LeBron Rants

[Bisquit]

Come on Sal i started this up just for you. Let it all out you'll feel better.

[sixshot]

Well, Sal may take a while to say something... but I'll voice how I feel about it here.

LeBron going to Miami doesn't really surprise me much. But no matter how you look at it, LeBron is going to get criticized regardless if he had stayed or went. What kinda threw me for a loop was where he's heading in combination with who he will be playing with. If it was just Dwayne Wade, then I wouldn't have any issue with it. A duo has worked well for many teams in the past. Jabaar & Magic, Bird w/ McHale (and Parish), Jordan w/ Pippen, Shaq & Kobe, Karl Malone & John Stockton. If you look at all of those duos done in the past, you've seen, many times before, that the team becomes quite formidable and a good contender for the playoffs/finals.

Having several big names in one team is always a very bad idea. Anyone remember the 2003-2004 Lakers roster? If you don't, here's a refresher: Alongside Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal, there's Karl Malone and Gary Payton on there. Sure the other two are kinda going out in terms of NBA season, they're still big names that people recognized. They got all the way to the Finals only to get their ass kicked by the Detroit Pistons. The Lakers had virtually an all-star team and they couldn't even win a 2nd game in the series.

The critics and the players always assume that things will work out. The issue is whether or not it will or if there will be tension between them. They always say that they will be happy to play together. I just kinda wonder about that.

LeBron leaving the Cavs, to me, it's a bit of a spit in the face for the fans and for the town. That's how I look at it objectively. I personally would have liked for him to stay in Cleveland so that he can build the team up there. Cavs already signed up Byron Scott to coach there. And LeBron now leaves??? C'mon, man. Byron is at least someone you can depend on! He has the qualifications too to make a good coach. And then there's loyalty to the name. The Celts got to keep Paul Pierce and Ray Allen for at least another year (Ray Allen's 2-year deal is an opt-out type). Even Doc Rivers is remaining for one more try/run. The more you stay with the team that you were signed up with, the better you solidify your place in NBA history as one of the best for that franchise/team. Forget championships and rings. Charles Barkley NEVER won a ring. But he's a rough player as well.

The Cavs should have been at the Finals. Yet the Celts got the best of them. But did they? If you look at the last few games LeBron played, you get that sense and feeling that he isn't placing that much effort TO WIN. And isn't that what it's supposed to be about? The drive to win?? The Celtics were the underdog for the whole playoffs. And they managed to beat Magics AND the Cavs, two completely dominant teams. "Oh but you got the 'Big Three'." Yes, we do, but during the regular season, performance has not been exactly great. You could understand if I had doubts about the Celtics getting past the Magics and Cavs.

The way I interpreted the last few games of LeBron James as a Cavs made me think that he sabotaged and threw those games just to get out of Cleveland. Getting to the Finals is not an easy feat. Getting to the Finals is a good accomplishment and feat alone. Winning it is the greatest accomplishment, as the Celtics have shown in 2008.

But what will the future hold? Is the Heat the team to beat? Let's imagine if you will of a fantasy scenario. Let's imagine for a moment if LeBron stayed in Cleveland and got the team to the Finals, and won. The player value for LeBron would then go through the roof. Compare that to having Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh at his side, what is his value as a player then? Some may think that he's taking the easy way out, to play with the big guys. Michael Jordan stayed with the Bulls for the entirety of his career. He could have easily gone elsewhere. But he stayed. It's no surprise that Jordan solidified his place in Bull's history. You can even look at the Celtics' retired numbers and see the numerous NBA greats that has ever graced the hardwood floor. How many of them stayed with the team their entire life?

I always believed that, if you have the skills and talents to bring the team up, carry them on, and help them win the NBA Championship, you're free to go anywhere you want to after that contract is up. I would have understood wanting to go elsewhere after winning it all. And I would not have felt disappointed nor sad about their departure.

I had high respects to LeBron James as a player. He is talented and skilled. But he should not have left just to win. Now that he's chosen Miami as his team, I've lost that respect. Too bad for LeBron, because in my eyes, he just left that pedestal next to Michael Jordan.

[Mike]

I'm not surprised that he left. Cleveland really hadn't done enough to improve the team to get him to stay. Without Lebron the team is not good at all. I think he was tired of being not only the best player, but really the only great player on his team.

I was bothered by the whole ESPN thing. The announcement was smarmy and just plain gross. The questions were pointless and obviously pre-approved by Lebron's people. The answers were rehearsed and scripted. Lebron looked worried and upset about what he was doing. The blatant commercialism with the vitamin water right behind them, and even the very idea of hiding in a boys and girls club to make the whole thing seem less smarmy only made it worse.

I really hate ESPN and I wish I never had to watch it for anything. They're nothing but the PR arm of the three major sports they televise.

The whole thing was lame, including the actual decision. The best thing for the league and for Lebron would be if he'd gone to Chicago or New York. The Bulls arguably would have had a better team than the Heat:

Lebron
Derek Rose
Carlos Boozer
Luol Deng
Joaqim Noah

vs.

Lebron
Wade
Bosh
and???????

I never like the "superteams" in any sport.

[sixshot]

NY would have been a much more interesting of a choice because Knicks really need someone to partner up with Amare. Knicks are virtually at the bottom of the pile (next to the Nets) and they needed people to turn their upcoming season around. Celts signed up Jermaine O'Neal to fill in the missing center (Kendrick Perkins is out for many months due to injury). But I found it funny that they expressed interest in Shaq as well for the center role.

This whole thing is messed up. I don't think I have seen a free agent this wild. Then again, never paid much attention 'till now (because C's Paul Pierce and Ray Allen were on FA block).

[Salvaje]

Guys, this was decided MONTHS ago when Wade, Bosch, and LeBum met at his Bath, Oh house. Even before that, at the Olympic games when all 3 opted for a 3 year contract and wanted to play together.
Can any of us blame them? We all hate to lose in a video game BFBC2. To join forces and kick ass - who wouldn't want that? Give me Whiskey, Six, Injun, Rigs, Bis, Helyk, KOD, Flex, wait wait wait - ALL of us, on one team?

My one and only bitch?
LeBum always talked about Family, Loyalty (he had these words tattoed on his body) and yet when it came down to it, he completely ignored NE Ohio and not only screwed us, but did it on National TV. Our owner Gilbert could not have done more to make us competitve. Swing trades, take on salary, redo the entire arena, build a 1st class practice facility near LeBum's home, hire his cronies, put his wannabe's on our summer Vegas team, and eat Luxury Tax to help us win RIGHT NOW (Shaq, Jamison, Parker, Moon, and even loser Telfair to eat his contract).

In the end, LeBum opted to go to a Team that cut and lost for years vs the Cavs that tried to win right now.
Hmmm, try to win for me and if not I will go to those that will try again.
Loyalty?
Family?
He screwed us. AND he waited until the last minute, not returning Gilbert's calls and texts. Now free agency is almost over and we have this money and most have signed elsewhere. Imagine what we could of done with advance warning (which LeBum KNEW ABOUT!).

That is my bitch. He can sign/go where he wants. But, we gave him EVERYTHING for 7 years and his payback was to dangle us on national TV and make us wait until it is too late to compensate for the damage?

I think we are seeing this. He admits he can't win by himself. He needs Wade. He isn't as great as he portrays himself. His brand/legacy is hurt by this and he will never be as awesome as he was in Cleveland.

My 2 cents from a broken heart (Cleve sports now need another decade to come back as the Indians, Browns, and now Cavs all suck!)

[sixshot]

I must ask this curious question: Would you now change your opinion of Paul Pierce since he spat at LeBron? Might have been an ominous forewarning of things to come when that happened.

[Salvaje]

LOL
Sorry Six, Pierce has forever lost my estimation. He is a thug, plain and simple. Fits perfectly into the Celtic system.
Probably why you guys win and we lose. Can you say Pistons?

[Mike]

Sal you should like this:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ma ... 9533/83512

"The Decision" was simultaneously the most painful and most hilarious television show I've seen in a long time. Its entertainment value rested almost entirely in its scope -- the same way a person goes to the Niagara Falls or to the Grand Canyon for that take-your-breath-away moment when the heretofore unimaginable vastness of the vista is first perceived, I watched "The Decision" in breathless awe of the sheer scale of the narcissism involved.

By any measure it was a landmark moment in the history of human self-involvement, eclipsing previous peaks in the narcissism Himalayas (Nero's impromptu fiddle concert as Rome burned, the career of the prophet Mohammed, Kim Jong Il publishing "The Popularity of Kim Jong Il") mainly because it was a collective effort. You can understand the citizens of Tsaritsyn cheering the decision to rename their city; if they didn't like "Stalingrad," they were getting lined up and shot.

But what was our excuse? The weird thing about this Lebron story is that seven or eight years ago, he seemed like a nice kid. All he did was step into a media machinery deisgned to create, reward, nurture, and worship self-obsessed assholes. He was raw clay when he went in, and now he's everything we ever wanted him to be -- a lost, attention-craving narcissistic monster who simultaneously despises and needs the slithering insect-mortals who by the millions are bent over licking his toes (represented in The Decision by the ball-less, drooling sycophant Jim Gray).

I'm sure there's a larger point to make in all of this about how the insane pathology behind the LeBron spectacle (read: a co-dependent need to worship insatiable media-attention hogs gone far off the rails of self-awareness) is what ultimately is going to destroy this country and leave us goverened for all time by dingbat megalomaniacs like Sarah Palin. But for now I think it's important to just enjoy "The Decision" on a pure humor value basis, since we're unlikely to see anything that funny for a good long while. To me the top five moments:

1. So here's LeBron James, sitting in a gymnasium full of children from the Boys and Girls Club, the charity that was to receive the proceeds from the event. Let's note the first thing: LeBron had a full hour to say anything he wanted, and might perhaps have used that time to talk about the Boys and Girls club, which was conceived for the express purpose of helping kids who don't have enough parental guidance -- kids like LeBron, for instance (whose biological father was an ex-con who was never there). LeBron instead chooses to have a show entirely about himself filled with navel-gazing commentators raving over his highlights, followed by Gray and his idiotic questions about whether or not LeBron bites his nails. Then, when Gray finally gets to a question about whether it might be hard to share the spotlight with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, LeBron answers, "It's not about sharing. You know, it's about everybody having they own spotlight." That's his message to the Boys and Girls of America: It's not about sharing! I exploded in laughter when he said this. Even funnier, nobody commented on it. I mean, what's the problem? The kids got the proceeds, didn't they?

2. The day after the show, I woke up and checked the internet to see if "It's about everybody having they own spotlight" had already made Bartlett's quotations or something -- it seemed primed to be turned into a famous line that encapsulates the mood of a country for a whole decade, sort of like "Tune in, turn on, drop out" or "Greed is good." But when I Googled it, I found less than a full page of hits. Why? Because ESPN not only spent the whole evening shamelessly deep-throating LeBron, they fixed his grammar post-factum. In the official transcript, LeBron sounds not like stammering, uneducated buffoon he sounded like on live TV, but just like any other ordinary, more or less literate mass-media dickhead. Some of his malaprop gems will survive ("I want to win into the future"), but otherwise... apparently, fame is now its own spell-checker. Obviously this isn't all LeBron's fault -- the guy didn't go to college, after all, and he's not being paid to be a public speaker -- but this is part of the story, the fact that sports stars don't need to go to school really at all anymore and can get to the pros by going to sham high schools that exist solely to crank out basketball players. But even that part of the story gets whitewashed.

3. Gray isn't visible during most of the interview -- thank God -- but about five minutes into their talk LeBron glances down slightly, and suddenly I was conscious of feeling Gray's off-camera eyes locked on LeBron's crotch during LeBron's answers. I burst out laughing. Overall, the whole scene was an uncanny replay of the Hot Tub Time Machine sequence in which the balding white Rob Corddry is forced to suck off black comedian Craig Robinson after losing a football bet. This has to have been the absolute low point in the whole history of the "interview," right? Charlie Gibson's 2008 Bush interview is a candidate, I guess, but this has to be the worst ever -- especially when you throw in the fact that Gray was a) paid by LeBron to do the interview, and b) chosen because he has a "special sales relationship" with one of the sponsors, the University of Phoenix.

4. When Gray asks LeBron, "Was it always your plan to play with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh?" watch as he hedges for a second in between the words 'Well," and "I mean," before answering, "Well, I mean, I'm looking forward to it. To say it was always in my plans, I can't say it was always in my plans because I never thought it was possible." In that one little hedging moment he starts, ever so slightly, to smile. And everybody knew what that smile meant: it meant, "What the >censored< do you think? Of course, we've been planning this for years." So he smiles, giving the deal away completely, then instantly switches gears and just turbo-lies right into the camera. I thought: this is just like politics! A terrible, totally unskilled liar, telling a completely transparent lie, who then improbably gets let off the hook by the sycophantic moron interviewing him. What is it about this story we love so much?

5. The camerawork was spectacular. The slow zoom-in leading to the EXTREME LEBRON CLOSE-UP during the key question -- You've had everybody else biting their nails. So I guess it's time for them to stop chewing. The answer to the question everybody wants to know: LeBron, what's your decision? -- if you'd asked a great comic film director to spoof reality-show direction, that's what it would look like. But here's the question: was this a spoof of reality-show TV, was it reality-show TV, or was this a society that can no longer tell the difference? Several times during the ESPN broadcast I got the sense that the network itself had lost track of where "reality" was. Were we really supposed to believe that this thing wasn't decided ages ago, that Wade was seriously considering going to Chicago at one point, that the Knicks were ever in it, that LeBron was trying to convince Bosh to come to Cleveland? Of course not, it was all bullshit, designed to snare viewers, the grownups among us all know that. But the ESPN anchors looked like they were hanging desperately on every tweet, almost like they really believed this stuff. Poor Stuart Scott, he's been podded completely, if you chopped that dude's head off, nothing but little plastic balls containing digitized "Boo-yah" chips would fall out of his skull. It's the prototype for all future news coverage-- one or two dominant news networks pushing sensational fairy-tale versions of reality in a race for ad revenue, competing with a few scattered hacks on the internet covering the much less important parallel "real story," i.e. the truth. In order for the networks to push their version most effectively, they have to genuinely believe that what they're spinning is real. Which is why you see them starting to mistake fake drama for real drama from time to time -- they're beginning to drown in their own bullshit.

Watch and see if that doesn't become the template for presidential campaign coverage in 2012. See if those reality-show zoom-ins don't start to creep into interviews with candidates. This is the beginning of our big Lost in Space journey together, where news and reality-show programming fuse completely and we all end up complete morons, voting strippers and X-games athletes into the White House. I'm psyched. Are you?

[Rivetgun]

I think he made the move based on tax rates. http://swz.salary.com/salarywizard/layouthtmls/swzl_statetaxrate_OH.html

Florida has no income tax and he knows how much income potential he has with endorsement deals. Hell its where Tiger Woods lives and we all know how much he is worth and how much his X is getting.

[goofy1148]

Thats why i have a life now and catch a game when i catch one. Haven't been to a "[paid" live event in 10 years...not about to start now....these people couls care less who you are...and i have given it back....with exception of course to Ted Bruschi....he CAN DO ANYTHING AND I'LL UNDERSTAND!

[Salvaje]

Very poignant comments Mike and sooo true.
More scary than this hype job?
"Watch and see if that doesn't become the template for presidential campaign coverage in 2012. See if those reality-show zoom-ins don't start to creep into interviews with candidates. This is the beginning of our big Lost in Space journey together, where news and reality-show programming fuse completely and we all end up complete morons, voting strippers and X-games athletes into the White House. I'm psyched. Are you?"
Can you say Sara Palin and her famous Wink? Work or not, exactly what Mike is pointing too.

Riv, if money was the deal, the Tax Rates were inconsequential. Believe me, Cleveland could of paid him enormous amounts of money more. PLUS, his accountants could of hid most of it as the rich pay nothing and the rest of us foot the bill.

This was predetermined months ago and LeBum screwed Cleve, after all they gave him, and waited to make his special. In the meantime, we lost out on free agents we might have gotten to replace him.
A case of me me me.

Agreed, he lost his legacy. He can't be the MAN. He needs help. Specifically, Dwayne Wade.
So be it.