People like to overlook the second World Series they won with a payroll variously reported as 20th, 25th, or 26th highest in the majors beating the team with the undisputed highest payroll.
So it’s bad for ratings/the league if one team is too dominant? Like when the Bulls won 72 games? Or when the Lakers had the good fortune of owning the #1 overall pick in the draft (turned out to be James Worthy) the same year they won the title?
Is it alright for Jordan to collude with Dennis Rodman? How about Kobe and RonRon? Or former players - Kevin McHale giftwrapping KG for his ol teammate Danny Ainge? Former boss the Logo giving away Pau to his protege Kupchak? Or how about if a player demands to be traded, won’t play otherwise, unless he’s traded to a particular team, like Kareem did?
Well if the discussion is “how fast an expansion team won the title,” then of course people are going to mention the first and not the second title.
I don’t think anyone holds their second title against them, although they did hold a mini-fire sale after that second one, too. How about keeping a championship team together for just one season?
I don’t understand what “collusion” could have to do with anything. Can someone explain?
The three players were all free agents. and they worked together to make sure they were all signed by the same team. Had the owners done something similar they would have been sued by the players, but apparently it doesn’t go the other way.
Some of us recognize it for what it is and are disgusted by it, but you’ll find no end of people carrying water for the poor, downtrodden players getting over on the man. In any event, that’s why the Heat are winning, and that’s a big part of why so many people hate them this year.
Collusion is by definition fraudulent or wrongful. This was just some guys deciding what team they wanted to play on. In the common parlance, I think that’s called “choosing.”
By that measure, every trade of one player for another is “collusion” by the owners.
Everyone’s entitled to nurture their own hatreds, of course. If you want to make a big stink about the fact that a couple of buddies wanted to be in the same workplace, don’t let me give you the impression that I’m trying to stop you. But accusing them of ethical impropriety because of it is just stupid. They were free agents. They chose to play in Miami. Literally every person in the world has made a similar decision at some point. (Not everyone has made The Decision, and criticism for that aspect isn’t what I’m talking about.)
If you want to know of a polarizing team also from Miami, try the Miami Hurricanes of the late 80’s and 90’s. My God, did people hate them.
There is a bit of debate about whether the courting of the big 3 happened well before the free agency period. There’s a bit of smoke there, but probably not enough for the league to ever do anything about it. So if Wade courted Bosh and LeBron to join the Heat while he was still under contract with Miami, then yes, it would be collusion.
It would be tampering, not collusion, if a certain set of things had happened. But one, the NBA said no tampering took place, and two, that’s a pretty far cry from the post I was responding to anyway, since Airman was specifically talking about a scenario that couldn’t possibly have been tampering.
YogSosoth:
Well, to be fair, basketball in New Jersey is already dead.
Just for a change of pace…
High on the list has to be the Baltimore Ravens team (don’t remember the year) that won the Super Bowl.
Remember? They used to be the Cleveland Browns, one of the AFC’s most storied teams, in one of the biggest football markets in the country, and with an absolutely fanatical fan following.
Owner Art Modell wanted to move the team to Baltimore because he thought it had better financial prospects. However, the NFL was looking to expand at the time, and Baltimore was tops in the running for a new franchise. (The fact football was successful there in the past no doubt was an added plus.) Nonetheless, Modell announces his intention to move the franchise. Naturally, this elicits a firestorm of outrage, and pretty much the entire city is vehemently against the move.
The NFL approves the move. The move happens. The team is rechristened the Baltimore Ravens. Who then go on to win a Super Bowl (with one of the most anemic offenses in franchise history).
The owner who thought only of himself, shafted an entire city, showed not the slightest remorse, and faced zero repercussions in Baltimore, has a championship to his credit. Friends, it don’t get much worse than that.
(And as an appropriately insane postscript, Cleveland ended up getting the next expansion team. Wait…why? Oh, that’s right, so the NFL could get a whopping big expansion fee AND a whopping big relocation fee, rather than just the expansion fee.)
A lot of people hate whoever the current NASCAR champ is. Right now it’s five time and defending champion Jimmie Johnson. Before that, it was Stewart, before that it was Gordon, etc.
Well, that’s another thing lots of people don’t like about the Heat. There’s a widespread feeling that the championship the Heat won was, well, not a shining example of accurate and unbiased refereeing. So, lots of people think that it’s not really a credit to win a championship by default because of the referees’ “Eff You” to Mark Cuban, but rather the reverse.
And given the dives LeBron has been getting away with so far in the playoffs (and the opponents he and Wade will be facing in the finals), there’s some fear of a repeat.
RE: Lebron taking less money to sign with Miami, let’s not forget that Lebron will actually make more money by signing in Florida than NY, due to tax purposes.
Fandom is so variable among sports. Just try to post something like this in a college football thread, and watch the shit fly. Feel free to substitute Alabama, USC, Ohio State, or any other big name school in for your “historied team” descriptor, and Boise State as your “expansion team” horning in on the traditional powerhouses’ championship action.
Regarding “The Decision”, I wish that the person who proposed the idea, (hack)sportscaster Jim Gray, would be subjected to a similar amount of public scorn that LBJ has received this past year. Heck, even a fraction of it.
Similarly, the only people that don’t hate the Steelers are THEIR bandwagon fans. As a long time fan of both (34+ years for BOTH), I’ve heard it all a million times. Strangely, though, no one ever called me that in the late 80s or early 90s, when I was routing for them through some terrible seasons.
I’ll grant you, though, that the Yankees are probably amongst the most hated teams around. But I’ve seen plenty of people that really hate the Steelers, too. They used to be a class organization, but that image is now tarnished. Add that to winning 6 and playing in 8 Super Bowls, and all I ever hear about how Harrison and Ward are dirty players and Big Ben is a rapist. If they were losers, no one would care.
Those things don’t make them less hated. Indeed, it is almost the reverse.
An organization like the Miami Heat can’t compare precisely because there just isn’t as much there.
A recent ESPN poll had about a third of the fans for the heat, a third for the mavs, and a third against the heat.
I doubt they’d be the most hated team to ever win a title though, if only because basketball isn’t as popular a sport as football or baseball(let alone soccer)
Doesn’t matter. The mid-90’s Cowboys called themselves that name constantly and were much despised. Whether the moniker was bestowed on them at an earlier age by someone else, then taken up again by the 90’s team is irrelevant to my point. People hated them, and they hated the nickname, which was seen as arrogant. The Steelers were serious underdogs in that Super Bowl and not expected to win. Many people (not necessarily the Cowboys players themselves) thought it was a forgone conclusion that the arrogant Cowboys would win. And they did, but Pittsburgh made it competitive and came close to pulling out a win, until their own quarterback shot them in the foot.