Context
This video of Myles Garrett dunking is terrifying . . . and then you realize he’s smaller than LeBron
“Freak athlete.” You’ve heard the cliche a million times applied to a million different players. It can connote many things, but usually it’s shorthand for big and fast. Bo Jackon? Freak athlete. Giannis Antetokounmpo? Freak athlete. Myles Garrett? Freak athlete. We know, we know. You don’t like the guy. He hit Mason Rudolph on the head with his helmet as if that’s somehow worse than what occurs on every single play in the NFL. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Fine. You don’t have to like the guy, but he is a freak athlete, as evidenced by the video that emerged of him dunking like Dominque on Wednesday. Check it out.
Pretty scary stuff. So scary in fact, that Joe Thomas, fellow freak athlete and one of the greatest offensive lineman to ever play the game, felt the need to chime in.
Amen to that Joe. But if we all agree that Myles Garrett driving the lane is something we want no part of, now imagine what it must be like to face LeBron James, who is actually BIGGER than Garrett and does this on a nightly basis. No thank you very much.
Currently, Garrett is listed at 6’ 4”, 271 lbs, LeBron at 6’ 9”, 250. Obviously Garrett is packing more muscle into a smaller floorplan, resulting in that angry bowling ball look you see here, but that’s not quite the full story. LeBron’s weight has fluctuated throughout his career. For years in Cleveland and Miami he was rumored to be playing around 275. Then in the 2014 offseason he shed some serious lbs, unveiling Skinny LeBron, who, as it turns out, was just as dominant as huge LeBron. Go figure.
Since then, LeBron has found a happy middle ground, but after returning to the Lakers following a lengthy groin injury in 2019, many in the Association speculated he had bulked back up to 280, nearly ten pounds more than Garrett is tipping the scales at in this video. That’s some impressively cultivated mass, but the weight isn’t really the point. The point is that we no longer see how one-of-a-kind LeBron James is. It’s like moving a bookshelf in your house. It seems weird at first, and after a while you don’t even notice it. Now we go all goo-goo-ga-ga over Myles Garrett dunking, but we forgot that LeBron has been doing it bigger and better for 18 consecutive seasons. We forgot just how incredible it was to watch a guy with defensive-end size and point-guard speed drive the lane for the first time, because we’ve seen him do it night-in, night-out for nearly two decades. Most of all we forgot that LeBron James is the freakiest of freak athletes—the freak by which all others freaks will forever be measured.
So thanks for the reminder, Myles. Now if you’ll excuse us, we have some old LeBron dunks to go melt our eyeballs with.