Lebron James on Defense

4th quarter.  

When you have one of the best scorers in the league, the last thing you want is for him to be more distributive.  He needs to scorer all four quarters but still be fresh for the fourth.  You can’t ask him to score and make plays for his team on every single play while guarding the best player on the other team the entire game and still expect him to close out the game.  That’s what happened last season in the playoffs and he was completely worn out by The Finals.  

I would prefer he mixes scoring with distributing the entire game, defense spot minutes in the first three quarters against the best scorer on the other team.  And finish the last 6-8 minutes of the game scoring and guarding the best offensive player on the other team.

agreed! lebron has to score as well … especially because miami often has 2 effective scorers and bosh when he’s able to get himself involved makes a third

also, specifically against the bulls it worked so well because lebron is very capable of playing pg – and when they insert him into the lineup at that position he defends rose, but he’s far too big for rose to defend at the other end which often left rose covering wade — forcing rose to exert a lot of energy on defense as well as have to work against lebron on offense, i think that was ultimately a very difficult dynamic for the bulls to overcome, at least their supporting cast should be better this year

also the beauty of lebron’s game is he can matchup with a carlos boozer or a david west of even elton brand should miami draw any of those matchups come playoff time giving them tremendous versatility in the lineups they place on the floor … i would always use lebron in ways that take full advantage of that unbelieveable skill set

Lebron needs to score.  He can guard his position until the 4th, then take over defensively, especially since he seems unwilling to offensively at that point.  Wade is also, by the way, usually capable of defending pretty damn good offensive players and needs to take more responsibility at that end.

 lebron deserves dpoy consideration.

 Really Battier should be able to handle any assignment well enough to let Lebron get some rest on the defensive side. And Battier gets to camp for those corner threes on offense a lot, so he saves energy there. Now today against the Knicks, Melo was unconsiouse in the first half. He just hit tough shots and there was nothing really anyone could do. When asked at halftime, Lebron was like, Who cares, Melo is taking long contested twos, we don’t care if he does that all game. But they put Lebron on Melo in the 4th and he did play better D than Battier and, of course, even Melo couldn’t just keep hitting all those long pull up jumpers. 

I’d really like to see a whole series of Lebron vs KD matchup. That would be pretty cool, especially since it would have to be in the finals now.