Re: Cleveland Cavaliers
Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2011 6:49 am
by TFIR
Why J.J. Hickson failed in Israel
5 Comments
By Guest Contributors
November 06, 2011 at 6:40 PM
By A.J. Mitnick
After less than two weeks in Israel, J.J. Hickson packed his bags and was on a 10 a.m. flight back to America.
Despite an upcoming matchup against a Rishon Lezion squad that knocked the team out of the playoffs last season, Bnei Herzliya had such an issue with Hickson’s attitude and behavior that they sent him home 24 hours before the game.
Though he arrived with tremendous hype as one of the more acclaimed NBA players to play in Israel, Hickson’s stint in Israel will be remembered as a failure and will prove to be a cautionary tale for international teams looking to sign NBA players during the lockout.
Hickson may be loaded with athleticism and talent, but he also a kid who has the same concerns that many young people have when they go to study abroad. It seemed like a great idea from afar for Hickson to come overseas, play a few games, make a few bucks and enjoy the lifestyle of a foreign country.
Little did Hickson anticipate that like many 23-year-olds, he would struggle to adjust to a new culture and would miss his family. Hickson’s flight had a delay that caused his bags to arrive in Israel three days late, and as an American who had the same issue when I came to Israel five years ago, I can vouch that it is extremely frustrating and certainly not the ideal way to start off in a new country.
During Hickson’s second week with the team, his main concern wasn’t attempting to adjust so that his team could do better than a 39 point defeat in their second game, but rather, he was more focused on how small his apartment was. On Friday, just 30 minutes before practice, Hickson called the team informing them that he would not be attending practice, after seeming aloof in most of the past week’s practices.
Re: Cleveland Cavaliers
Posted: Mon Nov 07, 2011 6:54 am
by TFIR
Morning-after lockout roundup: NBA union is very, very angry
25 Comments
By Chris Sheridan
November 06, 2011 at 8:48 AM
NEW YORK — Good morning. Hope you got some sleep. I didn’t get much, and I imagine Jeffrey Kessler didn’t either.
Kessler, the lead outside counsel for NBA players (he performs the same role for NFL players) was practically foaming at the mouth in the wee hours of the a.m. after David Stern and Derek Fisher had conducted their respective news conferences in the most diplomatic tones they could muster. The moment Fisher left the room, Kessler started venting. Loudly. And he didn’t let up for a good 15-20 minutes.
The owners, Kessler said, had been the ones who brought an abrupt halt to the proceedings. After 3 weeks of preconditions that were levied and then removed and then levied and removed again, the owners circled back to basically the same place they have been all along while giving the players a take-it-or-leave-it offer that for all intents and purposes would max out at 50.2 percent of revenues going to the players, 49.8 percent going to the owners.
The players had dropped to 51 percent, or as Kessler termed it: “Fifty plus one,” with the extra one percent ($40 million) being earmarked for improved pension benefits for both current and retired players.
“These are professional basketball players,’’ Kessler said. “They are the finest athletes in the world. How do you think they feel about threats? How do you think they feel about efforts at intimidation? Who negotiates in good faith when they say it’s this proposal or (back to) 47 percent? Take it or leave it. This is not good faith to the fans. ‘’
Big, bad Michael Jordan had become Paul Allen 2.0 during the meeting, Kessler said, barely uttering a word.
Arbitrator George Cohen’ suggestions, Kessler said, had been hijacked by Stern and turned into the owners’ official offer. The money quote from my news story, after the 8 1/2 hours of meetings and 60 minutes of dueling news conferences had ended: “The story here is they want it all,” Kessler bellowed. “They want a win, win, win, win. We wanted a compromise. Our 51 percent offer was based on a fair system. They would have to come to us on the system, but they did not.”
So although the sides are close on the money, they are not close on what is fair and what is unfair. And now comes the waiting (until Wednesday, when the owners say their offer will expire), and the fallout.
Re: Cleveland Cavaliers
Posted: Thu Nov 10, 2011 6:01 pm
by J.R.
Excerpt: The Whore of Akron
A displaced Clevelander honors his hometown by stalking the man who spurned us
by Scott Raab
When I began work on The Whore of Akron in June 2009, it wasn't going to be called that. The book I set out to write would've had a title like Bearing Witness, and it would've told the story of the Cavs' first NBA crown — and the city's first championship since the Browns won it all in 1964.
Not that I was assuming any such happy ending — as a native Clevelander, I'm incapable of optimism — but what the hell: We had the league's best player and an owner who would happily spend whatever it took to win it all. The Q was packed to the rafters every game, the town was the center of the basketball universe, and ... fuck it. It's not as if you don't know the rest of that story.
The Whore of Akron isn't just that story. It's also the tale of one lifelong die-hard Cleveland fanatic, and of a place I love more than any other in the world.
COINS ON A COLD GRAVE
My favorite story of Cleveland fanhood is about an old friend of mine named Joey, the 1997 World Series, and a shortstop who played for the Indians nearly a century ago, Ray Chapman. Chapman was a fine ballplayer and a sweetheart of a guy, much loved by his teammates; he batted second on one of the greatest Tribe teams of all, the 1920 Cleveland Indians.
Those Indians won the World Series — 1920 and 1948: that's the complete list in 110 years — but Ray Chapman wasn't with them. He was hit by a pitch in a game at Yankee Stadium on August 16, 1920, and died early the next morning.
They brought his body back to Cleveland and buried it in Lake View Cemetery, one of the world's greatest boneyards. I shit you not: Lake View holds more than 100,000 former people, sits on 285 gorgeous acres, and is the resting place of James Garfield; Eliot Ness; John D. Rockefeller; Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of a major American city; and the ashes of the finest writer Cleveland has ever produced, Harvey Pekar. It always was one of my favorite places to get high and — far, far less often — laid.
Ray Chapman's grave is hard to find. The granite monument that marks it — paid for back in the day by donations from fans — simply bears his full name, Raymond Johnson Chapman, along with the years of his birth and his death, 1891-1920. Joey had never visited, but he figured it couldn't hurt to pay homage in the fall of '97 before the Tribe took the field down in Florida to play the deciding game against the Marlins.
He found the grave in an old section of Lake View, near the Euclid Avenue gate, spotted it standing by itself amid a row of unraised markers. As he walked toward it, he saw something else: the top of Chapman's headstone was covered end to end with the coins of the Cleveland fans who'd already made the same Game 7 pilgrimage.
The story ends, naturally, with Jose fucking Mesa blowing his third save of the Series in the ninth inning. It ends with the Tribe losing, 3-2, in the eleventh, on an unearned run after an error by Tony "Feh" Fernandez on a routine ground ball to second base. It ended for me in the rocking chair in North Jersey — with my wife Lisa trying to console me. I told her the same thing I always tell her in those moments: I'm good. I'm used to this shit from a long way back. I'll wake up tomorrow morning with you next to me, a job I love, cash in my wallet, and money in the bank. You want to feel sorry for somebody? Feel for those poor fucks in Cleveland who were ready to head downtown and revel for the first time in their lives in the only joy strong and wide enough to bridge — to transcend — 50 years of collective civic misery.
***
Ray Chapman was twenty-nine when he died. He was a jug-eared kid from Beaver Dam, Kentucky, who still kept his United Mine Workers card in his wallet after eight seasons in the majors. In The Pitch That Killed, one of the greatest baseball books ever written, Mike Sowell notes that when Chapman's salary was bumped up to $3,500, Ray bought himself silk shirts and handmade suits. Pro baseball was a business then, too, far uglier in crucial ways than today: The year before Chapman died, the Black Sox had thrown the World Series. But for a poor boy born into a hardscrabble, hand-to-mouth existence, making a living by playing the game had to feel like nothing short of a miracle.
LeBron James was born into blight on the west side of Akron, and the fact that the world of professional sports had been transformed into a carnival of global scope by the time he came along hardly negates the astonishing nature of his flight to riches and glory. It happens to poor boys in other sports and from other tribes; once upon a time, Jews dominated pro boxing and basketball in America.
James did not choose to be born in Akron, and did not choose to play for the Cavs when he entered the NBA: The team tanked shamefully during the season to improve its draft position, chose him, and that was that. It never was clear that LeBron wanted to play for Cleveland in the first place, and he made plain — in word and deed — his desire to maximize his future options when his rookie contract expired and he chose to sign a three-year deal rather than four, or five, or six.
Looking back ... fuck. Fuck. Listen: I don't want to return to Ray Chapman's era. I believe in free will, free lunch, and free agency. I believe I can offer no more than an educated guess at what's in my long-fingered wife's heart, or my sweet young son's — or, frankly, my dog's. Too many days even now, pushing toward 60, I remain a stranger to myself.
What then can I read upon the stone heart of LeBron? What can I learn from the odyssey of a black kid, sprung from the loins of a teen mama, fatherless save for the seed of himself, who was a rock star at the age of 15, with girls lining up to lay naked with him just so that years later they could boast to their boyfriends that they had boffed King James?
That he's an asshole? I knew he was an asshole years before he became a free agent. The whining and ref-baiting; the tough-guy scowling and bicep flexing belied in every instance his failure to step up for a cheap-shotted teammate; his ludicrous sideline dancing in the fourth quarter of Cavs' routs: He is a hideously poor sportsman and more adept each season at acting every inch the prima donna bitch.
But despite all of that — and the Yankees cap at Jacobs Field, and the refusal to commit to a longer contract that would've relieved some of the win-now pressure on the front office, and the disillusioning up-close view of an entire organization warped to fit his whims — despite it all, he is still my asshole.
Our asshole.
I never loved Lake Erie any less when it stank of piscine death. I didn't have Chief Wahoo tattoed on my left arm in tribute to Albert Belle's integrity and Manny's mental hygiene. And I didn't have to like the Whore of Akron just to love him. His game, great as it was, was only part of our intoxication. Because he was one of us, a landsman, son of the same soil, a member of the tribe.
None of this makes LeBron's final performance against the Celtics in the 2010 playoffs — not only his play, but also his comportment — easier to explain or excuse. Quite the opposite: For fans whose bond to the spirit of Cleveland sports is a legacy dating back a century, bequeathed by a father and grandfather, it was a betrayal most profound. It was stupid and selfish enough to call attention to his elbow; had he not shot a free throw left-handed in the Bulls game, nobody outside of the team itself would have known about what was a minor injury. It was beyond stupidity and selfishness to tell the fans that they had been spoiled by his excellence. It wasn't only Clevelanders who watched LeBron James choke and quit. He brought disgrace and dishonor upon the city, and that went far past the game: It went straight to the heart and soul — his heart, his soul.
And yet, and yet, and yet, and yet. The same fans famished by decades of defeat, still so full of hope and hunger that they paid homage by the hundreds at the grave of a ballplayer few of their fathers had been alive to see play: Who among us hopes LeBron will walk away from the Cleveland Cavaliers?
***
When I left Cleveland in 1984 — I'd finished, at the age of thirty-one, a B.A. at Cleveland State University, the Harvard of Euclid Avenue, and got into the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop — I always figured I'd be back. I'd spent a year or so in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, three years in Austin in the late '70s, and always I came back to Cleveland to live. When my first wife got into medical school in Iowa after I finished my two years at the Workshop, and then into the University of Pennsylvania for her residency, I still thought of Cleveland as home, still came back for the Tribe's last series at the Stadium, for Opening Day at Jacobs Field, and for Cavs playoff games, and to watch the Indians in the World Series. Before my son, God love him, ever set foot in Yankee or Shea stadium, I took him to Cleveland to watch his first major-league baseball games.
My first feature for GQ — assigned in 1991 by the editor who's still my boss today — was the story of Kevin Mackey, the Cleveland State basketball coach who had a wife and children in Shaker Heights and a double life as an inner-city crackhead. Over and over I wrote about Cleveland and Clevelanders, and I'd go back to the city, find a room in a downtown hotel with a view of the lake, and sleep like a baby in the womb. Nobody in the city knew who I was, knew or gave a shit what I was writing or what I had written, and that was fine by me. The places I wanted most in all the world to see — the ruins of League Park, where Speaker, Ruth, and Chapman played; the art museum lagoon, where I once had pledged my love to a girl by throwing my first handgun into the muck; the softball field behind my junior high school, where I had jacked a drive to right-center field that cleared the tall fence and landed on the tennis courts beyond — all were there.
I didn't come to see people. I avoided everyone, including my mother. People wanted things from me. Cleveland gave. It wasn't nostalgia; it was plasma. It was who I was. Here was the diner where I sat over a plate of runny eggs after finally — finally — getting laid. Here was where I brought a tumbler of Jack Daniel's to my Classics in Translation final exam and, when I realized I couldn't write a fucking word in the blue book, bargained with the professor for that semester's C. Here was where I walked into drug stores with forged prescriptions and walked out with a hundred Quaaludes. Here was where I left the shoe store where I worked with the day's deposit and a stolen credit card, headed for the airport, and caught a flight to London. Here was where I walked in on some asshole who'd broken into my place to steal the drugs I was dealing and tore an ear half off his head.
***
The Catch. The Drive. The Fumble. The Shot. The Decision.
Coming to a cable channel near you.
July 8, 2010.
That morning, I get a call from cavs.com beat writer Joe Gabriele.
"Don't worry," Joe says. "He's staying."
You know that? Don't fuck with me, Joe.
"I'm just saying. You know how when he gets fouled hard he goes down and acts like he's hurt? This is the same thing — he's got everyone right where he wants them, thinking they know what he's going to do. He's going to fool them all. He's staying."
I don't believe it. I don't even believe that Joe believes it. The reporters closest to James and Maverick Carter, Chris Broussard and Stephen A. Smith, say it's going to be Miami. I believe them. And by now — I've been blogging LeBron's free-agency countdown on esquire.com and Deadspin — I'm too numb to hope, almost past caring. Almost? Never.
When showtime rolls around, I'm in the rocker. Lisa's on the couch. My son is over on Douglas Street, playing group tag — "Manhunt," they call it. I'm well-pleased with the boy. I don't want him sitting here on a summer night, watching this nonsense, don't want him to see the old man sickened and enraged one more time by my love for Cleveland sports.
When I see the footage of LeBron with the little boys and girls, I am both sickened and enraged. Idi Amin: I'm watching LeBron James, the last king of Cleveland, using children as props, as ornaments, as moral deodorant.
You want to stay, whore, stay. You want to go, whore, go. But spare us an hour of ESPN eunuchs lapping your scrotum while you void your bowels and bladder on the only fans who'll ever love you like a member of the tribe.
Or do you need this charade? Is it fun and exciting?
Nice shirt, asshole. Nice neck beard.
South Beach? When did the Heat move to South Beach?
What a grotesque and bloated parody of a man you turned out to be. Nothing but a bum. That's the mot juste: bum.
***
I watch every minute. Every second. I'm sorry it doesn't go on longer. I want to hear this narcissistic asshole refer to himself in the third person a few more times. I want to hear him calling himself a "twenty-five-year-old man" again, too. I want to hear more about the dream he had this morning, and about talking to his mama; hey, if he goes for another hour or two, he might even mention, at least once, Savannah Brinson — his high-school sweetheart and his sons' mother.
I also want another hour of live shots from Cleveland, especially the two squad cars parked, lights flashing, beneath The Banner, bulwarks against the pillaging horde. Someone needs to get on the radio and tell them that the horde left a long time ago, took its talents to the suburbs and beyond, and took with it all the disposable income and every vestige of hope.
"I'm sorry," Lisa says when it finally ends. "That was horrible."
So strange. I know this feeling in my bones — Cleveland lost — but there was no game. And this, this is worse. What the hell are they going to do? Dan Gilbert isn't going to stay in Cleveland if the team starts losing money every year. The Browns are clueless. The Indians have obliterated their entire fanbase. What's the city going to do if it starts losing teams?
"You want a handjob?" she asks.
Eh. I'm really not in the mood. I have to post something about this train wreck tomorrow, and I have to think about what to think before I can write.
"Why don't you just get your butt up on the bed?"
Yes, ma'am. God forbid that I should be the first man in human history to say no to a handjob.
***
I see a prima facie case that James contrived years ago to join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in 2010. They entered the NBA at the same time, became teammates and pals playing for Team USA in 2006, and each signed a three-year contract extension in 2007 that would enable them to become free agents together.
I also give James credit for being savvy enough to keep that option open.
Savvy is as savvy does. I discern the thumbprint of a cabal — not the tinhorn Rubber City Rube posse led by Maverick Carter, but the Creative Arts Agency, whose client list includes James, Bosh, and Wade — yet the fact is, LeBron James at age fifteen betrayed his own Akron community by taking his talents to a predominantly white Catholic high school rather than playing for Buchtel, a public school populated mainly by African Americans. It was a hugely controversial, carefully calculated move, and an early warning that his notion of loyalty was fluid rather than fixed, and utterly self-serving.
Likewise, I can argue that the Miami Heat, in the persons of Pat Riley and Dwyane Wade, are guilty of tampering, of illegal contact with James before he entered free agency, but the fact is, no major move goes down in the NBA's flesh bazaar without back-channel negotiations. That's part and parcel of the meat-peddling milieu enveloping ballers far less blessed than LeBron James as soon as they're old enough to help an AAU shaman build his stable of pimpable talent. At any level, amateur or pro, prizefighting is a less dishonest sport.
I'll take all of the above, and, above all, this: LeBron James is no naif, no victim, nobody's fool but his own. Same with Dan Gilbert, me, and every Cleveland fan above the age of consent who believed that what James said counted more than what he did. For years, James let folks far and wide know that he would be available when he became available. He saw teams strip themselves of talent for two seasons to gain enough payroll space to woo him. He bade them parade to Cleveland in their suits, while he wore shorts and a T-shirt to the meetings where they trotted out their PowerPoint charts and pleaded for his favor. James didn't make them beg; he let them. And no other franchise or city groveled like poor Cleveland and the Cavaliers; none had so much to lose.
In the end, Pat Riley brought what money can't buy — a bag full of his championship rings, in silver, in gold, in platinum — shoved it across the table to LeBron, and said, "Hey, try one on."
***
The Catch. The Drive. The Fumble. The Shot. The Decision.
One of these things does not belong. One of these things was an evil man's willful act, and worse. The Whore of Akron knows full well he has stomped on Cleveland's soul.
He doesn't care. To care, he would need a soul of his own — a soul and a sense of good and evil.
Just sports? Fine, so it's not war, or plague, or famine. But evil doesn't get a pass just because it hasn't literally murdered the innocent.
I am ready to give up, to write off the season past as a romp in sports journalism fantasy camp. I've seen enough: enough defeat, enough behind-the-curtain ugliness, enough civic suffering. I can't help the Cavs or Cleveland or myself. So I won't live to see another champion; so I'll die a froth-mouthed fan: So what? Enough.
Then, inside me, something shakes awake. Overnight.
It is not merely Dan Gilbert's letter to Cavs fans, a Comic Sans yowl of betrayal, mingling scorn, curse, and random syntax to near-Wagnerian effect.
It is not merely the Heat's welcome party for the Big 3, an event that resembles nothing so much as Saturday night at the Crazy Horse, with Stormy, Windy, and Princess each riding her own pole.
It is not merely the communal lap dance that follows, with the Whore of Akron telling the Miami mob that winning will be so easy that Pat Riley can suit up and play point guard, that he, King James, has come to deliver championship after championship — not four, not five, not six, not seven — on and on and until his braggartry is washed under by the roar of a sea of sun-baked cretins who fancy themselves fans.
It is all these things, and it is more than all these things; my debt to Cleveland — to all who suffer as I suffer — has come due.
What the hell. I'm taking my talents to South Beach too.
***
Excerpted from The Whore of Akron: One Man's Search for the Soul of LeBron James, on sale November 15 from HarperCollins.
Born in Cleveland, Scott Raab first earned notice outside of law-enforcement circles for his GQ articles in the mid-1990s. A regular with Esquire since 1997, he is best known for celebrity interviews delivered in his trademark off-the-cuff style. A self-described "fat Jew from Cleveland," he has since settled in New Jersey out of necessity, but he keeps his heart in a meat locker at Slyman's deli here in town.
Re: Cleveland Cavaliers
Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2011 2:06 am
by TFIR
Lockout talks end; Clock to remain stopped
5 Comments
By Chris Sheridan
November 10, 2011 at 11:32 PM
NEW YORK – The clock remains stopped, and it will stay that way until the early part of next week — and perhaps even longer.
Eventually, we will learn whether there will be a 72-game season beginning Dec. 15, or a nuclear winter for the NBA.
“”We have made our revised proposal, and we’re not planning to make another one. There’s nothing left to negotiate about,” commissioner David Stern said after the sides met for another 10 1/2 hours Thursday.
Stern would not characterize his proposal as a “best and final offer,” although it sounded as though that was the case. The sides agreed to wait until a meeting is held among the union’s 30 player representatives on Monday or Tuesday to discuss the new offer on the table.
If the player reps agree to put the proposal forward for a vote, it would likely take another several days to have players physically assemble in one spot to cast their votes.
Bottom line: Another week of waiting.
“We moved as far as we could move, and so now we are at where we’re at. And I’m optimistic that the NBA owners will approve it if the union approves it, and we await a response from the union. We’ve done our best,” Stern said. “We both recognize the seriousness of what we are facing. I think both sides would like to start the season Dec. 15, and we’ve done the best we can to make that happen.”
Deputy commissioner Adam Silver said the owners made several tweaks to their earlier proposal that would create “a more robust market for free agents.”
Previously, the union objected to restrictions that would be placed on teams over the salary cap threshold, preventing them from offering the full mid-level exception of $5 million and prohibiting them from executing sign-and-trade deals.
“It’s not the greatest proposal in the world, but I have an obligation to at least present it to the membership, and that’s what I’m going to do. Then we’ll collectively decide what it is we should do,” union director Billy Hunter said.
If the players reps reject the offer, Stern said the owners would revert to an earlier offer under which they would be asking for 53 percent of revenues and a flex-cap system similar to the NHL’s system.
Re: Cleveland Cavaliers
Posted: Tue Nov 22, 2011 2:18 pm
by rusty2
LeBron James opens up in London
November, 21, 2011
NOV 21
11:38
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By Brian Windhorst
ESPN.com
Archive
AP Photo/Tim Hales
LeBron James spoke candidly about his 'Decision,' his legacy and Cavs owner Dan Gilbert.
LeBron James does not give many one-on-one in-depth interviews. It fact, it almost never happens. There are a number of reasons for it, ranging from the demand to time to public relations to personal reasons. This is usually true overseas as well; James regularly conducts controlled media sessions in China.
Last week, however, James sat for a lengthy discussion with The Guardian’s Donald McRae in London. It was a promotional stop for James, a Nike event at the London School for Basketball. Kobe Bryant visited there last year. England is almost completely devoid of basketball journalists and James’ profile there has increased recently only because he’s taken a fractional ownership stake in the soccer club Liverpool as part of a larger business deal earlier this year. In a display of just how different James’ popularity is in England from the rest the world, The Guardian waited eight days to publish the interview.
McRae was able to get some insightful answers from James. Some revealed some thoughts James had not talked about before. Several excerpts stood out:
Q: Did you feel vindicated by the way that Dan Gilbert responded (to Decision)?
A: I didn't need that to vindicate my decision. I think Dan Gilbert was talking out of anger. And I don't take anything personal. As a professional athlete a lot is going to be said about you – but I just try to move forward and try to achieve my goals.
Q: You've been quoted as saying it's not impossible you could play for Cleveland again?
A: It's not impossible [smiling].
Q: But unlikely?
A: It's not impossible [laughs]. I still love the city. I have so many great memories of all those fans – so it's not impossible.
When James previously had been asked about Gilbert’s infamous letter – in the last such interview he did over a year ago with GQ – he said “You will see the light of people when they hit adversity. You'll get a good sense of their character. Me and my family have seen the character of that man.”
Gilbert and James obviously have a complex relationship, both before and after his time in Cleveland. There’s still plenty of tension. The two were in the same room for several hours recently during a negotiating session in New York. One observer said James would not look at Gilbert. In this interview, James seems to have moved past some of the animosity. Not that the two will be sending holiday cards.
On the seemingly far flung notion that he might return to the Cavs someday, James has been consistent on this issue. He has always left the door open, much in the same way he always left the door open that he might not re-sign with the Cavs when he was asked in the two-year build up to his free agency.
Q:Great players before you, from Magic Johnson to Larry Bird to Michael Jordan, all seem to have said that they would never have wanted to team up with their rivals.
A: Right, right.
Q: Do you think their argument has no substance - because the game has changed so much?
A: Um, well I believe that when Magic was drafted to the Lakers he had Kareem and, as the team was built, James Worthy was part of that team, as was Jamaal Wilkes, and Bob McAdoo so he had four Hall of Famers right there on his team. And Jordan went through his bumps and bruises coming up with Chicago but they were eventually able to draft Scottie Pippen and then they got Horace Grant – two great players – and then they got Dennis Rodman – another Hall of Famer. So that team was built for Jordan. Same with Larry Bird. He had Kevin McHale, Robert Parish, Danny Ainge – all great players. And eventually Bill Walton went to the Celtics. So I know the history of the game. Individuals get a lot of the spotlight. But there's never just been one individual who has done it by himself. You can go all the way back to when Oscar Robinson dominated at a high level and he was averaging triple-doubles season after season. But it was not until he teamed up with Kareem that he was able to win a championship. Same thing goes with Jerry West. Not a lot of people know that Jerry West went to the finals nine times and lost the first eight times. He won it at his ninth try.
Now this is the answer James probably should’ve given the night the Finals ended and not saying "At the end of the day, all of the people that were rooting for me to fail, tomorrow they'll have to wake up and have the same life they had before they woke up today. They got the same personal problems they had today and I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things I want to do.”
James instantly regretted that quote, which was said rather clearly as a defense mechanism in the moments after one of the most bitter defeats of his life. The next day he tried to take it back but it was too late. With months to reflect by now, James combines eloquence and a sense of history to continue to express his thinking leading up to his decision.
Coming to that decision created such a wave of reaction with many questions about James’ methodology. It took him months to start to articulate his thought process and make it public. It started the night the Heat beat the Celtics in the playoffs when James said:
"I knew deep down in my heart, as much as I loved my teammates back in Cleveland and as much as I loved home, I knew it couldn't do it by myself against that team. The way it panned out with all the friends and family and the fans back home, I apologize for the way it happened. I knew this opportunity was once in a lifetime. To be able to come down here and pair with two guys and this organization -- in order for me to move on with my career, that team that we just defeated, we had to go through them."
James goes further with The Guardian, referencing how much history played a role with his choice to join up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh. He also talks about two players he seems to truly relate to, continuing to offer an in-depth window into his mindset.
Robertson had some of the best statistics in history but waited until his 11th season -- five of which he didn’t even make the playoffs -- before getting a title with the Milwaukee Bucks. The West comparison is new and telling. Now eight years into his career with the ninth season in doubt, James is clearly feeling his legacy.
In a way, this is a defense mechanism too. It is James bringing up all-time greats and comparing their individual histories to his own. It’s a valid point, a response to critics and a personal buttress all in one swoop. It may be just an answer to a question to an interview but James has clearly thought about this prickly topic.
Q: When you met Pat Riley, before deciding to join Miami, and he showed you the Championship rings he had won, was that a key moment?
A: Definitely. It was a great moment. I know the history of the game so I knew how many rings he has won as a coach and how he was a player at Kentucky – and all those other intangibles that go with a great career like he's had. But what made me a really big believer in the team and the franchise was the fact that they talk a lot about family. They take care of their guys and it's not just all about winning. That was a huge thing for me.
There have been both veiled and direct references to potential tampering by the Heat before James became a free agent. There were reports of clandestine meetings and the like. There is little doubt that the most important factor was Wade selling James on joining him and doing it in Miami, not in Chicago or anywhere else. Even Wade, he has told friends, was surprised James actually pulled the trigger on it. Regardless, James has referenced his official meeting with the Heat and its importance several times over the last year.
The Heat were the third team to meet with James on the morning of the second day. Their entourage arrived nearly an hour before James did on that morning and Riley paced the halls of James’ Cleveland offices preparing himself for the sale. Heat coach Erik Spoelstra talked, owner Micky Arison went to the extreme measure of wearing a suit and tie, and Alonzo Mourning cried.
But Riley’s move of pulling out his title rings and putting them on the table resonated with James then and apparently continues to this day.
