LeBron James records a quadruple-double no basketball player wants during Cavs win
LeBron James had 26 points, 11 assists and 10 rebounds in Cleveland’s 115-108 win over the Indiana Pacers at Quicken Loans Arena on Friday night, a game in which LeBron played almost all of the fourth quarter as his team held off a furious charge from the Pacers, who trailed by 17 after three quarters.
Unfortunately, James’ triple-double in the official record was the wrong kind of quadruple-double on the stat sheet, as he coughed up a career-high 11 turnovers as well.
LeBron, who played 40 minutes overall in the win, said of the performance, “It’s a four-interception game for a quarterback with a win. That’s what I think of it.”
Which, OK, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. He did notch a triple-double, and the Pacers did play like such hot garbage for the first three quarters that their own fans jumped all over them on Twitter for it:
https://twitter.com/ColtChamp18/status/957081569835081729
Welp, the #Cavs are bound to have some sort of a bounce back game, but these #Pacers are a resilient group.
— The Corner 3 Show (@TheCorner3Show) January 27, 2018
Cavs coach Tyronn Lue took the blame for playing his 33-year-old star, a guy with over 50,000 minutes on his odometer, for 40 minutes, including what under the majority of circumstances would be garbage time with the reserves in the game.
“I just think he got tired down the stretch,” Lue told reporters. “I think we tried to use him a little too much, and that’s on me.”
Lue, who had to do something to halt the free fall of the Cavs that was more of the extend-a-parachute kind than the splatter-face-on-ground variety, decided on leaving LeBron in. Afterward, the coach had some criticism for his player as well.
“He’s got to do a better job making some better passes also,” Lue said. “He had some passes he normally doesn’t make. But when you’re tired, fatigued and you’re playing throughout the course of the season, it can happen. Even as great as he is, it’s capable of happening to anybody.”
Which, from the point of view of King James, evoked a reaction where you could almost hear the indignation through LeBron’s barely veiled civility.
“No, I just made some bad decisions,” he said. “I was overlooking passes a little bit too much as well. I had two to start the fourth quarter. Jeff Green kind of got held on his post-ups and then my going away, so I got to be better with the ball. But I didn’t get tired, though.”
If ever a win could make a team’s leadership and chemistry problems worse, well, welcome to Cleveland.
This was only the second triple-double that included at least 10 turnovers since the NBA began tracking individual turnovers as a stat in the 1977-78 season: Jason Kidd scored 18 points, grabbed 12 rebounds, dished 10 assists and tied John Drew’s record for most turnovers in a game with 14 on Nov. 17, 2000.
This is a new era for turnovers in the NBA. For 38 years, Artis Gilmore had held the record for turnovers in a season with 366 in 1977-78; once the league started counting them, teams and players started being more careful with the ball to avoid making the wrong kind of history, and four of the top 10 seasons for most individual turnovers were recorded in that first year.
But in 2016, James Harden coughed the ball up 374 times, setting a new record for rotten ball security; Harden then extended his record with 464 in 2017, averaging nearly six a game, while Russell Westbrook, despite averaging a triple-double and becoming the only player in NBA history not named Oscar Robertson to do so, also committed 438 turnovers, over five a game.
Those marks were also enough to break the all-time professional record; George McGinnis of the Pacers set the ABA record with 422 turnovers in 79 games played in 1974-75.
LeBron now has 210 turnovers, third in the league; DeMarcus Cousins has 242, but will add no more since his season-ending injury; Russell Westbrook is now the front-runner with 218.
If current trends continue, Westbrook will finish with 376, as the NBA seems once again to be treating turnovers as something to be ashamed of even if a player gets lots of assists.
Interestingly, when Shakyla Hill of Grambling State recorded a quadruple-double in college earlier this season, it was LeBron who had praise for her, including what turned out to be quite the piece of foreshadowing.
“That’s impressive,” James said. “It doesn’t matter what level you at, what type of league you in, male or female, you able to get a quadruple-double in any facet, obviously not with turnovers. She did it with steals.”
Which, considering that the NBA record for steals in a game is just 11 (set by Larry Kenon in 1976) and that only 24 times in league history has a player notched 10 steals, makes that an unlikely feat in the pros.
Indeed, the only player ever to achieve a quadruple-double with steals was Alvin Robertson, who did it on Feb. 18, 1986. The other four instances, including two from Hakeem Olajuwon (the only player to do it more than once) involved blocks as the fourth stat.
So take your place in history, LeBron. It’s the quadruple-double Cleveland deserves, but not the one it needs right now.
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