LeBron James says he’s never played on a super-team

LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers fell to the Warriors in a 4-1 series loss in the NBA Finals. The Warriors are a super-team. So are the Cavaliers, though, obviously to a lesser extent.

Well, I guess that LeBron disagrees.

"I don't believe I've played for a super-team. I don't believe in that," James said. "I don't believe we're a super-team here (in Cleveland)."

This is so quintessentially LeBron that it hurts. Of course, LeBron is very aware that he’s been on some of the most talented teams in NBA history (“Not one, not two, not three,” etc.)

It’s just an issue of semantics. I suppose that if you don’t believe in the concept of a super team, then LeBron, by virtue of that, has never played on one. James does this kind of stuff quite a bit and it’s sort of par for the course at this point.

He’s said multiple times that Cavaliers-Warriors isn’t a rivalry despite a hilarious amount of evidence to the contrary. Sometimes, I get the impression that James primarily doesn’t want to deal with it sometimes, so he deflects and makes things more difficult than perhaps they need to be.

There has, in these Finals, been a fair amount of false equivalencies born of LeBron’s path to super-teams and these Warriors. There remains an enormous difference between joining a 33-win team with two All-Stars that had never made a playoff appearance and signing with a 73-win team that was just one game short of repeating as NBA Champions.

The biggest frustration I’ve had with the discourse about the Warriors is how insanely far each side leans. People are either very confident the league is ruined, or they blindly cling to vague potential that some random event will upend them.

Just because other super-teams were toppled doesn’t mean this one will. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but absolute certainty is a absolutely ridiculous right now. The odds are heavily in favor of the Warriors running off a devastating dynasty.

This is an unprecedented collection of talent that we haven’t seen on one team since there wasn’t a three-point line on the floor yet. It will certainly be interesting to see how the rest of the league will try to take the Warriors out, super-team or no.