Ranking the 8 teams LeBron James has beaten in the conference finals
Like a song of the summer that ends up spending the entire season on top of the charts, LeBron James has left a whole lot of Eastern Conference teams stuck peaking at No. 2 in his NBA lifetime.
With Thursday's road vanquishing of the Boston Celtics, LeBron has made it to the NBA Finals a staggering seven straight years - and eight times in total, including his ahead-of-schedule first trip in 2007. Eight separate could-be title contenders were sent fishing one series shy of the finals, thwarted by the stingiest gatekeeper the East has seen since Bill Russell.
These turned-away teams have greatly varied in quality over the years: Some were legit title hopefuls undone by a generational talent, while others were pretenders lucky to have snuck into a third round to begin with. Which of these LeBroken squads was best of all, though? Let's look back at all eight, ranked - through a combination of regular-season dominance, playoff momentum, and overall LBJ kryptonite - from worst to best.
8. 2016-17 Boston Celtics
Regular season: 53-29
Lost to LeBron in five games
Sorry, Celtics fans, though this can't exactly come as much of a shock. You guys got one game off The King, and no one can take that away from you, but you also lost all three home games by an average of 30 points - one series after just squeaking by the 4th-seeded Washington Wizards, and two series after nearly being busted in the first round by your vengeful old point guard.
Even though the C's were the higher-seeded team - 53-29 was good for No. 1 in the muddled East, even though it only would have ranked them fourth out West - no one really thought Boston had a chance in this series. Even before franchise scorer Isaiah Thomas got hurt, it was clear that they didn't.
No shame for a team that still has cap flexibility, tremendous young players and assets, and the No. 1 pick coming their way this June, but chances are LBJ will have trouble even remembering what series it was in which he passed Michael Jordan for the all-time playoff scoring record a decade from now.
7. 2015-16 Toronto Raptors
(Photo courtesy: Action Images)
Regular season: 56-26
Lost to LeBron in six games
Again, another team just happy to get a win off LeBron - two, in the Raptors' case, as some funky Cleveland showings and a historic rebounding run for center Bismack Biyombo got Toronto a pair of home wins to even the series.
Nonetheless, the feeling around the league was that the Cavs never took the Raps all that seriously, and given Toronto's performance in their two previous series - getting pushed to seven games by both the Indiana Pacers and Miami Heat, with leading scorers DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry struggling to find their rhythm - it was hard to really blame them.
Cleveland won the final two games in the series by a combined 62 points, and Jurassic Park was subsequently closed for the season, with Toronto clearly not yet in the same league.
6. 2010-11 Chicago Bulls
Regular season: 62-20
Lost to LeBron in five games
This might actually be too low for a Bulls team that posted a better regular-season record than any of LeBron's other vanquished ECF foes, and boasted the only Eastern Conference MVP of the last 15 years besides LeBron in ascendant point guard Derrick Rose.
But even at the time, it was hard not to feel like the team was premature by a year or two: This was only Rose's third season, and his first with coach Tom Thibodeau, and the team had a major hole at shooting guard, where journeyman Keith Bogans was the default starter.
It seemed unlikely they could really hang with the "Big Three" Heat in their first major playoff run, and in fact, they couldn't - LeBron essentially swallowed Rose whole, with the MVP shooting just 33 percent over the last four games of the series, all Chicago losses.
At the time, it seemed like the first of many ECF showdowns between the two burgeoning contenders; thanks largely to a variety of injuries, the Bulls would never make it back.
5. 2014-15 Atlanta Hawks
(Photo courtesy: Getty Images)
Regular season: 60-22
Lost to LeBron in four games
This might be high for the only Eastern Conference finals opponent of LeBron's to get swept outright, but man, that Hawks team was good in the regular season, resembling San Antonio East despite not having a single player of the caliber of a peak Tim Duncan or Kawhi Leonard.
Atlanta went a perfect 17-0 in January, fielded four All-Stars, and seemed to have uncovered the secret sauce to winning team basketball. But that mojo all but disappeared in the postseason, where the Hawks were taken to six games by both a crappy Brooklyn Nets team and a banged-up Wizards squad, and then were summarily dismissed by LeBron's Cavs in his first year back in Cleveland.
Blame injuries - sharpshooter Kyle Korver was far from 100 percent and ended up missing a couple of games, while Al Horford seemed gassed - or the team being exposed by the grueling nature of playoff basketball, but the pre-May Hawks were convincing enough that it seemed like they might have had a real chance against LeBron, which is more than can be said for most.
4. 2006-07 Detroit Pistons
Regular season: 53-29
Lost to LeBron in six games
Like MJ before him, to finally reach the finals LeBron would first have to get through Detroit, which beat him in seven games in the 2005-06 semis.
In '07, the Pistons were without Ben Wallace for the first time since the early 2000s, but they had brought in hometown boy Chris Webber to man the middle, and were still the top seed (albeit with an underwhelming record) and likely favorites in LBJ's first ECF showdown.
The series was knotted at 2-2 going to Detroit for Game 5, and of course what happened there quickly ascended to all-time playoff lore, as LeBron scored 48 points in a double-overtime classic that ended with Cleveland taking a 3-2 series lead back to the Q.
It wasn't the best version of that Pistons team - which was essentially bullying the East by default at that point - and once they'd lost to LeBron and Co., Chauncey Billups knew it was all over, recently telling Brian Windhorst of ESPN: "We beat him in the 2006 playoffs and we beat him all the time in the regular season. But once he got that confidence and he knew he could beat us, we were done. We all knew it."
3. 2013-14 Indiana Pacers
2. 2012-13 Indiana Pacers
(Photos courtesy: Getty Images)
Regular season: 56-26 / 49-32
Lost to LeBron in six games / Lost to LeBron in seven games
It's tough to know which of these two to rank higher: The 2013-14 Pacers were the better regular-season team, but the 2012-13 squad was the much better playoff team.
The edge was given to the squad playing its best basketball in June, beating a better-than-you-remember second-seeded Knicks team in the semis and then taking the 66-win Heat to seven hard-fought games, with Paul George and Roy Hibbert playing elite-level two-way hoops and seeming to establish the Pacers as LeBron's next true challenge in the East.
That was true, but only sort of: The 2013-14 squad seemed like a true threat, but by the playoffs, the team's once-perfect chemistry had started to corrode. Hibbert was turning to granite before our eyes, Lance Stephenson still really cared about missing the All-Star Game for some reason, and recent acquisition Evan Turner added little but confusion.
Indy just barely escaped an embarrassing defeat at the hands of the sub-.500 Hawks in the first round, and after a convincing Game 1 win in Miami, just seemed out of its depth in the conference finals, which the Heat wrapped in six games. Basically a draw here, but we'll certainly remember the 2012-13 team more fondly down the road.
2011-12 Boston Celtics
(Photo courtesy: Getty Images)
Regular season: 39-27
Lost to LeBron in seven games
Can we really say that LeBron's most impressive ECF victory came against an aging Celtics squad that had just been taken to seven games by a what-are-we-even-doing-here, eighth-seeded Sixers team in the conference semis?
Maybe not, but the Celtics seem like the right choice: They still had the championship pedigree, they still had the psychic hold over LeBron (having beaten him in '08 and '10), they still had Playoff Rajon Rondo, and they still went into that Game 6 in Boston one win away from dispatching LeBron altogether, marking The King's umpteenth straight crushing playoff exit.
The Heat needed a historic 45-15 game from James at the TD Garden to stave off total disaster, and a triumphant comeback performance from a previously injured Chris Bosh helped them seal the deal in seven.
Were these C's objectively the best team that LeBron has faced in the Eastern Conference finals? Debatable, but you have to imagine that if LeBron himself was asked which of his opponents was the toughest - and which it meant the most to triumph over - you'd have to imagine the '12 Celtics would be the easy answer.