With the Miami Heat losing Game 1 of the NBA Finals, I feel as though most people are going to heap large amounts of hate and "He's not clutch," talk on LeBron James. Ok, if you want to be naive about the whole situation and bash him for that, fine. But at least take into account the fact that he has been playing with the equivalent of four high school girls for most of his career. Don't believe me? Read on.
Let's look at some of LeBron's greatest hits, some of his best playoff games and the supporting cast he had to put on his back and carry in those games. We'll analyze LeBron's accompanying starting 4 and their PERs (player efficiency rating, not a perfect stat by any means but one that takes into account most statistical factors including normalized numbers and rates players pretty reasonably in a single statistic) both for that individual season, and their career in order to gain context about whether players were past their prime or not (biggest outlier being Shaq).
Then I'll shoot out the average PER of some elite players' other four starting teammates for their respective great playoff runs.
