LeBron James Is Content With Dishing Off During US Feast - New York Times

Sometimes, this feels like the summer of LeBron James, the stretch when perception changed, the jokes dwindled and the self-proclaimed King assumed his rightful throne as the best basketball player on the planet.

Chosen One indeed.

His lone recent rejection came off the court, when, according to multiple reports, he asked the Olympic swimmer Lauren Perdue to meet him in the athletes’ dining hall this week. She declined, citing her curfew, but later posted the invitation on her Twitter account.

This marked but a minor setback, one that paled in comparison with James’s first N.B.A. championship and his rise to another lofty perch â€" the single most important member of USA Basketball’s national team.

That James emerged as the United States’ most transcendent talent surprised no one.

That Team USA breezed through three victories in pool play also hardly qualified as news.

It’s not that James and the Americans won, but how they won that proved instructive. They won without James taking many shots. They won without James scoring many points. That was O.K. More than O.K., in fact.

The abundance of scorers seemed most evident against Nigeria on Thursday, when the United States set an Olympic single-game scoring record with 156 points and Carmelo Anthony set a United States single-game record with 37. The Americans finished with 29 3-pointers and 41 assists and shot 71 percent from the field.

On a night when Coach Mike Krzyzewski took offense to a question about whether the Americans ran up the score, he said his team “just couldn’t miss.”

James did not play in the second half. That was O.K., too.

In its first two contests, in which the U.S. team trounced France and flummoxed Tunisia, James scored 14 points.

Not 14 points in each game. Fourteen points in two games. Two games the Americans won by an average of 37 points.

Against Nigeria, in Blowout No. 3 (156-73), James played as if trying to break the Olympic assist record in the first quarter. On the Americans’ first possession, James rifled a pass into the corner and Kevin Durant knocked down a 3-pointer. James followed that dish with an underhand pass to Durant and a shovel pass to Durant, his completion percentage higher than most quarterbacks.

By the time James collected his third assist, he actually had more assists (15) than points (14) in the tournament.

Imagine that from Michael Jordan. When James threw down a thunderous dunk, it seemed more like an afterthought.

At the end of the first quarter, the United States had poured in 49 points.

That is not a misprint. Forty. Nine. Points. That meant the Americans were on pace for a total of 196.

“Tonight was just one of them nights,” Anthony said afterward. “It could have been anyone on the court against us.”

Tougher games loom in pool play, against Lithuania and Argentina, and James will be needed more than Thursday.

Fact is, James’s greatest value to the latest American dream team â€" uppercase reserved only for the original â€" is not in his scoring average, but in his ability to affect games in so many other ways. His talents, the ones he famously took to South Beach, encompass a wider range of skills.

On this squad, James calls out defensive sets and regularly defends three positions. Through three pool play blowouts, he recorded 17 assists in limited playing time, and he spent large chunks of each second half on the bench.

On a roster that includes only one center in Tyson Chandler, on a team that wants to run, surrounded by teammates who can score, James most excels in the role of facilitator. Every touch prompts a help defender to sprint in James’s direction. Every drive to the basket leaves a teammate open. The shorter international 3-point line only makes James’s ability to open up the floor with his mere presence even more devastating to opponents.

“All of our guys are important,” Krzyzewski said after the Tunisia victory. “None of them are more important than LeBron.”

It’s not that James is prohibited from scoring. In exhibition play, he led Team USA with an average of 18.6 points. It’s that the Americans do not need him to score. It’s like a bonus. In the first two Olympic games, only two United States players averaged 15 points, and one was Kevin Love. Ten players averaged 6 points or more, as if they took their cues from James, with what seemed like an assist on every basket.

The U.S. roster boasts enough scorers. Six players notched double figures Thursday.

In his third Olympics, James was everywhere, or at least it seemed that way. He grabbed rebounds. He blocked shots. He went to some nightclub called Funky Buddha on his day off.

He did not score that many points. It mattered not even a little bit.

James recently told “Nightline” this team could beat the Dream Team from 1992. For all the obvious arguments against that â€" the 11 Hall of Famers on the ’92 team, the gold medal it won in Barcelona by an average of 43 points, some guy named Jordan â€" one overlooked point in that debate is James himself. He would have presented a matchup problem even for the team recognized as the best in the history of basketball.

Who would have guarded him? Karl Malone? Charles Barkley? Larry Bird?

In an interview on WQAM radio in Miami, Pat Riley, the Miami Heat president, said how James “changed over the course of the season really had to do with a man that came to terms with, really, who he was, what he was trying to project out there.”

“He’s erased all that,” Riley said of the negative perception.

Perhaps. Or perhaps detractors pegged James incorrectly in the first place. He certainly provided them with enough material.

Perhaps, more than anything, this summer is when LeBron James grew up.