LeBron James Triangle X Ball Don't Lie
Brian Spaeth is an actor/writer/producer living in Los Angeles, but really, he’s from Cleveland. He likes jokes, basketball and snakes. He blogs at Brian’s Thoughts About Airplanes.
I’ve wanted to write this since Thursday night, but my blog is currently a mess of backward-English nonsense and this doesn’t fit what’s happening over there at the moment. Thanks to Trey for letting me spout the following, which I’m sure has been said elsewhere both better and nine-thousand times.
Still, as a Clevelander and I feel I have something to add. This LeBron-to-Miami thing was a triangular failure and I’ve got to get it off my chest. Some disclaimers:
1) I was born and raised in Cleveland, although I haven’t lived there for some seven or eight years. Part of my reason for writing this is because I see my native breathren getting written off as whiny babies more and more, and this just isn’t the case.
2) I’m working under the assumption that it was always 95% (if not 100%) set that these three were going to Miami. There was never a Plan B for them.
3) I don’t think LeBron is a bad guy. I think he made some misguided choices. Some that were misguided for him, and others that were misguided for the rest of us.
Here we go. I think these are all obtuse angles, also.
THE CLEVELAND ANGLE
Understand that as a Clevelander, I’m not bitter that he’s no longer playing for the Cavaliers. Most of us knew deep down he’d go at some point — not for any specific reason other than him staying didn’t fit the paradigm.
My official initiation to all this was “The Shot”, and the moment I truly understood was the ’97 World Series. Leading in the top of the 9th with the best closer in the game about to take the mound, I instinctively knew we’d lose. I said this to my dad during the commercial break and he sort of gave me a deeply affecting “now you’re like me” look.
Watch the Cleveland reaction shots in the bars from the other night and you’ll note very few people freaking out or screaming or shocked in the “I’m taking my talents to South Beach” moment. It was by-and-large a sullen kind of mass, “…of course he’s leaving.”
We weren’t anticipating it and certainly not hoping for it, but at the same time somewhere inside we knew. This was this generation’s Cleveland sports initiation, which is the only part about this that makes me emotionally sad.
Not that we didn’t love him, and that’s the other part to this side of the triangle that has people bitter. From a purely basketball standpoint, had the Cavs been struggling to 40-50 wins every year, most of us would’ve had KG-type feelings for him. “Go man — you deserve better than this.”
That’s not how it was, though. He was leaving an annual contender and a franchise willing to spend and make moves, even though he wouldn’t give them the commitment to execute anything more than year-by-year panic plays and quick fixes while he openly flirted with the Knicks. 60+ wins two years in a row isn’t an anomaly. The Boston series malaise is another wrinkle in there. If the Cavaliers aren’t a true contender the blame lies partially with LeBron himself.
The real issue at the absolute core for Cleveland — even beyond the horrible ESPN presentation — is that he named that show “The Decision.” He was raised in the area and knows exactly what “the” before a word means when dealing with Cleveland sports. At the very least, let us pick our own name for the tragedy and don’t exploit the meme for the sake of your marketing. It was just a cruel and classless slap in the face, and if he’d named the show anything else I wouldn’t be nearly as disgusted with him.
Don’t worry — we would’ve named it.
THE MARKETING ANGLE
This has been written up elsewhere a zillion times over.
Wade and Bosh are just as complicit, by the way. They toyed with the media and franchises just as much. If these three would’ve taken a different angle in just about every respect, the “unselfish team-up” thing could’ve found a way to be endearing.
Maybe. I’m not sure for LeBron, mainly because of the third angle.
THE LEGACY ANGLE
Once the preseason magazine covers roll out and especially once the winning starts, the media will forget/ignore the TV special and how the merger happened. Cleveland will always resent LeBron, but it’ll be habit as much as anything after we scream at him the first few times Miami rolls through town. (Assuming he shows up — I’m honestly not sure he should.)
Lebron’s legacy, though … this isn’t going anywhere. It’s a tricky subject — it’s clearly more about what we needed for LeBron than what he needs for himself. I say all of the following as a basketball fan, not a Cleveland fan.
Like many, I’m hardcore about the NBA Alpha Male way of viewing basketball. We wanted him to be the next Jordan/Kobe/Alpha Male. The iconic single name. The unique body and skill set. The hometown hero story. There was so much about this entire deal that was supposed to become legendary. The next Jordan couldn’t be another version of Jordan, which with all due respect, is Kobe’s ceiling. As a player he’s too much the same.
LeBron though — he was an entirely different beast, which is what it would take to make people finally stop asking for the next Jordan. LEBRON HAS A BIG “CHOSEN 1″ TATTOO ON HIS BACK. The move to Miami — teaming up with the competition — it kills all of that.
That’s not necessarily a criticism, either. It’s just not what I personally wanted from theLeBron James(notes) story as a basketball fan. I’m selfish — I wanted him in the Greatest of All-Time conversation. Cleveland was the best place to do that, but New York, New Jersey, or even Chicago would’ve kept that alive to some extent. The Super Friends concept doesn’t do it.
Now, either he’s not concerned with such things or he doesn’t understand. I tend to think it’s the latter. Does he think his puppet can still live with Kobe’s puppet? Wouldn’t it seem odd now?
Maybe it’s the former, and that’s fine, provided he would conduct himself as such or simply say so. “I’m not concerned with my individual legacy — the three of us are sacrificing that to go down in history together.” He doesn’t owe us that either, but on some psychological plane of basketball karma, I feel like he does. The metaphorical tattoo has to be removed.
You see why this makes me crazy, because it doesn’t really make sense. His legacy is damaged no matter what happens, though. It’s on the table for discussion as a mistake.
CONCLUSION
How could this triangle of free agency failure been avoided?
If he knew he was going to Miami with Wade and Bosh, he gets together with Cavs management in May or June and tells them. Ask them to keep it quiet if necessary, but let them make preparations, both from a personnel and PR standpoint. Respect the organization that’s done everything to appease and please him and his friends. (I await Brian Windhorst’s inevitable 2000-page book on this.) Then figure out how to address it with the city. I don’t know that anything would play well with everyone, but blunt honesty would at least be blunt and honest.
Explain that he loves the city and the fans, but he has a chance to go spend the prime of his career with his best friend and a gawky power forward who’s awkward around girls … and he really, really, really wants to do that. Even if it’s a lie, he says it breaks his heart. Cleveland fans would still be hurting, but at least we wouldn’t feel screwed. We can deal with the loss of a basketball player — you may remember we had an entire football team leave.
The media response would’ve been 180 degrees the other way, and none of this stops those three from going to Miami to win basketball games, which I’d love to think was the prime motivation here, pre-championship celebrations aside.
The only thing anyone could criticize in this scenario is the Legacy angle, and that’s our problem, anyway. Plus, so long as Michael Jordan denounces this Marvel Team-Up at some point, I’ll feel that’s been taken care of.
Originally posted on Yahoo’s Ball Don’t Lie blog
