When I was in AP Biology in high school, my fantastic teacher Mr. Backiel would occasionally favor us with what he termed a “birdwalk.” This basically meant an anecdote or story only tangentially related to what we were supposed to be studying. For example, a story about a whole family who died at Thanksgiving dinner when they ate three-bean salad that had been infected with a bacteria in the canning process. Obviously, these were the best class periods. What follows is a birdwalk of epic proportions*.

With the arrival of the playoffs and another chance at redemption-via-championship for LeBron James, the doubters and the cheerleaders are up in arms. With the Heat trailing as time wound down in Game 4 of the series against the Knicks, James wasn’t the one with the ball in his hand. He didn’t even touch the ball on the final play. For some, it’s just more evidence. They only see him giving up the ball or not asserting himself and concluding that he’s not the equal of Bryant or Michael Jordan. But what if he’s the equal of Eric Clapton?

Seriously. Hear me out. Although not a high school phenom like James, Clapton joined the Yardbirds in 1963 at the age of 18 but after the Yardbirds scored a hit with “For Your Love” in 1965, they began pushing their sound more towards pop and Clapton left to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, with whom he recorded Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton. The album showcases Clapton’s prodigious guitar talent and contains several of what remain his finest guitar solos on tracks like “Steppin’ Out” and “Have You Heard.” As it was with LeBron James’ play for St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, what became known as “The Beano Album” (because Clapton is reading a copy of the comic Beano on the cover) brought Clapton to national prominence. Some of James’ high school games were broadcast on national television, and it was difficult not to see what he could become, looking like a man among boys with tattoos covered up by decals. He seemed like the total package, in much the way that Clapton appeared ready to become and stay the best guitarist on the planet for some time.

Given his complete physical dominance of his high school competition, it’s possible that the notion of whether or not James had the “killer instinct” he’s broadly felt to lack never really came up. It was perhaps just assumed. But Clapton’s greatest shortcoming was put on display midway through the second side of the Bluesbreakers’ debut when he took the mic from Mayall to perform Robert Johnson’s “Rambling On My Mind.” It’s not a terrible performance or anything; as people should remember when it comes to James, the average aspects of Clapton’s musical repertoire are far better than 95% of the population’s. But in comparison to his muscular, ragged and often terrifying guitar work, his voice is tentative, polite.

When Clapton left the Bluesbreakers in 1966 to form Cream with drummer Ginger Baker and bassist Jack Bruce, his reputation as a world-class guitarist only grew. In 1967, a scrawled “CLAPTON IS GOD” infamously appeared on the wall of an Underground station in Islington. His reputation as a game-changer was written almost from the start. And so it went with LeBron James, who notched 25 points, 9 assists and 6 rebounds in his NBA debut. But while Cream’s star rose on the backs of the combined effort and virtuosity of Bruce, Baker and Clapton, James’ Cleveland Cavaliers endured two lackluster seasons, missing out on the playoffs twice before advancing to the Eastern Conference Semifinals in his third year and losing to the Detroit Pistons in seven games. During James’ first few years in Cleveland, there was little opportunity for anyone to question his heart simply because he wasn’t in a position to make a difference to his team in the playoffs. Although Jack Bruce was undeniably the lead singer of Cream and a fabulously talented vocalist, Clapton’s confidence in his own voice improved with Cream and he stepped up to sing lead on many of Cream’s best-known songs, including “Strange Brew,” “Badge,” “Crossroads” and co-lead on the biggest hit, “Sunshine of Your Love.” It’s telling that on the live version of “Crossroads” from Wheels of Fire that Bruce introduces Clapton at the end of the tune as “Eric Clapton, lead … vocals.” That pause there says a lot about how Clapton was thought of at the time: a guitarist first, vocalist second.

By now it should be clear that there’s more than one problem with the analogy I’m working with. The most glaring one is that the goal in professional sports is very clear cut: a championship is what marks a player as great. It’s a lot more muddy in the musical world. A Grammy? Cream didn’t win a Grammy until 2006 and that was a Lifetime Achievement Award. Jimi Hendrix, Queen, Led Zeppelin, The Who and many, many others have never won a Grammy. Sales? Cream’s third album, Wheels of Fire, was the first double-album to go platinum. And yet Cream were only together a little over two years before they broke up at the height of their powers in 1968. A large part of it was the ongoing contentiousness between Jack Bruce and  Ginger Baker (which stretched back to their time in Cream-precursor The Graham Bond Organisation), but Clapton was also growing tired of the giant expectations that were being inspired by the group’s success and the fact that they barely listened to one another while playing live. To all outsiders, it must have looked like Cream had won whatever you could call the championship of music, but to Clapton remained musically dissatisfied and so the band called it quits in 1969.

Their loss in the NBA Finals to the champion San Antonio Spurs in 2006-07 inspired a similar rebuild by the Cleveland Cavaliers. At the trade deadline in 2008, the team shipped out players including Donyell Marshall, Shannon Brown, Drew Gooden, and Larry Hughes in exchange for Wally Szczerbiak, Delonte West, Joe Smith, and Ben Wallace. But neither this lineup, nor any of the ones that were tweaked for the two years after (which included bringing in players like Antawn Jamison and Shaquille O’Neal), could climb the mountain and bring home the NBA Championship. It was over these three years, from the 2007-08 season to the 2009-10 season, that the rumbles about James’ inability to lead his team to a championship started. Even as his personal numbers grew to near-legendary levels, he continued to falter on the league’s biggest stage—the playoffs—and the storm clouds of his departure began to loom.

In spite of his misgivings about the course that Cream’s career had taken, Clapton went from one supergroup to another in 1969. He’d long admired singer/keyboardist Steve Winwood and so he approached him about forming the group that would become Blind Faith. Winwood was, in a way, the Shaquille O’Neal of this analogy—an experienced player with his own success brought in as a counterweight. And as it went with the re-tooled Cavaliers, the expectations for Blind Faith were skyhigh immediately. When the group (with Ginger Baker once again on drums and Rick Grech on bass) made their concert debut in Hyde Park on June 7, 1969, it was in front of 100,000 people. As James discovered when Shaq came to the Cavs, it’s never as simple as just plugging people in. Blind Faith only had a handful of songs and the set devolved into lengthy jams—one of the things Clapton had wanted to leave behind with Cream—and the crowd roared their approval. When the group embarked on a U.S. tour in the summer of 1969, there were riots, and Clapton found himself a victim of the same kind of success and pressures that had brought down Cream. He had sought to spread the responsibility out (as a singer, he had once again retreated, with Winwood handling all the vocals on the group’s self-titled debut), but the expectations had only increased. In somewhat the same way, all the additions and mini-rebuilds in Cleveland had been undertaken for the purpose of building a supporting cast around James to help him share the burden, but every addition of a former All-Star or future Hall-of-Famer only made the team’s failures in the playoffs more acute.

And so James left Cleveland in a very public and fairly brutal way, joining up with his friends Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade on the Miami Heat. There’s no end to the ways this has been dissected and discussed, but it seems the end of Blind Faith was altogether more of a whimper than a bang. During the group’s only American tour, Clapton struck up a friendship with the opening act, Delaney & Bonnie. With the dissolution of the ill-fated supergroup, Clapton joined that group as a sideman, eventually using their rhythm section—bassist Carl Radle, drummer Jim Gordon, and keyboardist/vocalist Bobby Whitlock—to start Derek and the Dominos.

It is at this moment of their stories’ greatest confluence that they also separate, however. If James joining the Heat was the ultimate abdication of his anointed role as King James, a tacit recognition that he’s simply happier playing with other talented players, then it’s indeed very similar to Clapton’s sinking into anonymity with Delaney & Bonnie and going somewhat pseudonymous in Derek and the Dominos. (There’s even a guy named Duane/Dwyane to play the foil in each situation.) But James’ chapter with the Heat is still a work in progress, and it’s just possible that the path that Clapton took is instructive.

Returning to Clapton’s singing—his early Achilles heel—it’s interesting to note that in spite of his shrinking from the spotlight as a personality, both Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs and the self-titled debut he recorded just before forming Derek and the Dominos have him doing more singing and songwriting than he had ever done before. It’s as if he needed to pull back from his identity as a guitar god to become a more fully balanced and musical artist. On Layla, he’s grown into his voice substantially. He uses its softer curves ably, not striving for bluesy swagger on plaintive songs like opener “I Looked Away,” but also bending his desperation (he was in love with George Harrison’s wife Patti Boyd at the time) into the devastatingly heartbroken chorus of “Bell Bottom Blues” or the frantic worry of “Why Does Love Got To Be So Sad.” And so, weirdly, retreating from his role as the slashing, technically gifted lead guitarist of the Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Blind Faith allowed him to refashion himself as a more complete musician, allowed him to find his voice.

In only his second year with the Heat, the jury remains out on LeBron James’ evolution. But it doesn’t seem impossible that he doesn’t in fact need to become more aggressive, more of a killer, more of a clutch performer, whatever that means. Maybe he just needs to become clutch enough to win a championship and our understanding of him will change. Consider what happened to our understanding of Kevin Garnett’s game when he went from perpetual playoff disappointment on the Timberwolves to NBA Champion on the Celtics. Suddenly, his inability to take over games didn’t seem like such a liability, and it was his defense that became his defining characteristic. For the first five or six years of his career, Clapton was known as a guitarist first and a singer a distant second, but since the early 70s, that’s gradually changed. “Tears in Heaven” is, after all, not a fret-burning workout. Even so, Clapton’s voice is still not the equal technically of Winwood’s or Baker’s or countless other singers. But he’s learned to make it work for him as he’s grown into it. For all the outward success he experienced early in his career, Clapton ultimately had to step back from it and from the expectations it created to become the musician he wanted to be.

From such a young age, it looked like nothing could stop James, and he certainly hasn’t done himself any favors by often buying into the hype and marketing. But maybe he has to do more growing into his game than we give him credit for. He hasn’t experienced that outward success, hasn’t won those championships we expect of him—not yet. But maybe he doesn’t get there by being more than he is. Maybe he’s enough already and closer than we think.

Or maybe he needs to fall in love with George Harrison’s wife.

* About halfway through writing this, my boy Eric Maroun (who’s named for Eric Clapton, by the way), directed me to this post from last June which posits in a broad fashion the same thing I cover here. My hope is that we’ve got different enough takes to not make this redundant.