Or fans that grew up with the team and stuck by them when they were terrible, when the immortal Stump Merril was managing them.
As a Pacers fan, I don’t hate the Heat. I pretty much agree with markdash. Now the Dallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins on the other hand, I hate those teams with the heat of a thousand suns.
Eh, gonzo was being facetious.
Anyway, I think that in the brave new media world, being hated is even better than being loved, ratings-wise, so the Heat are getting a lot of attention, and advertisers are happy.
Yeah, I’m a middle-aged white guy, and southern, to boot, and it’s perfectly OK to throw insults, racist remarks and assume negative stereotypes on me all day long, and I’d better like it, because as the face of oppression ( :rolleyes: ), I deserve every bit of it, and if I say anything about it, I’m the illegitimate offspring of Adolf Fucking Hitler.
My, aren’t we pouty today.
I am an alum of a very northern University and on our message board, the middle aged midwestern white guys can’t stand LeBron either. It’s not racial, by the way, they all love Kevin Durant and Blake Griffin.
Feel free to act all persecuted, though, you guys are very good at that.
Celtics radio announcer Johnny Most (OK, the most outrageous homer any media man could ever be, but we loved him) called Rick Mahorn and Jeff Ruland “McFilthy and McNasty”.
Especially that Laimbeer guy. He was the poster boy for squeaky clean all-American basketball player.
THe 1986 Mets were pretty much hated everywhere as an obnoxious group of drug addicts and criminals. When Sports Illustrated’s Jeff Pearlman wrote a book on them a few years ago he says the publisher read it and said the only guy he basically liked was the backup catcher Ed Hearn. He also says in spring training 1987 the Philadelphia Phillies put up a team picture of the Mets and someone wrote on it “Can anybody beat these a**holes?”
Besides the fact that both James and Bosh left to win a championship rather than " stay and do it on their own like Jordan did" as basketball fans tell me, you also have Pat Riley as the architect. He is still loathed in New York for having suddenly deserted the Knicks without winning a championship.
If you got back a century, the baseball New York Giants under John McGraw were detested nationally. Muggsy would do stunts like have a wagon drive through the streets of a city that the Giants were visiting with banners saying “Come to the ballpark and watch the Giants beat your Cards/Pirates/Cubs, etc today”. On the field he was a very pugnacious man although off it he was a quiet man who supported a number of widows and children.
You can find some NASCAR champions like Darrell Waltrip and Dale Earnhardt who are detested in their prime but in older age, they somehow become beloved figures.
The Heat are hated because there is absolutely NOTHING good about them winning. Not one fucking reason.
You can hate the Yankees or Cowboys or Lakers or Celtics all you want, but at least those are big cities and historied teams. The cities have been in the thick of championships for a long time, either recently or within memory. Often, their ascension makes the leagues better, pushes other teams to challenge them, and unites a large group of fans who hate them vs. a large group of fans who love them
Miami has no history. They won 1 championship and have existed only for about 20 years. Founded in 1988, they’ve been around less years than the Lakers have had Finals appearances. Other than that year, they’ve never been in the conversation when it comes to winning championships. And other than that city, most people dislike them.
And don’t kid yourself about the ratings and the supposed draw they are. A Heat championship would be worse for the league than next year’s lockout. The way they would have put together a team hints at collusion and arrogance. If they win, other teams would start pilfering stars to the detriment of a more well-rounded league. You’ll see guys leave their draft cities and home cities to go play with their big-name friends in big-name cities. Yes, rich teams and big cities have always looked to stack their roster with stars, but Lebron, Wade, and Bosh probably colluded to do so and the way they robbed fans of seeing them each try to lead a team by themselves would make the future of the league worse in the long run.
This. What they did was a total bitch move that is going to snowball into over a decade of horrible basketball.
Have to agree. Never lived in or around Detroit itself, but I’m from Michigan and I grew up on the Bad Boys and love the Pistons to this day. Those teams were hated by fans league wide for being not only hard nosed, but blatantly physical and illegal. Laimbeer and company never hesitated to knock someone on their ass for daring to take more than one step through the lane, and we loved them for it. 
It’s a natural consequence though of the NBA’s treatment of it’s rulebook as “guidelines”. Flashy offense outstrips the rules as it sells more tickets. That’s fine, I understand the reasoning, but the league should just go ahead and implement a “performance score” if that’s the intent.
Not saying it would be a good idea, but I’d laugh if Dallas or someone else implemented a blatant “Lebron defense” and punched him in the stomach every time he stepped foot in the paint.
McGraw was a great promoter as well as a good baseball man. He cast his Giants in the role of Goliath, knowing that that locals would pay good money to see their poor Davids try to knock them off. It was all about putting people in the seats.
The “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons were just dirty basketball players, IMHO.
The Dallas Cowboys took to calling themselves “America’s Team” in the mid 1990’s, and were much despised. Non-Steeler fans were rooting for the Steelers to knock them off in the '95 Super Bowl, but Neil O’Donnell didn’t get the job done, and the Cowboys won the Lombardi trophy. I can’t say whether they were hated more than the Heat is now, but they were not well liked by a considerable amount of people.
Er, that isn’t true. The nickname “America’s Team” was placed upon them by NFL films in 1978.
Cite.
I’ve got to disagree with you here on a couple of points. Why is it ok for the ascension of storied franchises to make league’s better, but not the Heat? I would say that they are absolutely forcing other teams to improve their rosters. You say that the hatred of the storied franchises unites people, and that’s a good thing; then in the next paragraph you say that outside of Miami most people dislike them, and that is a bad thing?
The simple fact that they have a championship to their credit gives them history.
Yeah, I don’t understand the hate for expansion teams. On the one hand, it sucks when a team that’s been around for like 6 years like the Florida Marlins win it all, but the Heat are 23 years old at this point. There are a lot of storied franchises that are expansion teams, like the Mets, Jazz, and Vikings. The Heat are well on their way to establishing a storied history.
As (probably) the only Marlins fan on this board, I will disagree.
It wasn’t just that they won so quickly after being founded, it’s how they did it (big-bucks free agents) and what happened afterwards (huge fire sale) that left a bad taste in the mouth of Indians, Giants, White Sox, Cubs, Red Sox, and Angels fans.
Wasn’t this called the “Hack-a-Shaq” back in the day?
I seem to remember that many teams would intentionally foul Shaq because he was known as a horrible free throw shooter.
And besides, I think I gut punch would also merit a flagrant foul. I do like the idea though.
Lebron has “Chosen 1” tattooed on his back. That’s automatic hate. The announcement they had… holy shit, how masturbatory was that?
Storied franchises have established fan bases and established haters. Even if you dislike them, you’d still draw a lot of people to watch. One of the lowest NBA finals in recent memory was Detroit vs. San Antonio. That series went 7 games but had abysmal ratings. At the time, San Antonio was just establishing it’s history with Duncan and that year’s championship would be their 2nd. Detroit had a pretty good run in the Bad Boys era but arguably had no “superstars”, only a collection of all-stars. I didn’t say it’s better for storied franchises to make the league better, I said it would definitely make the league better if it’s a franchise with some history to it. Not always, of course, but it generally draws more people
Your second point has already been addressed. Sure, Miami will make other teams improve, but the type of improvement is what will be catastrophic for the league. You always have some degree of star pilfering, but the whispered rumors of collusion in Miami’s case doesn’t bode well. Will superstars start talking to each other and agreeing to get on the same team in their primes? That’s not good for the league because it robs other teams of the opportunity to even compete for a title. You’d end up with a handful of mega teams that stars will go to instead of the usual 1 or 2 mega teams and talent still spread around the league. Rumors abound of Dwight Howard, Chris Paul, Deron Williams, joining up. If they join up in NY or LA or someplace, that kills basketball in Orlando, New Orleans, and New Jersey. Less teams with a chance of winning the title = bad for the league
And when I said hatred unites opposition, there is a line of hatred where a fan says “I’ll watch to see them get beaten and support the opposition”. If you cross that line, it becomes “They’re going to win anyway, no point in watching”. If the Heat win, and people say they’ll only get better in subsequent years, then ratings are going to drop like a rock. Support for the league will be minimal. Even if the Lakers or Celtics or Bulls or any of the historic franchises are hated, you’d at least have a pretty good ratio of hate vs. love. That mobilizes a lot of people. With Miami, you’d have a large majority of people who hate them who will tune out the NBA if they win vs. the tiny amount of people in Miami who like them. If the Heat win, they’re not going to gain a lot of new fans but they’ll lose a lot of haters. You don’t have that with the Lakers or Celtics or most of the other franchises
And we all saw The Decision. There’s hatred at a team for being good and then there’s hatred at the players for being utterly repugnant and arrogant. Lebron and the Heat are in the latter category, and seeing these types of people succeed is a huge turnoff. If Lebron wins, I might tune in to watch the post game interviews, but it would only be out of curiosity. I wouldn’t be able to stomach the guy. And I bet a lot of people feel the same way