When LeBron James first played for the Cleveland Cavaliers, he wanted nothing more than to win a title for his hometown team. Then King James left Cleveland fprMiami and won two rings. Well LeBron went back to the Cavaliers in 2014 and won it all in 2016, but he still can’t sleep at night as he wants to win even more than the three rings currently on his fingers.
In Game 1 of the 2017 Eastern Conference finals against the Boston Celtics, the Cavs won 117-104 and LeBron scored 38 points. But he didn’t want reporters to ask him how he makes it look easy. That’s because LeBron doesn’t care about that or how many points he scored. Instead, all he cares about is winning another title. And another after that. But that insatiable drive to succeed has a cost.
LeBron on if he’s more at ease this year: “No. You can ask somebody else that. But no, not for me. I still can’t sleep.”
— James Herbert (@outsidethenba) May 19, 2017
get this man a casper mattress
— James Herbert (@outsidethenba) May 19, 2017
According to CBS Sports, here’s the longer quote from LeBron about wanting to keep winning every single year.
“I think it’s the same process,” James said. “Since we all came together and this team has been formed, we wanted to compete for a championship. And this has been no [different]. That’s just the word every day. But we want to always follow the process and understand that you can’t shortcut the process. But our ultimate goal is to compete for a championship, and we’ve been able to put ourselves in a position to do that for the three years that we’ve been together. So that’s been pretty constant.”
While LeBron talks about not being able to sleep at night because he wants to win every year, Cleveland head coach Tyronn Lue did admit that winning last year gives the Cavs confidence.
“I think from a year ago, I just think of doing everything to try to win a championship, and then when you finally win a championship, you have that confidence, that championship swag I guess they call it, that you can overcome a lot of things,” Lue said. “Especially the way we did it last year. We have that confidence when things get tough, when things get hard, that we can pull through. Just having that confidence factor is big for us.”
When reporters brought these quotes up to LeBron, he zig-zagged and made it seem like the Cavs didn’t win anything last year. Instead, he wanted to focus on winning this year.
“Well, we’ve always been a confident bunch, and we knew, I think, this season, our main thing was health,” James said. “We couldn’t get healthy. So we couldn’t understand or see exactly what team we could become because we couldn’t get healthy, we couldn’t get the lineups out there on the court, we couldn’t get the rhythm and the camaraderie on the court because coach had to go with so many different lineups and couldn’t really fully see what the roster was all about because of injuries. So being healthy at this point in the season really helps a lot.”
While Cleveland looks like they are healthy in time to take a 2-0 lead over the Boston Celtics on Friday, James still wants people to know he can’t sleep and that winning last year means nothing.
Because after all, last year when Lue said he hoped winning it all would give James some peace of mind, King James responded with this:
“(I’ll) have peace when I’m done.”
Well LeBron is far from done and knows he needs to win seven more games this postseason to bring another title back to Cleveland. Maybe after that he can sleep a little bit better.
