LeBron Down 3-1 / LeBron Wearing Earbuds
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About
LeBron Down 3-1, also known as LeBron Wearing Earbuds, refers to an exploitable image of basketball player LeBron James wearing white earbuds or headphones over a headline that reads "No team in NBA Finals history has come back from trailing 3-1." The image presumably comes from the 2016 NBA Finals series in which James and the Cleveland Cavaliers notably overcame a 3-1 series deficit to defeat the Golden State Warriors. In the years since, it has been used as a reaction image sarcastically encouraging people to overcome seemingly impossible odds, and was notably used by the Dallas Mavericks in the 2024 NBA Finals. Meme creators will often replace LeBron with other NBA players in the original image with them wearing the earbuds and sunglasses.
Origin
The image of LeBron wearing earbuds with text reading "No team in NBA Finals history has come back from trailing 3-1" appears to come from media coverage of the 2016 NBA Finals when LeBron James and the Cavaliers overcame a 3-1 series deficit to beat the Golden State Warriors.
The earliest known use of the image in a meme was posted on April 11th, 2017, by Twitter / X user @yalljust_myfans,[1] gaining over 30,000 retweets and 41,000 likes in seven years (shown below).
Spread
Over the following years, the meme continued to circulate in NBA circles and saw particular use in the playoffs when teams faced large deficits in playoff series. On June 7th, 2018, Redditor mugoatwara used it in the subreddit /r/ClevelandCavaliers[2] when the Cavaliers were down 3-0 in the NBA Finals that year, gaining over 610 points in six years (shown below, left).
On March 16th, 2023, the Twitter account @NBAMemes[3] used it to joke about Princeton upsetting Arizona in the NCAA basketball tournament, gaining over 240 likes in one year (shown below, right).
On June 17th, 2024, the Dallas Mavericks tweeted an edit of the meme featuring the team's star, Luka Doncic, as they were down 3-1 in their series to the Boston Celtics[4] (shown below). The post gained over 9,500 retweets and 41,000 likes in one day (the Mavericks lost the Finals that night).
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