Today The Ringer’s Shea Serrano debated himself to determine which was cooler: LeBron’s dunks or LeBron’s blocks.
If you were to take all of LeBron’s dunks and put them on a mixtape, and then take all of LeBron’s blocks and put them on a different mixtape, which of those mixtapes would be better? Meaning: What’s better, the whole of LeBron’s dunks or the whole of LeBron’s blocks?
This is a fair question to ask, but it feels wrongheaded to omit the correct answer: LeBron’s passes.
Lots of people jump high for cool blocks and dunks. Very few people have ever combined strength, precision, and decision-making in LeBron’s signature way. When he’s old and gone I’ll still be replaying mental footage of him whipping a one-handed pass across the entire length or breadth of a basketball court, rifling it through a tiny corridor of undefended space, and landing it right into a teammate’s preferred shooting pocket.
Or doing whatever this is:
Or these:
This season he’s assisted on an estimated 42.9 percent of his teammate’s field goals while on the floor, exceeding any of his previous seasons. The Block will forever be seared into my brain, but it’s the playmaking will always stand out to me as his most expensive and impressive cyborg feature. You could make a supercut of LeBron assists that moved faster than the camera could keep up.