Could Jesus Really Score on LeBron in the Post?
by Boobie
Late Thursday night, LeBron James joined teammates Richard Jefferson and Channing Frye on their Road Trippin’ podcast to discuss the Warriors championship parade, including his reaction to Draymond Green trolling him. In the course of the conversation, James dropped this nugget about his ability as a post defender:
It’s a bold claim, and it leaves out the possibility of, for example, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skyhooking over him the way he did everyone else in the league during the 1970s and 80s, but on the Shaq front it’s probably correct. He’s one of the few humans ever with the combination of size, strength, skill, and coordination to give overwhelm LeBron mano-a-mano. The question, then, is: could Jesus Christ, son of God, born to the Virgin Mary, have really given LeBron buckets in the paint?
The first issue that comes to mind is, of course, physicality. LeBron is 6’8” and 250 pounds, one of the greatest pure athletes of all time, and, as Brian Windhorst is quick to remind us, he is so strong. Jesus’ size is never mentioned in the New Testament, meaning his was likely about average size for a man of his place and time, which historians put at about 5’1” and 110 pounds. On top of that, Jesus was a virgin, meaning he was probably actually below average height — let’s call him 4’11’, or 4” shorter than the shortest player in basketball history. That’s a bad sign, as post offense is historically the domain of the biggest guys on the court.
Another issue is that basketball was invented in 1891, or about 1868 years after Jesus died. It’s hard to imagine he ever played the game, and that being the case, there’s almost no way he has the polished footwork and varied set of moves and counter-moves that would be required to make up for the size disparity. To this point in our analysis, things are looking bleak for Jesus.
There are some reasons for optimism, however. One of the few physical advantages Jesus does have is tremendous wingspan. Roman centurions were amazed at just how far his arms extended to each side when they were brutally nailing him to the cross. That mitigates the size difference a bit. If his ascension to heaven wasn’t just a one-time thing and he can levitate on command, that would also make up for the size difference, as he could explode to the rim and throw off LeBron’s timing om blocks, drawing fouls (free throws still count towards points per possession numbers, after all). Jesus was also a fisherman, which requires a degree of accuracy and timing that might be able to translate to soft touch around the basket.
Some of his other miracles would come in handy, too. For example, at the Wedding at Cana, he turned water into wine. It would probably be considered dirty and not in the spirit of the rules, but he could always turn some of the water in LeBron’s blood into wine, leaving him staggering, uncoordinated, and prone to poor decision making, opening up space on the block for Jesus to go up and under. Walking on water probably wouldn’t help much here, but since no one else has been able to do it, it probably required outlier-level coordination, again helping make up for the size disadvantage.
Jesus was also famously proficient in other cheek-turning, which suggests that maybe he would have the seeds of an effective post spin move — if that’s true, then perhaps we can throw out the whole “never played basketball because it was invented millennia after he died” issue altogether.
Jesus has another thing working in his favor outside of physical and traditional skill considerations, too: he is the figurehead of Christianity, the world’s largest religion and probably the most influential force in western civilization over the last 2,000 years. He also famously has some experience bringing people back from the dead — first Lazarus, then himself. Given those two things, can we discount the idea that Jesus might repeat the miracle of resurrection for post offense, converting skeptical basketball observers in the process? Ever since the NBA softened its illegal defense rule, posy play has fallen out of vogue, because it’s much harder to score down low when defenders can help off their assignment and swipe at the ball without committing to a pure double team that would leave a shooter open — what better way to revive the skill then showing that even a scrawny, sub-five foot man with holes in his hands and feet can score efficiently close to the basket?
Even with all those things going for him, it’s unlikely that Jesus would be able to consistently overcome the difference of over a foot and a half in height and about 140 pounds of muscle without some alcohol-related chicanery. He might be able to use a post game as a changeup every once in a blue moon, but doing so consistently would be a waste of his other skills. He’d probably be better off playing the mold of a Stephen Curry or Isaiah Thomas, leveraging that fisherman’s shooting touch from the outside and levitating into the lane for dunks and layups when defender run him off the line. LeBron gave himself too little credit on this one; Jesus would not, in fact, give him buckets in the post, no matter how much fun it would be to watch him try.
