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With each locational move, celebrated or decried, the baggage has become a heavier burden. Glass has covered more and more of LeBron James’s basketball house.

“That comes with the tag of being the best player,” said James Jones, a member of King James’s court in Cleveland and Miami. “It’s fair to say that people take the temperature of his team, his entire situation, multiple times a day.”

To illustrate his point, Jones gestured to the news media mob scene a few feet away in the visitors’ locker room Wednesday night at Barclays Center. For the second time within hours, James was having to explain Monday’s 34-point thrashing of the Cavaliers — on their home court — by the Golden State Warriors.

Streaks of rain on those big-picture windows, he called it; not necessarily foundational cracks.
“I think he gets frustrated with the repetitive nature of the questions,” Jones said. “The people asking are very savvy — the reporters have been around this game a long time, and they know a lot. And so they ask the questions they already know the answer to.
“He says the same thing again and again — it’s the same process we had in Miami, the same process the Spurs undertook, the same process the Warriors undertook. You look at every team; their situation requires patience and a process. We understand, and it’s nothing personal, not unique to us.”

But what is exclusive to James is the consistency and intensity of the scrutiny. With James, the questions too often sound like accusations. No other historically impactful N.B.A. luminary has been poked and prodded and proclaimed one extreme thing or another.

Not Michael Jordan. Not Kobe Bryant. Not Magic Johnson. Not Larry Bird. Certainly not James’s contemporaries, Carmelo Anthony, Chris Paul and Kevin Durant.

We do acknowledge that James came with a spotlight on his head — his high school games worthy of national television coverage — and a target on his back, tattooed with a self-indulgent decree, “Chosen 1.” We understand he lives, unlike Jordan, in the age of Twitter, of endless mind reading, name-calling and noise making.
Many say James is no longer the best player. But that has only heightened the analysis and the anticipation that he will ultimately fail to meet expectations or fulfill his legacy — whatever that is and by whomever it has been imposed.

Of course, the critics know that this is, foremost, a team sport. But the world has to know: Has Stephen Curry taken something more intangible than the Most Valuable Player Award? Was Monday’s rout more than a singular beat-down in a still-developing season?

Or was it more the symbolic rendering of James as Ronda Rousey, bloodied and perhaps permanently bowed?

At 31, in his 13th season, his hairline in steady retreat, James sounded a bit weary of being the daily tossup in the generic talk show after his Cavaliers took out their frustrations on the hapless and hopeless Nets, 91-78.

“I actually wish that teams would forget about us and the league would forget about us and, for the first time in my career, I could fly under the radar,” he said.

There is no chance of that anytime soon, and James should know that the suffocating surveillance is partly a predicament of his own production. Had he never left the Cavaliers for the Heat, he would by now have won — or not — that ever-elusive championship for his beloved Northeast Ohio, and the story line would have become tired and worn. The herd would have moved on.
Going to Miami upped the self-promotional ante and made James the antihero, until he and the Heat delivered consecutive titles in the midst of four successive trips to the league finals. The return to Cleveland has reinstated the must-win mandate — if only once, for the long-suffering masses. That weight may turn out to be even greater than the championship ring chase against Jordan and Bryant — by which the mythmakers would still have been evaluating James had he remained in Miami.

It is always going to be something with James, a lightning rod in a tell-all time, who has twice now rewritten the narrative, unlike Jordan, Bryant, Johnson and Bird. Excluding Jordan’s two-year endgame fling in Washington, they all stayed in one city, one environment, respected and beloved for whatever they ultimately achieved.

In Chicago, Jordan set the modern, post-Bill Russell standard, with six titles. In Los Angeles, Johnson and Bryant each notched five. With a Hall of Fame cast, Bird managed three, but New England would fight you for merely suggesting he does not belong on his generation’s Mount Rushmore.

Once upon a kinder, gentler time, Jerry West spent an entire career with the Lakers, salvaged one title from nine N.B.A. finals and took his place in the pantheon of wonderfulness as the inimitable Mr. Clutch.

Yes, Shaquille O’Neal led a late-career Gypsy’s life, but he was cast more as comic book character than celluloid champion, and no dominant center — not even Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or especially the twice-traded Wilt Chamberlain — could ever match Russell’s extraordinary record of 11 titles in 13 seasons.

In these ultimately unresolvable discussions, the quality of the teams — and their staunchest opposition — is always in play. Like it or not, James’s teammates are under the daily microscope, too.

In Miami, Dwyane Wade’s health and Chris Bosh’s heart were constantly questioned. In Cleveland, it is Kyrie Irving’s maturity and Kevin Love’s mettle.
Maybe they are good enough; maybe they are not. At a morning practice Wednesday, James complained that people wanted teams to “come together like instant oatmeal.” He continued: “Throw it in the microwave — in 30 seconds, it’s done, ready to go. It doesn’t work that way. You need time, and you need adversity together. You need hardships. You need times when you don’t like each other. You need the worst of times in order to become really good.”

No argument there, even if it’s already been forgotten that James’s Heat had a variety of in-season struggles, and last season’s Cavs got off to a 19-20 start before losing in the N.B.A. finals to the Warriors after leading, two games to one.


Conveniently ignored in the latest sounding of alarms: On Thursday night, Irving played in only his 15th game — a 115-102 victory over the Los Angeles Clippers — since recovering from knee surgery; the trade deadline looms next month with the possibility of roster upgrades; and, oh, right, the Warriors and the matchup nightmares they pose for Love are probably less certain of getting out of the West than the Cavs are of surviving the East.

“We’re going to keep playing, keep building, and if we get there, you’ll know,” Jones said, referring to the pursuit of the higher — or highest — level.

If they don’t, we’ll know and hear about that, too. As Jones said, multiple times a day.