LeBron James left Cleveland because he wanted more help, and he returned for the same reason. His first seven seasons in the NBA, during which his best teammates were Mo Williams and Anderson Varejao, informed the rest of his career. He decided, at age twenty-five, after five straight fruitless playoff runs in which he carried the Cavs over some obstacles and took the blame when they eventually stumbled at others, that he was going to spend the rest of his career with other stars by his side. This wasn’t the same thing as insulating himself from failure. His first season in Miami ended with perhaps his most high-profile flameout as he played anonymously (by his standards) in the Finals against an excellently coached but eminently beatable Mavericks team. He’s been defeated by superior Spurs and Warriors squads. But for seven years running, LeBron has consistently gotten close to another ring because he’s had the talent around him to do it. 

This year? Doubtful. The Rockets are now the Warriors’ closest rival, and though the East is a perhaps still navigable mess, the Cavs basically have no shot at a title. Kyrie Irving is gone and Isaiah Thomas, it turns out, suffered a career-altering injury last season. Kevin Love is a really good player who has never excelled in Cleveland like he did in Minnesota. (Sidenote: LeBron would likely be similarly disappointed in Andrew Wiggins if the Cavs had kept him around.) Circumstances have conspired to give LeBron the kind of team he has left behind in previous summers—underpowered 2010 Cleveland, aging 2014 Miami—but they have also forced him to assemble a uniquely impressive season.

Thirty-three-year-old LeBron James has essentially solved the sport. I had a CYO coach who frequently explained basketball like it was a flowchart—if your defender bites on the pump-fake, then you blow by him; if he keeps his feet, then swing it to a teammate, etc.—and he would end his list of if/thens the same way every time: easy game, right? In theory, yes, but when you have twelve-foot range and the speed and dexterity of a landbound harbor seal, things quickly become complicated. LeBron really does look like he’s doing simple arithmetic out there. Screen, drive, count it. Screen, drive, draw the help, find a shooter. Screen, drive, switch hands, lob. He knows what to do—in both a locker room whiteboard sense and second-to-second, as the court shifts around him—and, only a tic past his physical prime, the moment he sees a passing lane and the moment the ball leaves his hand are nearly simultaneous. He can also, not for nothing, still dunk like he’s flying toward the rim on a zipline.

On a team with a dearth of players who can create their own shots, LeBron is often the entire offensive mechanism. And while that’s sub-optimal from a championship contention perspective, LeBron is reminding us that once upon a time, he made players like Boobie Gibson and Anthony Parker look pretty good. This year, he’s doing the same sort of thing with Jordan Clarkson, Larry Nance, and Jeff Green, and it’s definitely not the best basketball in the league, but it’s something only LeBron could accomplish. If this is less remarkable than it was eight years ago, that’s just time and accumulation dulling our sense of wonder. If LeBron wasn’t doing what he’s doing right now, we wouldn’t think it was possible. 

He won’t win the MVP. That’s James Harden’s, finally, and he deserves it given that he’s essentially having a Peak Kobe Bryant scoring season while also placing third in the league in assists. These two things can be true at once: Harden is the league’s most valuable player and LeBron is its best. By the numbers, LeBron might even be a little bit better—27.5 PPG vs. 30.7 PPG, 9.1 APG vs. 8.7 APG, 62.5 TS% vs 61.9 TS%—and that is without taking into account, as Bethlehem Shoals recently pointed out, that LeBron isn’t going nearly as hard as he did in his twenties. There have been nights, especially in January and February when the Cavs were at each other’s throats like thieves in the third act of a tragedy, when LeBron isn’t completely engaged. He’s a little bit bored, or he sees no point in spending himself in the second game of a back-to-back when he knows he’s going to need a full tank for the playoffs. The MVP is, and probably should be, as much about sustained effort as ability. It’s typically a young man’s award, and LeBron hasn’t been young for a while. 

This career that’s cresting—he can’t be still be this phenomenal at 36, can he?—has had the shape of an argument from the start. LeBron is a lot like Kobe in that respect, but Kobe’s Jordan-toppling quest became quixotic around the time he and Shaq split up and he spent his late twenties chasing scoring titles for non-contenders. In retrospect, Kobe was always doomed to shrink in comparison to M.J. because his game is such a close facsimile of his idol’s. LeBron’s pursuit endures in part because he’s had so many deep playoff runs and three titles, each more difficult to obtain than the last, but he’s also aided by being fundamentally different from Jordan. He controls games; Jordan dominated them. He orders the team’s offense; Jordan was offense all by himself.

In a way, all great players are alike because they make plays that decide games—you give them the ball and let them work. But the singular talents stand out more than the ones who are great because they do what others have done before at stratospherically competent levels. LeBron isn’t going to add to his championship collection this year. What he’s doing instead is delineating, in subtle ways, using the ample blank space the Cavs' roster affords him, what he can do that nobody else can. This is not, strictly speaking, what he set out to achieve this season, but it is a triumph—peculiar and slippery and thoroughly his own.