But while I'm ecstatic for basketball season to get underway, I am already so freaking tired of hearing the name "LeBron James". For the two seasons prior, all we have heard about is "oh boy, LeBron's free agency is finally coming up, I wonder where he's going to go?" Speculation ranged from his saving the basketball Mecca that is New York City, to joining the laughingstock Los Angeles Clippers (where he would forge a battle for LA basketball supremacy with Kobe Bryant), and seemingly thousands of other scenarios in between.
If I ever leave Pro Sports, I'm going to announce it on an hour-long TV special. Maybe on the old Friday Show or something.
Once James and his old team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, were eliminated from the post-season by the Celtics in the Eastern Conference semi-finals, the media furor around "King James" soared to heights previously unimaginable. Even while the NBA playoffs were continuing on, the LeBron Watch became a daily segment on almost all ESPN programming. He even got his own section on ESPN's scrolling bottom line, which is generally reserved for daily scores and other sports news that's actually happening that day.
This all led up to July 8, when LeBron finally announced his plans for this coming season. In an hour-long special title called "The Decision", which featured studio analysts and all sorts of other quirks, James announced that he would be "taking his talents to South Beach". Thus, he would be joining up with incumbent superstar Dwayne Wade, as well as fellow free-agent signee Chris Bosh. Much of the hype dating back to previous months was the possibility of several marquee-free agents-to-be joining forces with one another, creating somewhat of a superteam.
In the aftermath of "The Decision", LeBron was blasted in a variety a ways, from all sorts of angles. The majority of negative sentiment towards James stemmed from his decision to announce on national TV that he would be leaving his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers. Could he really be so narcissistic to stab an entire city in the back on a grand stage, a city which had showed him nothing but support and adoration for the first 7 seasons of his career?
The next wave of negativity came from LeBron's plan to join up with other superstars, rather than to compete against them and win championships. This is where I personally turned against LeBron. Since his high school days, we've been hearing about how LeBron has a chance to be the greatest basketball player of all-time. Not just a chance, but that it was an inevitability. He was supposed to be not just the next Michael Jordan, but better than Jordan. And for awhile, it seemed like he very well could be on his way to at the very least coming into the same galaxy as His Airness.
Think Michael Jordan joins up with Patrick Ewing and Charles Barkley back in the 90's?
Here's where the problem lies: Michael Jordan didn't run from his challenges as LeBron did. MJ won his titles, more or less, as the only elite player on his team. Sure, he had plenty of talent around him. Scottie Pippen, Horace Grant, Dennis Rodman to name a few of his sidekicks. But MJ won 6 NBA titles as the only truly "elite" player on his team. And it took him until his 7th year in the league, when he was still a young 28 years of age. LeBron's decision to join up with other superstars Wade and Bosh is very much a cowardly one. Believe it or not, LeBron doesn't turn 26 until December of this coming season. Is one supposed to believe that at such a young age, LeBron had to wave the proverbial white flag and acknowledge that he could not win a title without the help of not one, but two other superstars?
As Jordan himself said, he never would have joined up with his rivals. He, along with retired NBA superstars Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Charles Barkley, to name a few, echoed in the notion that they were too busy concentrating on beating their rivals rather than forming alliances with them.
The final and most important point as to why LeBron's decision will hurt his legacy in the long run is that the team he joined, the Heat, is by no means "his" team. Dwayne Wade has been the Heat's marquee player, crunch-time scorer, face of the franchise-guy for the past 7 seasons. Are we supposed to believe that LeBron's arrival is going to diminish those responsibilities for Wade?
Like it or not, LeBron is now a sidekick. Perhaps the greatest sidekick of all-time, but a sidekick nonetheless. And that is why in infuriates me that ESPN is devoting so much of its coverage of NBA training camps on LeBron, where he really isn't even going to utilized as the best player on his own team. The two-time reigning MVP, his numbers are almost certain to be reduced sharing responsibilities with Wade and Bosh.
LeBron did indeed have a chance to become the greatest player of all-time. It's really a damn shame that we were deprived of the rest of the journey.
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