If Lebron James made this, it would've been the dunk of the year

[Andy Lin]

I came across a video by accident where the title of the video is "If Lebron James made this, it would've been the dunk of the year".

I think the title is grammatically incorrect and should be either:

1. If Lebron James made this, it would be the dunk of the year
or
2. If Lebron James had made this, it would've been the dunk of the year

where

1 gives the scenario that we still don't know the result yet, so we say it at the point of time before Lebron doing it. And
2 is the scenario that we already knew that Lebron did it but failed, so we say it at the point of time after Lebron doing it.

But the original sentence in the title seems to be in another form that I'm not quite understanding, and it's the reason for this thread.

Please let me know if I missed something.

 

[SoothingDave]

You are correct. It should be "if he had made this."

This is a common error that native speakers make.

 

[Tdol]

However, that is not to say that all sentences following this pattern are grammatically wrong:

If I were you, I wouldn't have done that.
(I wasn't you but I also cannot be you.)