LAS VEGAS — The NBA Cup is new, but the lesson it taught was as old as the league itself: To win anything of value — and the in-season tournament seems to have quickly established itself as such an event — you’re going to need superstars.
In a way, that the brilliant play of future Hall of Famers and champions LeBron James and Anthony Davis proved to be the deciding factor in the Los Angeles Lakers‘ 123-109 victory over the Indiana Pacers to claim the first edition of the event verified its consequence.
Staged on a neutral floor in December in a single game, it was hard to truly compare Saturday night’s contest to any sort of playoff setting. But one thing was for certain: It was treated like an elimination game. There were aggressive game plans, heavy minutes and intensity — situations where James has thrived for a long time.
James is unquestionably one of the NBA’s greatest winner-take-all players in history. He has won nine such games in a row now, going back more than a decade. This isn’t an accident. He has averaged 33 points in those moments, that figure slightly dragged down by only scoring 24 points, with 11 rebounds, on Saturday to finish off a tournament run that clinched him the first NBA Cup MVP award. (As an aside, that factoid might pave the way for the trophy being named after him someday.)
These games are not all created equal, of course. An NBA Finals Game 7, which James has won twice, isn’t the same as winning a game in the play-in tournament or the three tournament games this week.
James, though, has won the past five Game 7s he has played, with two of them coming on the road, one of the rarest feats to execute. The last time James lost a Game 7 was in 2008, when his Cleveland Cavaliers went down narrowly after he scored 45 points in Boston against the eventual champion Celtics.
This is why teams scheme, tamper, tank and even pray to get their hands on a superstar like Davis, whose mega…
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