Posts tagged lebron
The NBA/The All Star Game/More Bill Simmons
2 Separate items.
I never thought the 1987 NBA All-Star Game could be topped. On its 20th anniversary, my retroactive running diary included this paragraph:
“For the love of God, LOOK at those lineups again. You had Magic and Bird in their absolute primes. You had MJ during the season when he won the dunk contest, averaged 37 a game and put himself on the map as The Next Great Guy. You had Barkley and Hakeem in their breakout seasons. You had Isiah, McHale, Parish, Worthy and Nique at their absolute peaks. You had Moses, Kareem, English, Cheeks and Walter Davis with something left in the tank. You had Doctor J in his final All-Star appearance. You had six guys who ended up making the NBA’s ‘Top 50’ list on the bench to start the game. You had John Stockton, Joe Dumars, Patrick Ewing, Fat Lever, Clyde Drexler, Terry Cummings, Sidney Moncrief and Karl Malone watching from home because THEY WEREN’T GOOD ENOUGH TO BE INVITED. Will we ever see anything approaching this again? I say no.”
Fast-forward 24 years: Thanks to a talent boon and modern science extending the primes of players who should have been more washed up than the “Fockers” franchise by now, next month’s All-Star Game will absolutely approach “this.” We won’t see three of the best five players ever at their peaks or soon-to-be-peaks, but put it this way: The great Tim Duncan is looming as the worst All-Star on a 2011 team. That’s when I’m forced to break one of my steadfast rules (“Never waste a column on All-Star selections”) and break this baby down.
Here we go …
Q: You’re really wasting a column on this? When was the last time anyone truly cared about the NBA All-Star Game?
A: I’ve attended every All-Star Weekend since 2004 but skipped Sunday’s game three of those times. Why? I’m old enough to remember when the game mattered. I hate watching half-assed basketball. I hate seeing something potentially meaningful be squandered. Ideally, the game should showcase the league’s biggest stars, entertain its fans and take something of a snapshot of that specific season.
Who is that season’s alpha dog? Which players absolutely have to play at crunch time? Which young guys have vaulted into The Discussion? Which older guys are fading from The Discussion? Which guys have a game that translates into any situation, and conversely, which guys wouldn’t be that fun to play with?
So why hasn’t the game been doing that? Our last meaningful one happened in 2001, when a new generation of franchise guys tried to seize control of the post-Jordan era. All of them were looking for the upper hand like Marlo after Avon went to the clink. Kobe wanted to show that he wasn’t just riding Shaq’s coattails. Ex-teammates Vince and T-Mac wanted to prove they didn’t need each other. Duncan, C-Webb and Garnett were vying for the “Best Power Forward Alive” crown; same for Kidd and Payton and the “Best Point Guard Alive” title. Iverson wanted to show everyone that the league now belonged to him. Marbury and Allen wanted to prove they were franchise guys. Throw in the magic of Chocolate City (that year’s host), and everyone went hard. Iverson won the MVP; Kobe emerged as the West’s crunch-time alpha dog; and in the fourth quarter, the East erased a 21-point deficit and ended up winning thanks to two gigantic 3-pointers from … (wait for it) … Stephon Marbury!
Ten years later, the box score doubles as a snapshot of the ensuing decade: The West was almost comically loaded; the East had waaaaaaaaaay too much riding on Iverson, Marbury, McGrady, Allen and Jermaine O’Neal; and there just weren’t enough up-and-coming stars. It’s no wonder the league swooned from 2002 to 2007. The All-Star Game teaches us more than you’d think. This year, it’s going to teach us that the league is obscenely loaded right now.
Dustin (NY)
Most likely to throw a crippling INT this week? Mark Sanchez or Jay Cutler?
Bill Simmons (12:18 PM)
I’d say Cutler - he’ll throw you at least 2 a game, you just have to hold onto them. That was Seattle’s biggest misfire last week, dropping the goal line INT he gave them. KC Joyner did a nice job of breaking down Cutler’s possible flimsiness this week (Insider only): http://insider.espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs/2010/insider/columns/story?columnist=joyner_kc&id=6038319
The Summer of Lebron
Well folks, I’ve let you down. Big time this week. Lots going on. Here go a couple quick reads, and we’ll try and regroup moving forward.
GQ’s September 2010 Profile of The King: 3 Weeks in Crazyville
He can imagine, he says, playing for Cleveland again one day. Did I hear him right? Cleveland? “If there was an opportunity for me to return,” he says, “and those fans welcome me back, that’d be a great story.” Cleveland…Ohio? Where fans at this very moment are burning his jerseys? Where fans are selling toilet paper made from his jerseys? “Maybe the ones burning my jersey,” he says, “were never LeBron fans anyway.”
*****
So begins J.R. Moehringer’s surprising, insightful, and compulsively readable journey into Camp LeBron during the days and hours leading up to the PR train wreck that was The Decision. At a time when James was being obsessively shielded from the world by his team of handlers, Moehringer had unprecedented inside access: a pair of face-to-face meetings shortly before The Decision and a follow-up phone call six days after the fact. During that postmortem interview, when Moehringer asked James what he’d change if he had a do-over, James replied, “Nothing at all.” Bottom line: LeBron doesn’t really care how it went down. He knows he made the right decision, Moehringer writes, and so do the people around him. “They’re happy to see my happy. That’s what they can see in my face. They say, ‘It’s been awhile since we’ve seen you look like that.’ “
Other highlights:
• James on how a kid could from Akron, located only thirty minutes from Cleveland, could grow up rooting for Chicago and Jordan: “It’s not far, but it is far. And Clevelanders, because they were the bigger-city kids when we were growing up, looked down on us.… So we didn’t actually like Cleveland. We hated Cleveland growing up. There’s a lot of people in Cleveland we still hate to this day.”
• James on Cavs owner Dan Gilbert: “I don’t think he ever cared about LeBron. My mother always told me: ‘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.” He went on to say that Gilbert’s post-Decision screed “made me feel more comfortable that I made the right decision.”
• James on Charles Barkley, who’s been hyper-critical of James’s decision to share the limelight—and the scoring burden—with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami: “Charles was probably trying to be funny. It wasn’t funny to me.”
Must Read: Inside look at LeBron’s free-agent coup
I am reading it now myself, but it’s a Wojnarowski expose (I have no accented “e” on my keyboard) on LBJ.
From Team USA coach Mike Krzyzewski to managing director Jerry Colangelo to NBA elders, the issue of James’ immaturity and downright disrespectfulness had become a consuming topic on the march to the Olympics. The course of history could’ve changed dramatically, because there was a real risk that James wouldn’t be brought to Beijing based on fears his monumental talents weren’t worth the daily grind of dealing with him.
When the mandate had been to gather these immense egos and get the NBA’s greatest players to fit into a program, no one had a more difficult time meshing into the framework than James. Other players made it a point to learn the names of staffers and modestly go about their business without barking orders and brash demands.
No one could stand James as a 19-year-old in the 2004 Athens Olympics, nor the 2006 World Championships. Officials feared James could become the instigator of everything they wanted to rid themselves for the ’08 Olympics. For as gifted as James was, Krzyzewski and Colangelo subscribed to a belief that with Kobe Bryant joining the national team in 2007, they could win a gold medal in ’08 with or without LeBron James. Behind the scenes, officials had taken to calling James’ inner circle, “The Enablers.” No one ever told him to grow up. No one ever challenged him. And yet, James was still a powerful pull for his teammates, and everyone had to agree they could no longer let his bossy and belittling act go unchecked. These weren’t the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Team USA wasn’t beholden to him.
Dwyane Wade's World Trade Center Reference And Other Great Moments In 9/11 Sports Analogies
Oh Dear. The Heat Experiment is off with a bang.
Dwyane Wade’s questionable World Trade Center reference he gave to Fanhouse briefly set off hyper-sensitivity alarms everywhere, but it wasn’t even that awful compared to some of the other ones we’ve seen recently.
After the quote was sent up to the replay booth for review, it turns out there was a breakdown in the Fanhouse machine which resulted in a transcription error. Here’s the less retarded version:
“We’re going to be wearing a bullseye. But that’s what you play for,” Wade said. “We enjoy the bullseye. Plus, there’s going to be times when we lose 2-3 games in a row, and it seems like the world has crashed down. You all are going to make it seem like the World Trade is coming down again, but it’s not going to be nothing but a couple basketball games.
Much better, but still icky for some people. Before the shame-shaming became completely out of control, Wade felt obligated to issue this apology:
In an interview yesterday, I attempted to explain how some people may view the Miami Heat losing a few basketball games in a row during the upcoming season. It appears that my reference to the World Trade Center has been either inaccurately reported or taken completely out of context. I was simply trying to say that losing a few basketball games should not be compared to a real catastrophe. While it was certainly not my intention, I sincerely apologize to anyone who found my reference to the World Trade Center to be insensitive or offensive.”
Did LeBron Get Played? Game Theory and the Big 3
One last rumination on LeBron (for now). c/o the monkey cage.
We’ll probably never know what exactly went down between Dwayne Wade, Chris Bosh, and LeBron James as they made their final decisions about where to play next year, but according to the media, it was certainly all LeBron all the time. But what about the other two - what kind of effect did they have on the outcome? This reminded me of something John Huber once said at a conference - that he liked formal modeling because it gave him a chance to understand interactions that he would never actually be able to observe. So with that in mind, consider my very modest attempt at asking what game theory might have to say about the end of the King James saga.
Consider a simple game with three players (no pun intended!) who all have to choose where to play basketball next year. They can each choose to stay in their own city or move to the city of another player. (So for the moment we leave out the option of them all going to New York or Chicago for simplicity’s sake, but I think the logic still holds fine if we expand the number of destinations.) The players get utility from the following four factors:
- the money they are paid in salary
- the chance to win a championship
- the quality of life in the city in which you choose to live
- not being perceived as a villain
Let’s now assume the following
- All three were going to get roughly the same salary no matter where they signed
- The chances of winning a championship increases monotonically the more of the big 3 sign in the same place for those who sign there (ie., probability of winning a championship is highest if you sign with both of the other three, which is greater than then if you sign with one of them, which in turn is greater than if you don’t sign with either of them). As a corollary, the chances of winning a championship decrease if two of the big 3 sign in one place for the one person who signs elsewhere.
- One gets perceived as a villain for abandoning one’s current team, but this “villain penalty” increases (1) if you originally grew up in the region of the team you are playing for and (2) the more you say “well, I might stay - I just don’t know.” To put this another way, LeBron will pay the biggest “villain” penalty and Bosh - who made no secret of his desire to get out of Toronto - will pay the lowest. (Note: For those who care about these sorts of things, we could also call this the A-Rod effect, who still gets booed in Seattle to this day.)
I’m also going to go out on a limb and assume the quality of life in Miami is higher than in Cleveland or Toronto for our young stars (and especially so for Wade and Bosh - LeBron maybe a little less so because of friends and family in Cleveland).
OK, so where does this get us from the perspective of Wade? His top preference is to stay in Miami (no villain penalty, best quality of life) with Bosh and LeBron joining him (highest chance of winning championship). His decision gets more difficult as Bosh and Lebron go elsewhere, and especially if they go elsewhere together.
What about Bosh? He clearly revealed from statements leading up to the free agency period that he was willing to pay the “villain” penalty to gain the quality of life benefit of being somewhere else. So in our simple game, he too prefers Miami (higher quality of life than Cleveland, given he wants out of Toronto), and he prefers to be there with Wayde and LeBron. Again, things get more difficult for him only when the “championship” option looks better elsewhere, especially if Wade and LeBron both go somewhere else together.
Which brings us to LeBron. He is going to be pay a heavy “villain penalty” for leaving Cleveland. If that penalty is sufficient enough to outweigh the benefit of living in Miami vs. Cleveland, then he would likely prefer to be in Cleveland with Bosh and Wade joining him there. (Plus, remember LeBron’s quality of life benefit from Miami is probably lower than the other two.) Indeed, he might prefer to stay in Cleveland even without Bosh and Wade provided those two remain in separate cities. Where things become more difficult for him is if Bosh and Wade both go to the same place outside of Cleveland - this then makes the difference in the probability of winning a championship between joining them (highest chance, all 3 in one place) and staying put (lowest chance: he’s in a different city and the other two are in the same city) the largest it could be, the making the cost of staying in Cleveland the highest it could be.
So here’s the question: what do you do if you are Wade and Bosh and you want to achieve your most preferred outcome (ie., all three in Miami)? Once LeBron makes his decision, you simply solve for the highest utility, balancing playing with LeBron vs. quality of life vs. the villain penalty. However, if you can make your decision before LeBron, then perhaps you can influence Lebron’s choice, especially if you have an idea how much Lebron values winning a championship.
Thus the optimal strategy for Bosh and Wade, I think, is both should credibly commit to going to Miami before Lebron makes his decision. This puts the maximum possible pressure on LeBron to come to Miami. Now all of the sudden, Lebron is making his decision with complete information: if he sufficiently values the chance to win a championship, he has to come to Miami also. Whereas if LeBron makes his decision first, he might choose to go to Cleveland on the expectation that there is at least some non-trivial chance that Wade and Bosh will join him there.
So this leads to the interesting question: by allowing Bosh and Wade to make their decisions first, did LeBron possibly get himself into a situation where he ended up with a sub-optimal outcome? If so, it would certainly put that ESPN special in a whole new light - not just obnoxious, but possibly even counter-productive. By committing himself to a specific timetable - and remember, the demands of the ESPN show called for absolute secrecy regarding his decision - he gave Wade and Bosh a chance to both (1) move first and (2) have a little time to think through the strategic value of moving first. So in the end, the need for the King to play to the public may have led to the King himself getting played - surely not the first time in history this has happened!
New Simmons:Welcome to the All-LeBron sound-off
That didn’t take long. More funny/sad/insightful reaction to LeBron. Or as Simmons calls it, the LeBacle.
LeBron.
::shakes head:::
I haven’t see a hand overplayed this badly since MacArthur crossed the 38th parallel. Best excerpt below (h/t Adam).
We are already fools for caring about athletes considerably more than they care about us. We know this, and we do it anyway. We just like sports. We keep watching for moments like Donovan’s goal against Algeria, and we keep caring through thick and thin for moments like Roberts’ Steal and Tracy Porter’s interception. We put up with all the sobering stuff because that’s the price you pay — for every Gordon Hayward half-court shot, or USA-Canada gold-medal game, there are 20 Michael Vicks and Ben Roethlisbergers. Last night didn’t make me like sports any less — my guard has been up since 1996 — it just reinforced all the things I already didn’t like.
For LeBron not to understand what he was doing — or even worse, not to care — made me quickly turn off the television, find my kids, give them their nightly bath and try to forget the sports atrocity that I had just witnessed. He just couldn’t have handled it worse. Never in my life can I remember someone swinging from likable to unlikable that quickly. I will forgive him some day because I like watching him play basketball, and whether you’re rooting for or against him, his alliance with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami created one the greatest “Holy s—-, how is this going to play out?????” scenarios in recent sports history. Sports are supposed to be fun, and eventually, this will become fun — for everyone but people in Cleveland — because we finally have a Yankees of basketball.
But I will never, ever, not in a million years, understand why it had to play out that way. If LeBron James is the future of sports, then I shudder for the future.
James to Miami - Reader Recap and Opinion
Who are we kidding. Today is LBJ response day. Also, this may be the first time LeBron has ever been hit with the “unforgivable” tag on the scrambler.
Haven’t decided yet whether I’m down w/the heat. “I have to sleep on it”.
Reader Scott……
First, if you ever doubt the emotion and drive that exists with professional sports, read this letter from Cavs majority owner Dan Gilbert.
http://www.nba.com/cavaliers/news/gilbert_letter_100708.html
Secondly, a thought occurred to me yesterday. While this free agency period is certainly unprecedented, it is surprising to me that this hasn’t happened before. Let me explain the reasons why I think this.
The reasons why are simple: for highly coveted commodities, a free market allows the price to be determined by demand. Therefore rice is less expensive than diamonds, and LeBron James makes more money than me. Shocking, I know. When a commodity’s value is fixed (max contract), the interested parties shift from a ‘bid’ mentality to a ‘pitch’ mentality. James simply had all the power in this negotiation, and he knew it. If you think back to Kobe’s free agency a few years ago, he could have easily pulled some shenanigans like this, but since he was largely known at the time as ‘The guy who drove Phil and Shaq out of LA,’ fewer teams were lining up. Say what you will about LBJ having this ESPN special, this was an unprecedented opportunity to promote his brand, his charity of choice, his management team, and foster a favorable relationship with the primary media carrier in his industry. Eliminate basketball from the equation, and isn’t this a no-brainer?
So why not? All of the reasons that I’ve heard have to do with his legacy (this is Wade’s team, not LBJ’s, etc.), his relationship with fans, his contract (he’s taking less money to play in Miami), and his supposed ‘quitting’ on the city of Cleveland. These things have NOTHING to do with James’ goals: to win NBA Championships, to promote the LeBron James brand, and to become the NBA’s first billionaire. If you judge it by those criteria all together, it’s hard to say he made the wrong decision. However, if it was based ONLY on loyalty (Cavs), global status (Knicks), or the best chance to win (Bulls) he definitely made the wrong decision.
From a fan’s perspective, I’ll use a comparison that my roommate provided: the only other athlete who would do something like this is A-Rod….draw your own opinions.
Also, great moments in Comic Sans history:
And this is just sad. Cleveland’s heart (and face) were just removed.
From the Cleveland Plain-Dealer
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