OAKLAND, Calif. — LeBron James emerged from the visiting locker room at Oracle Arena, walking briskly, wearing sunglasses and his now-famous shorts-suit.
As quickly as he entered the postgame interview room, he left even more abruptly.
As visibly frustrated as he's ever been after a loss on the NBA Finals stage, James dropped the mic on the table and walked out after a series of questions about the unfortunate turn of events that snatched Game 1 of the Finals away from the Cleveland Cavaliers.
"Tonight, we played as well as we've played all postseason," James said after a playoff career-high 51 points was wasted in a clumsy, controversial, boneheaded conclusion to the Cavaliers' 124-114 overtime loss to the Warriors on Thursday night. "We gave ourselves a chance, possession after possession. There were just some plays that were kind of taken away from us. Simple as that."
James had eight rebounds and eight assists to go with his scoring output, the sixth 50-point game in Finals history. He had just four points shy of the double-nickel that the man to whom he's most often compared, Michael Jordan, put up against Phoenix in the 1993 Finals.
Elgin Baylor holds the record with 61 in 1962. Speaking of bygone eras, there are only five other players in NBA history to appear in eight consecutive Finals, and all of them played for Red Auerbach's Boston Celtics in the 1950s and '60s. Most of James' historical equals played before cellphones were invented.
Except one.
Unlike Jordan, who killed you with guile and skill, James was a locomotive motoring downhill at the Warriors all night—a giant among mortals. It would take something spectacularly unexpected to derail him.
And sure enough, not one, but two such things came to pass.
It all began to unravel after James soared in for a devilish, double-clutch layup off the glass and converted the three-point play to give the Cavs a 104-102 lead with 50.8 seconds left.
The first officiating controversy of the Finals presented itself with 36.4 seconds left, when James stepped in front of a driving Kevin Durant and drew what was whistled as a charge. The crew of Ken Mauer, Tony Brothers and Ed Malloy went to the replay monitor to check whether James' feet were in the restricted area.
"I read that play just as well as I've read any play in my career, maybe in my life," James said. "I knew I was outside the charge line; I knew I took the hit. I don't know what else to say."
But under NBA rules, the review of whether James was inside or outside the restricted area triggered the ability for the officials to review whether James had been in legal guarding position.
"It was determined that he was out of the restricted area, but he was not in legal guarding position," Mauer told pool reporter Tim Reynolds of the Associated Press. "So we had to change it to a blocking foul."
It was an enormous swing. Durant hit both free throws, making it 104-104.
Somehow having energy left to try to put the game away—and take his first 1-0 lead in these four straight matchups with the Warriors in the Finals—James responded with another driving, double-clutch layup that gave him 49 points and gave the Cavs a 106-104 lead.
Stephen Curry answered with a three-point play, and then the blunder that will go down in Cleveland sports history with Earnest Byner's fumble happened. It was unfathomable…except that the culprit was JR Smith.
At the free-throw line with 4.7 seconds left, George Hill missed the second of two. Smith grabbed the rebound…and…and…dribbled to half court, apparently thinking the Cavs were leading. It was 107-107.
James motioned wildly toward the basket, and nobody on the Cavs called a timeout that they had at their disposal. They didn't get a clean shot off amid the chaos. Television replays appeared to show Smith telling an incredulous James, "I thought we were ahead."
In the locker room, Smith told a different story.
"No, I knew it was tied," Smith said. "I thought we were going to take a timeout because I got the rebound."
Smith, who had the ball, did not call timeout, however.
In overtime, the Cavs got run out of the building—and so did Tristan Thompson, who was ejected for what Brothers perceived as an elbow to the head of Shaun Livingston, who was attempting a jumper with the outcome already determined. There was pushing and shoving between Thompson and Draymond Green, and as time ticked down, James and Curry went at it verbally—an exchange that Curry dismissed as "a bunch of nothing."
For James, it was an impossibly crushing outcome and a debilitating waste of one of the most brilliant performances of his career.
"We've got to move on," he said. "This game is over and done with. We had opportunities. I would never give up on JR. That's not my M.O. I don't give up on any of my players, any of my teammates."
Outside the visiting locker room, Hill emerged and slapped hands with James' agent, Rich Paul, who said, "Next one." Hill shuffled away with a blank stare. Earlier, Paul, Maverick Carter (James' friend and business associate), Smith and Thompson had been reliving the Cavs' late-game undoing as owner Dan Gilbert spoke with team officials nearby.
Everyone in the Cavs' corner of Oracle must have been thinking the same thing: The man scored FIFTY-ONE POINTS…and it wasn't enough.
In barely 72 hours, James will have to do this all over again. Has the burden on one superstar ever been this great?
"What separates him is the physicality, the sheer size of him," a longtime executive told Bleacher Report in the hallway outside the visiting locker room. "That's what makes him unique."
On the walk from the interview to the home locker room, I asked Warriors coach Steve Kerr if he'd ever been involved in a task of a magnitude that approaches dealing with James, who at 33 and in his 15th season is at the apex of his powers.
"Yeah, Michael Jordan when I was on teams playing against him," Kerr said. "This feels very similar.
"It's a different game today. He shoots a lot of threes; Michael didn't shoot a lot of threes. I think they're different. Michael was an incredible scorer, great footwork, could score from anywhere on the floor. They're the two greatest players I've ever seen."
Now, the greatest of this era has to find a way to put aside the buffoonery, shake off the wasted effort—an enormous one, at that—and avoid his third straight 0-2 deficit in the Finals against these Warriors.
"We understand how difficult and how challenging this task is," James said. "You take it all the way throughout the night, thinking about it and ways you could have been better and plays that could've gone your way and didn't. And you wake up tomorrow with a fresh mind and you move forward."
Peppered with questions from ESPN's Mark Schwartz about Smith's role in the debacle, James answered one, two, three, four, five questions before putting the mic on the table and abruptly walking out of the room. Out of Oracle Arena he went, into the cool, windy Bay Area night.
What more can he do?
Ken Berger covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter: @KBergNBA.
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