LeBron James cooking up something special in these NBA Finals

CLEVELAND – After racking up 40 points, 12 rebounds and eight assists to lead his Cleveland Cavaliers to a 96-91 victory and a 2-1 series lead in the NBA Finals, LeBron James went home, turned on the television and flipped over to the Food Network.

“I watched ‘Chopped,’” LeBron said Wednesday.

For the uninitiated, “Chopped” is a cooking game show in which professional chefs – and sometimes amateurs or celebrities – are handed a basket of disparate and often obscure ingredients and told to cook, in a brief segment of time, an appetizer, main course and dessert. It tests creativity, on-the-fly game planning and sheer will to win. Intimidation is sometimes used. Facing pressure is a critical skill.

The goal isn’t really to cook anything great, just something better than the other guy.

If the episode James watched was the one airing live at around 2 a.m. EST on the Food Network (as opposed to on demand), then, according to a network spokesperson, it was a rerun from 2013 called “Wasted.” It featured the challenge of cooking with “usually discarded food scraps.”

That meant contending, for instance, with herb stems, overripe tomatoes, pickle juice and the remains of a filleted fish in the appetizer round. Wilted carrots and potatoes with eyes were in the main course. Figuring out what to do with an already squeezed orange and used coffee grinds was the challenge of dessert.

Chef Garrett Eagleton of Brooklyn won it – his “pickled cod salad with charred tomato vinaigrette” appetizer was apparently quite good (“One appetizing appetizer,” judge Alex Guarnaschelli declared).

LeBron should hire him as a personal chef because, obviously, the two are kindred spirits at this point.

Of course LeBron James would become engrossed in a show in which a talented guy takes pieces off the scrap heap, meshes them together in a hurry and is crowned champion at the end.

He’s averaging 41, 12 and 8.3, is playing 47 minutes a game in this series. According to Synergy Sports Tech, he either scored, assisted or created (kind of like a hockey assist) 200 of the Cavs’ 291 points thus far.

First are those who always hated him for being him. Maybe it was the too much, too soon stuff of being called “King” and “The Chosen One” as a teenager. Maybe it was later about when he announced he would be “taking my talents to South Beach.”

Really though, he’s a guy who grew up under a single mom, in tough circumstances and was a child star with all eyes on him and plenty rooting for him to fail. He never had any public problems anyway. No arrests. No big controversies. No flare-ups. If you want to criticize him for “The Decision,” fine, he listened to his not-yet-ready-for-prime-time friends who were managing his career. Maybe he should’ve been less loyal.

He’s married to his high school girlfriend, seems like a very involved father and is “regular guy” enough that he’s home watching re-runs on the Food Network. Last week he noted he went to the movies and saw “Pitch Perfect 2” – “Fat Amy is awesome,” he said.

Not really sure what there is to hate about him at this point. He sounds like a typical suburban dad.

The second group is the Michael Jordan disciples who are threatened that someone is being mentioned in the same breath as No. 23. They’ll accept no challengers to his throne as greatest of all time and hack away at any possible LeBron weakness. This will never end; you’re messing with people’s childhood memories here, so accept resistance no matter the reality.

Finally there are the advanced-stat folks who see James’ line during this series and find all sorts of red flags, most notably efficiency. Scoring 40 points a game does not assure victory in a basketball game. It’s far more important to note how those points are acquired.

James is 43-of-107 in this series, an absurd shot total. This is not ideal. So some are harping on the idea that he actually isn’t playing all that well.

James gets some of that.

“I’m not OK with it,” he said of his shooting, both volume and percentage.

During his time with Miami, LeBron embraced advanced stats and metrics, everything from the best way to share the ball and include teammates to the little things such as forcing an opponent to his off hand and causing a 20 percent reduction in field-goal percentage. Part of this is embarrassing to him.

The 2-1 lead in the Finals is not.

Forget advanced stats or concepts about how the game is ideally played. This isn’t a philosophical experiment. It’s the NBA version of the Hunger Games. James is down two All-Stars – Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love – and is trying to lift the equivalent of a “Chopped” basket to the title.

Chef Eagleton would probably never serve a pickled cod salad in real life, but when you’re thrown Mozgov and Shumpert and James Jones and Delly and so on, you put your head down and take the ball to the basket.

There’s more here too. James isn’t just winning games with his play. He’s winning games with how he plays. There are intangibles that can’t be computed. Some of it is lifting up his teammates to be better ingredients than they appear.

“If you work hard and he sees in practice you’re doing the right things, he’ll trust you in games to make plays,” Jones, the longtime vet said. “That builds confidence.”

So suddenly when LeBron makes Tristan Thompson or Matthew Dellavedova the Robin to his Batman, they are owning the boards or harassing Steph Curry or even tossing in desperate runners late in the fourth quarter.

Then there is the other side. In Game 3, Golden State decided to put Harrison Barnes on LeBron at the start of the game. It didn’t go well. Barnes is skilled, but somewhat slight of build and James just manhandled him. The defensive assignments were quickly switched, but Barnes never recovered. He finished 0-for-8 from the floor.

Did LeBron’s boldness just eliminate the effectiveness of a key Warriors starter? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it sure looked like it, and that isn’t something that can be put in a measurable metric.

“I’m so outside the box,” LeBron said. “I went seven straight seasons with improving my efficiency as far as shooting. But this is a different challenge. This is a totally different challenge. ... I’m doing everything for our team to win. And that’s all that matters.”

He’s a master chef cooking with used coffee grinds and leftover juice from a pickle jar.

It doesn’t have to be perfect or pretty. It just has to be enough. So far it has been.

“Next time you speak with LeBron, feel free to invite him to the Food Network,” spokesperson Irika Slavin said. “He can compete on ‘Chopped’ whenever he’d like.”

After watching these Finals, you want to bet against him in the kitchen?