MIAMI — When LeBron James plays basketball at the level he did on Tuesday night, two things become apparent really quickly.

One, it doesn't matter who wins the MVP — and Derrick Rose did have a terrific year — when James is at the absolute hysterical peak of his powers there isn't another player in the conversation. Best player in the world.

And two, if you give him Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh instead of Anthony Parker and Zydrunas Ilgauskas (I know he's still with LeBron, but you know what I mean) it becomes a lot easier to understand why he took his talents to South Beach.

"In the past, if I don't bring my A-plus game, there's a good chance we don't win the game," James said after his 35-point, seven-rebound, zero-turnover dismantling of the Celtics in a 102-91 Game 2 win that had a Changing of the NBA Guard feel to it. "That's not taking anything away from my teammates, my previous teammates (oh, really?), but I had to be really good."

Look, LeBron James rubs me the wrong way. I don't buy his act at all. Phony and orchestrated is a charitable description. "The Decision" was 60 minutes that caused me to vomit up every piece of food I've ever eaten, and I'm counting Gerber food here. An ego-stuffing, third-person-referencing 600-pound dump on a city that will go down as one of the most ill-conceived concepts in TV history. 

"The Decision" was a disaster. But the decision? After two wins against a team he couldn't beat on his own, it's looking better and better.

LeBron took the path of least resistance. Left the cold weather, the dreary city, the mediocre teammates for Wade, Bosh and South Beach. Turns out the words of Mr. Robert Tepper from "Rocky IV" aren't always ones to live by. There is an easy way out, there is a shortcut home.

And LeBron James took it. Sure, it's easy to blast him for it — and I have — and suggest that great players from the past wouldn't have done the same. And maybe it's true. But Magic had Kareem. Bird had McHale and Parish and DJ. Jordan had Pippen. LeBron had Mo Williams. 

And now he has a future Hall of Famer in Wade (who has been almost as good as James in the first two games) and a future Hall of Very Good inductee in Bosh (though he still strikes me as a prime candidate for a 3-for-16 meltdown when the Heat face its first must-win postseason spot). 

What he did isn't what we were told stars do — he ran away from the heat to get to the Heat — but let's be fair: What we saw LeBron James do on Tuesday would not have happened against the Celtics were he still in Cleveland.

The script probably looked awfully familiar to James, though, with seven minutes left in the fourth quarter. The Celtics — getting almost nothing from Paul Pierce and Ray Allen (both banged up) — had somehow managed to scrape and claw to an 80-80 tie in a game they had been trailing all night, a game in which their stars had been significantly outplayed by Miami's Big Two and Three-Quarters (sorry, Bosh never won a playoff series on his own, so he doesn't qualify). 

Here they come again, the gritty, gutty Celtics. Poised to steal one in Miami, escape with a split and put all the pressure back on LeBron. Again. And we've seen how that's played out in the past (just ask Mike Brown, if you can grab him during a commercial in between cliche-filled ESPN News time-fillers).

But that didn't happen in Game 2. James did what he failed to do time and again vs. the Celtics down the stretch of a playoff game over the last three years. He took over, scoring seven points (including a spectacular three-point play on a follow-up dunk off of a Wade miss) and grabbing three rebounds in a 14-0 run that put the game away and also removed any last shred of an idea that this Celtics team has some kind of mental edge over the Heat. Big brother was punched in the mouth on Tuesday. The fear is gone, replaced by actual confidence, not the fraudulent kind James, Wade, Bosh and Erik Spoelstra were trying to sell us earlier in the season. Remember when Jordan's Bulls finally crossed that point with the Pistons and realized that they were the better team? Tough to shake the idea that we are watching that right now with these two teams.

This doesn't mean that this series is over. You'd have to have a Rashard Mendenhall hitting the tweet button level of stupidity to kick dirt on this group. Kevin Garnett, Pierce, Allen and Rondo? Beat up or not (we'll learn more on Allen and Pierce in the next day or two), 2-2 after four games is far from an impossible scenario, right?

But the Celtics are going to have to take it from Miami. This isn't going to be a repeat of 2010, with James quitting (and he did quit, I stand next to Dan Gilbert on that one) in Game 5. Wade won't let that happen on his watch. As great as James is, Wade is the leader of that team. He runs the show, and the players follow him. Again, if you view that as a knock on LeBron, that's a perfectly acceptable stance. But it seems he's comfortable with the dynamic, which almost everyone (me included) had serious doubts about when he signed with Miami and accepted a shared above-the-title billing.

LeBron James hit jumpers on Tuesday, contested and uncontested. He got to the basket whenever he wanted. He was a game-changer on defense, again shutting down an increasingly frustrated Paul Pierce (who has, for the first time in his career, looked old in this series). He was the best player on the court when it mattered most. 

And now he's two wins away from perhaps ending the days of relevance for Pierce/Allen/Garnett and shifting the balance of power in the Eastern Conference.

“It was [games] like this that I thought about when I made the choice," James said.

By "choice" he means decision, of course. Choice must be testing better. And as far as decisions go, the 1,278-mile move from Cleveland to Miami wasn't the popular one, but it's looking more and more like the correct one.