of his career, in case it wasn’t abundantly clear how much of a hater Bayless is being.
Game 5 will tip at 9:00 p.m. ET on Friday on ABC.
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