…so.
Any predictions for Thunder vs. Heat? It’s going to be a good series.
I’m going to push back a little on that: I think Boston is the underdog in Miami but I think they definitely have a chance. 2:1 underdog, maybe. Last night, an absolutely ridiculous performance by LeBron and an atrocious shooting night by the C’s made it look a lot worse than it was. There were a lot of jump shots in that game on both sides, and jump shots can be fickle.
… just, wow, LeBron.
I agree. It’s incredible they’ve been able to overcome Paul Pierce’s suckage in this series as well as they have. You could say the same about the Heat and DWade, but the C’s rely much, much more on Pierce scoring points.
A lot of the national media have already crowned the Thunder the winner. I hope the Thunder aren’t listening to it. I don’t think that Lebron can continue playing like he did last night, but if he does the Thunder are in trouble.
The Celtics just got down big early and just couldn’t make up the difference. Pierce is such a huge percentage of their offense, if he’s having a bad day they don’t have enough firepower to make up the difference. And where the hell is Ray Allen? I see him on the floor but he ain’t doing much.
That really was a ruthless performance by LeBron. Not his first of the playoffs this year, but shit. 45 points on 26 shots, 15 rebounds and 5 assists and Pierce shut down in one game. If he can do something like that again, they should win the series.
I’m really looking forward to the Thunder-Heat final but I absolutely hate the 2-3-2 format. At no point in a series should the team without home court advantage have played more games at home. If 2-2-1-1-1 was good enough for the rest of the playoffs, it should be good enough for the championship.
It only changed in the 80’s to minimize trip to and from LA and Boston.
Go Thunder! Deny Lebron a championship!
Why? Seriously. Was it because of “The Decision”?
“What a bad person, he’s much worse than all the drunk drivers, spousal abusers and convicted felons I like to root for.”
Greatness should be appreciated. That’s why I’m rooting for LeBron.
*special exemption if you are from Cleveland.
Cynical logic often doesn’t apply to sports allegiances.
(I’m still upset that the Lakers and Dodgers moved to L.A. and that the Jazz moved out of New Orleans!)
Cleveland seems to have gotten a bit of the rough end of things over the years, sports fans wise.
I used to just hate hate hate French Lick Larry. Now, I can feel a sense of admiration and nostalgia for being in attendance at games where he helped orchestrate the dismantling of my chosen team’s dreams in certain games (NBA Finals, Rockets vs Celtics). Does it make sense? No. Bird is one of the best players ever. Did that thought come up way back in 1986? Of course, but a sports fan doesn’t need stats, logic, or even a verifiable reason to feel any certain way. It’s FANaticism.
I have many reasons to dislike him, some reasonable, others even I can admit are strange reasons, but they’re my reasons
I don’t like how he was anointed The One and King James as soon as he got into the league without having really won anything. Many people in the past have nicknames before they were in the NBA, but that was usually given to them by others based on their performance. Magic had his nickname in college, where he was a standout player and won the NCAA championship. That was earned, and wasn’t given to him by himself. I read an article years ago, and this may or may not be true, that James started calling himself King James in high school. He had won nothing yet, and just because he’s a physical freak of nature, its still pretty arrogant from a kid. Add to that, the name stuck in the NBA, where he’s won nothing so far, and it seems pretty idiotic
I don’t like the comparisons to Kobe because I’m a Lakers fan. Until James approaches the amount of championships Kobe has, at least 2 or 3, I find the comparisons ridiculous and out of place. Sure, I can see that right now, Kobe is a worse player than James, but it was only 2 years ago that he won a championship, and that was the 2nd of a back to back. His skills may have diminished, but he really has no equals in the league right now with the exception of Tim Duncan. All of the “who would you rather have to start a team” discussions are asinine, I think, when I hear it because they generally compare Lebron now to Kobe now. Taking in the whole span of their careers, I’d pick Kobe, no question
I hate The Decision. I don’t care if it made money for the Boys & Girls club charity, Lebron could have donated that with no problem. What he did was not only betray his whole fan base, but he robbed basketball fans of a future Hall of Famer going it on his own. I will never forget that afterwards, both Magic and Larry said they’d never join up with each other, they’d rather beat each other. I doubt Jordan would say any different. He killed basketball in a city in a way that was egregiously cold-hearted. I don’t even like Cleveland, but I prefer them to Lebron. He should have simply reupped without fanfare like Kevin Durant, or told his team as soon as possible that he was leaving. I don’t buy all the bullshit that he didn’t make up his mind until the last minute. It was clear from the Boston series that he mentally checked out already
On the same subject, I feel betrayed as a basketball fan when I know he has great skills, but has repeated 4th quarter stinkers. Killer instinct is important, and I don’t think he has much of it. Maybe at one time he did, like when he scored like 25 of 26 points against the Pistons a few years ago, or when he almost beat Boston in a game 7 by himself. He was on some crummy teams, but I don’t hate him cause of the losing, I hate him cause it seems like at some point in the last few years, he just stopped trying
I really really HATE The Decision. :mad: Its the equivalent of a guy going on TV to dump his girlfriend for a model. Even if a person have no dog in that fight, why the fuck would that not cloud their feelings against him?
The rumors of collusion amongst him, Wade, and Bosh when they were on the 2008 Olympic team to join up. If that’s how many years Cleveland lost from him, that’s totally messed up.
His little snipes at Cleveland, like “Oh I’m from Akron, not Cleveland” that was done after The Decision. You dumped them on TV, move on.
I’m actually not too upset about the “Not one championship, not two, not three, etc…” because I think they were in the moment and wanted to hype up their fans. But I want him to address that and so far, I don’t think he has. If he loses again this year, he should at least say something to the effect of “We were premature on those predictions, sorry about that. We wanted to hype up our fans”. I hate false modesty in sports, I’m kind of ok with bragging if its earned, but I hate it when braggarts get put into their place and they pretend it never happened
I’m mad that Lebron doesn’t really act like he cares about his legacy. He had a lot of options 2 summers ago. He could have stayed in Cleveland and brought a championship to that city and ruled it forever. He could have went to New York and used the pressure to fuel him to win, or die trying but at least the fans there would appreciate it. Hell, he could have joined Kobe in LA and taken over for him after he retires in a few years. If he became a Laker at that time, I wouldn’t hate him, but now I don’t even want him here. Yes, I am saying that right now, I hate Lebron more than I want LA to have him. Let’s face it, Kobe and the Lakers’ legacy is secured. I don’t want Lebron to try to rehab his image by using LA. Fuck that, we don’t need him.
His seemingly total lack of awareness on how he’s perceived. His shock that Cleveland fans were burning his jersey after The Decision, the way he doesn’t understand that for a long-suffering sports town like that to lose their homegrown superstar is different than when Wilt left Philadelphia, or Kareem left Milwaukee. Its like your own family betraying you. And then to say that all his “real” fans still like him is just throwing even more dirt on the grave.
I hate Boston, but that’s because I’m from LA and a Lakers fan. I may want Boston to lose forever, but I have grudging respect for their history and their players. But I have no respect for Lebron because of his arrogance, his exaggeration (through his or the media’s hype) of his achievements, his tactless way he handled the town that loved him, the lack of realization of all that, and the way he just seems to laugh it all off. I want my hate to affect him and when I get glimpses of that, I’m overjoyed. But most of the time he says things like “Well we played good enough to win (speaking of game 5 vs. Boston this year)” is infuriating when he should have said he was pissed off he didn’t win, pissed at himself and his teammates, and that he’ll come back and destroy them the next game (which he did, oddly enough).
Also, the flopping. You’re a 6’9 280lb man and you flop. Kobe doesn’t flop. He has teammates to do that but he doesn’t do it himself. Stand on your feet you idiot. As if all his physical gifts weren’t good enough already, he has to try to pretty much cheat to do it. And yes, I consider flopping to be cheating.
That’s some crazy rage ya got there YogSosoth.
I wouldn’t call it rage. And as far as how we choose to like or hate sports teams and figures, that seems a lot more thought out than the average.
I don’t really know much about the NBA - were the Sonics/Thunder justified in leaving due to lack of fan support, or did they leave because their owner was a fuckup? Because having to choose between rooting for LeAsshole and a team that left a city is a pretty ugly decision.
Call it what you will - if nothing else, it’s irrational, and, imho, is unhealthy.
Watching professional sports is silly. People like or hate teams because the color of their hats or even less articulable reasons. You don’t need well-defined, logical reasons to pick who to root for and who to hate. His reasoning is better than 90% of the reasoning you hear for justifying sports hatred.
I have a rainbow afro wig and a John 3:16 sign for you!
Watching sports may be silly to you, but that doesn’t make it a universal truth.
I’ve never been able to quantify the amount of well reasoned irrational hatred among all the irrational hatred that’s out there.
No offense intended, but this made the rest of the post redundant. The comparisons are inevitable anyway because they’re both so great and have played most of their careers at the same time and they are so different not only personally but in terms of the arcs of their careers. At times both of them have hurt their teams with their opposite flaws. But I think the most important element is that they’ve often been criticized in the same exact way: for failing to come up big in the playoffs and for their supposed inability to lead a team to a championship. Kobe put that behind him, and LeBron could, too, since he is still younger than Kobe was when the Lakers won their titles in 2009 and 2010. As far as the championship argument: it’s a team sport and that I would not be surprised if you had a different take in, say, 2007, when people knocked Kobe for failing to put aside his differences with Shaq and being unable to win a title as the best player on a team. I’ll add that in game 7 against the Celtics in 2010, Kobe was absolutely horrible. 23 points on 6/24 shooting. And then there were the things people said about him after that Phoenix series a few years earlier- like I said, not all that different from many of the criticisms of LeBron. But the bad playoff games are overlooked in Kobe’s record just like the great ones are overlooked in LeBron’s at this point.
Kobe is also an amazing player, and when they’re both done they’ll probably both be considered among the 10 best ever. Kobe’s probably second only to Jordan among shooting guards. LeBron is harder to place in one position because of his versatility, but as a general guideline I think that’s solid if he keeps doing the kinds of things he’s been doing. Meanwhile I think the fact is that LeBron has been the better of the two players for, say, three or four seasons.
It was neither. The owner of the team sold the Sonics to a guy from Oklahoma City, and they moved to Oklahoma City. Fan support was not the problem, and nobody fucked up - unless the ex-owner, Schultz, really thought Bennett wasn’t going to move the team. I think it’s just as likely that he didn’t care. To a lesser extent they also wanted major renovations on the team’s facility (which had last been renovated a decade earlier).
I know you said you don’t follow the NBA much, and I’m pretty content to let YogSosoth have his bete noire the way he likes it, but I do want to point out something about this guy who stopped trying at some point in the last few years. At literally every moment in the past 4 seasons, Lebron has been the best player in the NBA. There are fancy stats to track it, and he’s led the league in them, but also just to the naked eye it isn’t even close. This current season, the one that is happening while this criticism is being applied to him, he won the MVP award and averaged 27 points, 7.9 rebounds, 6 assists and 1.9 steals per game. There’s one other person who ever beat those numbers in a season, and it was Michael Jordan, and he did it once. And he was Michael Jordan, you know, at the time.
So, OK, but YS probably meant stopped trying in playoff/fourth quarter type situations, to be fair. Lebron’s averaging 31 points, 9.6 rebounds, 5 assists, and almost 2 steals in the current playoffs, and leading all scorers in the 4th quarter. No one has ever pulled those numbers off before. I know you can fiddle with the numbers and find different oddities and things, but no one but Lebron has ever averaged even 28/9/5 in the playoffs, so it’s not like I’m sneaking it in.
So maybe he meant Lebron hasn’t been trying in the most important games or moments – crunch time. Game 4, Pacers-Heat: Pacers up 2-1 in the series and playing at home. Lebron has holy shit 40, 18 rebounds, and 9 assists. That had never happened as far as basketball-reference.com knows, which means not in the last 30 years. I don’t mean in the playoffs. I mean nobody ever did that. Game 6, Celtics-Heat: elimination game for the Heat in Boston. 45, 15, 5. 30 in the first half. In Boston. I did read that a game like that had happened once before in the playoffs, although I guess the box score didn’t survive. But Wilt Chamberlain did it. And then Lebron - Lebron who never gets it done in the clutch - did that, this year, in Boston in a do-or-die game, and nobody cared very much. Didn’t even bat an eye, mostly.
Again, this is what is currently happening. This is who these fairly reasonable criticisms are being applied to. It’s not like he hasn’t had great performances before (those things I said had never been done before, he’d actually come the closest to doing them before doing it this year), but he is literally right now completing one of the very very few greatest individual seasons of all time. These people who love to get overexcited about hero narratives and digging deep and the heart of a champion and so on ought to be foaming at the mouth about what he’s doing, so I can get annoyed by that and go back to hating everybody but my own shitty teams. People always say “no one believed in us, the whole world was against us” but it’s actually true about the best player in the world. It’s like a mass hallucination. There’s really never been anything like this, as far as I can tell.