Richard Jefferson had a great interview segment on Undisputed where he said playing with LeBron is "Not for everyone" and I thought that was incredibly astute. Playing with LeBron undoubtedly gives you opportunities to excel in moments, but that doesn't mean it's always easy for anyone.
LeBron has had a lot of teammates in his career so I think isolating only the new players this season to try to answer this question is just willfully disregarding the rest of his career. Isolating those four new guys is cherry picking a small and volatile sample size (post-trade deadline regular season + playoff run)
If you want to break it down, you should stat with other all-star caliber players: Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love. Playing with LeBron as a star player is obviously not an easy thing. You have to take a back seat whether you like it or not, and it seems only his best friend Dwyane Wade was able to cope with that from a mental standpoint, the other three guys all struggled. On the court, I believe playing alongside LeBron made both Bosh and Irving much better players than before playing with him. Part of that growth is the necessity that they must expand their own games to continue to have a large impact on the game. Wade did not become a better player, but his career was on a down-turn that the other three guys weren't on, so it remains to be seen whether it was more age and attrition rather than playing alongside LeBron.
But while the data on other impact players is a mixed bag, his track record with role players is pretty sterling. If you go all the way back to 2006, the first time LeBron entered the MVP conversation, and you can already see names like Damon Jones and Anderson Varejao, who made their careers early out of playing alongside LeBron. Larry Hughes was never the same guy in Washington that he was in Cleveland, but it is worth acknowledging that his contract with Cleveland was his huge payday in a time when guys played awesome in contract years and then were never the same after securing that 5-6 year deals (Side note: This is why contract lengths were shortened in 2011 CBA).
As you get to the 2009 Cavs you start to see more names like Mo Williams, Delonte West and Daniel Gibson, and an entire team of more-or-less scrubs who won 66 games. That's more than Houston won this year! Mo Williams in particular received an all-star selection in 2009, his 3-point percentage going up 5 percentage points from his previous season in Milwaukee.
If there was one player from this later Cavs era that perhaps was worse alongside LeBron was Antawn Jamison, who was traded to Cleveland at the trade deadline in 2010, but statistically it just looks like he lost 3.5 shots a game from when he was in Washington, but his FG% went up 3.5 percentage points as well.
Guys like Boobie Gibson and Varejao and Battier and Mike Miller and Birdman, Delly and Frye, all guys that knew exactly what was expected of them and were capable of doing that every time, and who were willing to do that without asking for more touches or money or minutes or exposure.
There's a Ryan Anderson quote where he talks about how it can be boring to play the role of a floor spacer but that he's come to understand it's value, and because he understands its value he will sprint to his spots every time even if he hasn't gotten the ball for a quarter. His existence and his effort are vital, even though it's boring as fuck.
Not everyone can handle doing that all year long but it's vital in allowing Lebron to use his teammates tactically. A guy who gets pouty because he didn't get the ball and stops running the floor or setting solid picks really tanks the effect of Lebron's BBIQ because he can't use them as a chess piece.
Miami is riddled with guys who have greater legacies because of LeBron: Mike Miller, Shane Battier, James Jones, Mario Chalmers, Norris Cole, Birdman. I couldn't find a single role player that I thought was made to be less than themselves during that entire four-year stint in Miami. Happy to hear from someone else that might know better.
The 2nd stint in Cleveland has been very similar to Miami if you ask me: Matthew Dellavadova, JR Smith, Tristan Thompson, Iman Shumpert, Channing Frye, Richard Jefferson.
There's definitely a theme to a lot of these guys that excel around LeBron: They're older veteran players who have made their money already for the most part. They don't have alternative goals anymore outside of winning games and playing good team basketball (around LeBron). This is not to say the other guys don't want to win or play good team basketball, but many of them are young enough to still have personal career goals.
Inace je isto igrati u finalu playoffa i sa jazavcem lonzom u lutriji
, ali reko mozda ovako lakse doprem do moderacije
. Vidis da odmah ide prica nek' je LeBron broj jedan. Valjda neki kompleksi jer je LeBron naslijedio kobea kao tada najboljeg igraca u ligi. I da se razumijemo zna se ko je goat jos uvijek, mada nije nemoguce da to LeBron postane.
