In Michael Jordan's rookie season, the Chicago Bulls won 38 games, lost 44 and made the playoffs with the seventh seeding. Tuesday, as LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers landed in Toronto, they were tied for seventh place in the Eastern Conference, 28 victories in the bank, 18 games to play, with a winning streak of four and a run of 8 of 10.
You may want to call this comparative analysis a contrivance. But consider the long-hapless franchise that began the season 6-19 -- that lost its first 13 games on the road, that had to be recast with veteran stabilizers and a new point guard -- is suddenly following its man-child toward near-instant respectability, to say the least.
"Early on, it was difficult," Paul Silas, the Cavaliers' coach, said Tuesday by telephone. "Now it's become fun, almost magical."
Granted, low-entry playoff qualification in the East carries the stature of running seventh or eighth in the Iowa caucuses, but that's missing the point in the case of Cleveland and James. A rookie who never played a college game, who will not turn 20 until next December, is already making a mockery of conventional career sequence and of the assertion that he would be swallowed whole by his own hype.
"There was a huge aura around Michael his rookie year," said the Nets' general manager, Rod Thorn, who drafted Jordan for Chicago. "But I've never seen anything like it's been for LeBron, and you know what? Just like Michael, he's getting better and better from the first game he played."
LeBron James isn't the whole story in Cleveland, the way Jordan was in Chicago, but that's the good news, especially for the NBA's paternal head of state, David Stern. Silas has a Lithuanian center, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, who, when healthy, is in the top five or six at his position. He has an emerging power forward in Carlos Boozer. Someone named Jeff McInnis has come from Portland to run the point.
Still, without James' stunningly seamless transition from the preps to the pros, there would be no playoff chase, no string of sellouts at the formerly gloomy Gund Arena.
"This kid has a swagger about him that tells you, `I can be something special,"' Silas said. "But when you talk to him, he's gracious; he's likable."
Silas, 60, is a hardened NBA lifer who has never engaged in exaggeration and won't start now. He would not draw parallels to Jordan, or Magic, or any of the all-time greats because, as he said, James is not a great player, not yet.
"He still has lapses on defense, still doesn't hit the open man all the time the way he should," Silas said. "I know people said this would be a difficult situation, to coach a kid with so much hype, and if he were a different person it would have been. But from Day 1, we've had a bond, and when he makes a mistake and I call him out on it, he says, `My bad."'
James, Silas said, wants to get this right, so he accepts the coach's honest evaluation. He responds when Silas sits him down, as he did after a recent lapse of focus in Chicago, and reminds him: "As LeBron goes, so go the Cavs." And this is why Silas believes he will one day draw the comparisons with the all-time greats.
In Rod Thorn's distanced view, there is one striking difference in demeanor between the rookies Jordan and James. "We had a soft team when Michael was a rookie, and he was tough on them when he felt they didn't compete," Thorn said. "LeBron seems milder."
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