***
By Bryan Toporek
NBA fans have been trapped in a free agency world of preposterousness these past two weeks.
We've gone from "The Decision" to "The Letter." We've gone from Amir Johnson's five-year, $34 million contract to Joe Johnson being the highest paid free agent in a class that includes LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh.
And yet, one of the most preposterous ideas in all of this free agency hysteria has been that of LeBron James, The Royal Quitter.
It started with his owner, Dan Gilbert, who ranted about LeBron quitting in every big game in an interview with the Associated Press. He advised us to "go back and look at the tape" of the Orlando-Cleveland Game Six from 2009, asking us to check how many shots James took (he took 20 shots, for the record).
So, in other words, we can discount Gilbert because he's a bitter owner who's lashing out like a 13-year-old girl after a breakup. What else should we have expected? (To his credit, the Fathead stunt was hilarious.)
Then we had the bloggers, who swarmed in with the "James = Quitter" argument by saying a true superstar would never want to join forces with other stars; instead, they'd create a decade-long rivalry on the court and maintain their friendship off the court.
By joining Wade and admitting that he sometimes wanted another player on his team to be able to take over and dominate a game, LeBron showed a supposed weakness that he's never revealed before.
Then again, joining Wade and Bosh isn't so much quitting on the Cavs as it is quitting on the chance to become one of the all-time greats. Therefore, it's not entirely relevant to this particular discussion.
Finally, we get to Jay Mariotti.
Mariotti suggested the possibility that LeBron would "deliver less-than-maximum effort at times" because he "was planning all along to bolt the Cleveland Cavaliers." This appears in a column in which Mariotti practically begs the league to investigate the Super Friends' decision for tampering and/or collusion.
Moving beyond the fact that Mariotti has become a caricature of himself at this point, the mere suggestion of this conspiracy should cause FanHouse to ban Mariotti from writing for a week, for his own sake.
Imagine, for a moment, that Mariotti is right, and that LeBron, Wade, and Bosh had agreed to head to Miami months, if not years ago. Why would that cause LeBron to deliver less-than-maximum effort in the last playoff run he'd ever have with his hometown franchise?
Would LeBron really give up a chance at his first NBA championship just because he wasn't planning to stay with Cleveland long-term?
To put it plainly, not a chance.
How can you argue that a guy who just passed up $15 million on his new contract for a better chance of winning doesn't value championships before all else (including loyalty to his hometown)? And if he's got such an obsession with titles, why would he intentionally sacrifice his shot at a championship when he's on a team that had the best record in the NBA?
If anything, wouldn't Cleveland be (a little) less upset with LeBron had he brought home a championship before callously dumping them on national TV?
No, LeBron's apparent lack of effort in the final two games of the Celtics series didn't stem from the underlying knowledge that he'd be leaving his hometown after the season.
Instead, as Sports Illustrated's Joe Posnanski points out, LeBron hit a breaking point with the Cavaliers during the Celtics series:
"But, well, if James did quit, then WHY did he quit? Why does anyone quit anything? It’s because they think there’s no point. I think LeBron simply came to the realization that his team wasn’t good enough. The coach wasn’t good enough. Ownership wasn’t good enough."
"He realized (rightly or wrongly) that no matter what he did, this team was not going to win a championship. And once he realized that, he lowered his intensity level and finally, in the last minute of his Cleveland career, watched the clock tick down."
LeBron didn't quit on the Cavaliers. LeBron felt like the Cavaliers quit on him.
LeBron didn't need Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman around him to win a championship. All he needed were teammates that could knock down wide-open shots when he passed to them out of a double-team.
Year after year, the Cavs came up short in that department. After seven years, James finally decided that he'd seen enough Mo Williams bricks for one lifetime.
So he left. A "quitter."
To his credit, Mariotti did promise that we'd remember Game Five against the Celtics—the night that LeBron turned into LeGone, as he called it.
But why suggest that James would intentionally forfeit his last shot at a championship in Cleveland, knowing that he'd be heading to Miami in a few months anyway?
We may be able to replace Dan Gilbert's letter in the "Most Preposterous Idea From the Summer of 2010" category after all.
Source: http://bleacherreport.com/articles/420067-why-would-lebron-james-have-quit-on-the-cleveland-cavaliers
No comments:
Post a Comment