“Michael got better after his first championship, and so I think the same thing happens for LeBron. … It’s going to be LeBron-mania like we’ve never seen before.” — Magic Johnson
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The kid from Akron, Ohio is a world champion, the NBA regular season and Finals MVP, and indisputably the best basketball player on the planet. LeBron James has achieved this at the age of 27, a few months younger than Michael Jordan was when Jordan won his first title. But LeBron got his without the benefit of an all-time great head coach like Phil Jackson, without the benefit of anything like the three years Jordan had at the University of North Carolina under the legend Dean Smith, and without the benefit of a family structure that was remotely as functional as Jordan’s.
LeBron got his by way of a legendary playoff run in which his singular talent allowed the Miami Heat to rip through a favored Oklahoma City Thunder team to win a title without anyone playing the center position, redefining what a championship team looks like. In doing so, he completely destroyed the notion that he’s anyone’s “sidekick,” and put an end to hysterical speculation about whether a fatal character flaw would keep him from ever becoming an NBA champion. He won with force, and grace and class. He won after picking himself up from a spectacular failure in last year’s Finals and taking a hard look at himself and his game.
After winning the title last night, LeBron looks as much as ever like a man who’s poised to realize his potential as the greatest to ever play the game, and looks smarter than ever for having left the Cleveland Cavaliers to do it.
Even setting aside the complete impossibility of anyone leading the Cavs to a title as long as Chief Wahoo’s curse is in effect, the failures of the Cavaliers front office during James’s tenure in Cleveland have been firmly established in the LeBron narrative. The Associated Press reports as a plain fact in its recap of last night’s game that, “few who watched the Cavs fail to assemble championship talent around [James] could have argued with his desire to depart.”
And now even fewer can argue with LeBron’s desire to leave the Cavaliers, thanks to the perspective this Heat title provides as to the complete thundering insanity of Dan Gilbert’s infamous post-Decision guarantee that the Cavs would win a championship before LeBron would.
Now is a great time to go back and look again at how thunderingly insanely stupid Gilbert’s letter was. Then go ahead and give the Cavs owner the maximum benefit of the doubt. Assume the disappointment (if not surprise) of the moment gave him the longest leash possible to get caught up in emotion and say something he shouldn’t have said. But even still, there had to have been something about Gilbert’s worldview that told him there was some reasonable possibility that the Cavs — who have been one of the very worst teams in the NBA for the last two years and are nowhere near winning a championship by any remotely objective assessment — could actually win one before LeBron did. So how thoroughly warped did Gilbert’s understanding of the components of his basketball team have to be for this to be the case? How thoroughly warped was his estimation of LeBron, or his understanding of what an NBA championship team looks like?
Seven years in Cleveland, and while Cavs fans had to argue about whether it was Mo Williams, Anderson Varejao or Delonte West who was the best teammate Gilbert’s front office ever found for LeBron, Gilbert himself was busy running the most expensive election campaign in Ohio history so he could get a license to build (another) money trap for poor people and idiots. This is the guy who guaranteed the Cavs would win before LeBron did, and whose initial response to LeBron’s victory was to publish a staggeringly dishonest lie about how he enjoyed LeBron’s title run, and completely ignore that he ever made the insane guarantee at all, despite that he derived so much benefit from it.
Why would anyone with LeBron’s talents trust any significant part of his legacy to a guy like this? Anyway, Gilbert owes us $850 million and it’s time for him to pay up.
Along with Gilbert’s debt, something else that should be put to rest is the idea that LeBron took an improper shortcut to a championship by teaming up with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh by way of free agency. Basketball at the world’s highest level is a billion dollar business, not a night of pick up at the Y. You play to win the game, and just a quick look at NBA history, including the Thunder team the Heat had to beat for the title, shows that every great championship-caliber team is stacked with All-Star quality players. Magic, Bird and Jordan all played with multiple Hall of Famers, and for Hall of Fame head coaches. The main difference between these teams and LeBron’s Heat is that LeBron didn’t sit around to wait and hope that Gilbert could divert enough attention from his other pursuits to help surround LeBron with what even the greatest player would need to win an NBA title. LeBron took control of his own talents and destiny in an unprecedented way, and did it himself. By any decent worldview, this is progress, and exactly what you’d want your own children to do, as much as you might be disappointed that they weren’t able to figure out how to do it in Cleveland.
So the kid from Akron is a world champ, indisputably the best basketball player on the planet, and poised to realize his potential as the greatest to ever play the game. If you’re from Northeast Ohio and can’t take some pleasure in the fact that this kind of greatness came from your own backyard, you should at least be able to understand that it’s a perfectly fine thing that many people in your backyard can and will; The same backyard that helped raise LeBron James, when so much could have gone wrong for him had the community not been there.
The kid from Akron is a world champ, and as poised as anyone on earth has ever been to become the greatest player to ever play the game of basketball.
Go Seattle Supersonics, as well. Sometimes sports can be really fucking great. Peace and giant catapults for everybody. Wow.
