Can he be a frontrunner if he, uh, is the front?
The city pissed all over him when he left for not staying and winning them a championship, and they were in no shape to win a championship when he decided to come back and try to do it. Going back there was literally the least frontrunning thing he could have possibly done.
What I’m saying is, that’s a stupid criticism.
I can’t respect a player who jumps ship after losing in the playoffs. The fact that he had to leave Cleveland first and then Miami to get three rings doesn’t make him look at that great.
To me he will never be in the same category as Bird, Isiah, Kobe, Magic, and Duncan because they all stayed with their teams after losing in the Finals
Bird lost 85 finals and came back to win 86 finals
magic lost 84 finals and came back to win 85 finals
isiah lost 88 finals and came back to win 89 finals
kobe lost 08 finals and came back to win 09 finals
duncan lost 13 finals and came back to win 14 finals
Lebron lost the ECF in 10 and left
Lebron lost the 14 finals and left
Lost in 2011 and left. Wait, either left or won two in a row, can’t remember.
Lost in 2015 and left. Wait, either left or won the next one. Shit I’m bad at this. It’s almost like when you’re in the Finals every year, everything you do happens after you’re in the Finals.
2011 he was under contract
2015 he was under contract
Believe me if he would have left this year too if GS had won
I may be the only one, but I don’t think Cleveland (the city) deserved anything. They took great pleasure in pissing on Lebron when he left. Fans and owners love bringing up loyalty for the players they want to keep, funny that loyalty didn’t extend to Anderson Varajao.
I wouldn’t go by NBA forums. As a young college student a few decades ago I worked as a ticket taker at Oracle and the team generally sold well when even they were god-awful ( it also helps a little that Oracle isn’t all that big ). In 2010 they averaged a little over 18,000 fans a game for a 26-56 team ;).
Now I wasn’t one of them :D. The modern Warriors style of play has pulled me back into the NBA after a long period of disinterest. But a dedicated fan base has certainly existed for quite awhile, aside from the normal legion of bandwagon-jumpers.
No one took pleasure in pissing on LeBron, they felt betrayed and heartbroken in a way that there’s not really any sort of analogy for in the rest of the US sports world. Someone who was one of us, who was our best chance, decided to ditch us for somewhere easier and flashier.
Why the hell should Lebron waste his career dragging teams of scrubs into the finals every year for no return?
Every team you listed had another hall of fame level talent besides the star. I can almost guarantee if you asked any player whether he’d prefer a ring to spending his career in one city, he’d pick the ring.
And none of this considers any of the financial incentives those players were working with.
But Isiah, Bird, Kobe, and duncan allowed the front office to build around them
I get some of that, I really do, still, some of the things that were said were beyond reason. He’s a basketball player not property. And a lot of the vitriol was fed by the scumbag owner and others with financial incentives.
Didn’t the Cavs have the worst record in the NBA each of the 4 years LeBron was in Miami? He comes back and they go to the finals and then win the finals. The two years Jordan was gone, the Bulls were still a playoff team. Could Jordan have gone to the mid 90s Washington Bullets or 76ers and made them instant contenders? Maybe, but we’ll obviously never know.
I’m not saying LeBron is greater than Jordan, but I think it’s closer than people give LeBron credit for.
And this is a professional, speaking publicly to the fans. What the fans said was worse. They pissed all over him and had no justification for it. They didn’t deserve to have LeBron come back, really.
And let’s be honest, you’re telling me these people were Cavs fans whether or not LeBron was on the team? They wanted something flashy or they didn’t care.
I don’t think Gilbert would have gone so rage-monster without The Decision, even considering everything he did to make James happy just to have him bail.
I don’t think what you posted contradicts what I said. I wasn’t saying no one said anything bad about him, but because it came from a place of feeling betrayed, rather than just piling on hatred on a guy.
Like I said, I don’t think there’s an analog for that situation in all of US sports that I’m aware of. A lot of hope and loved was poured into LeBron because Cleveland finally had one of the premier athletes in the world, and he was one of our own, grew up suffering as we did, part of the whole experience. And we were lucky enough to get him by winning the lottery and he was everything he was hyped to be - it felt like destiny.
There are very few cities that identify with an athlete to that level that I don’t even know how to come up with an analogy. LeBron inspired more fanatical fandom in Cleveland than, say, Brett Favre in Green Bay, who is the best analogue I can think of in terms of how much a city is identified with a player. Except Green Bay didn’t have a long history of being a cursed sports city, a city that was the butt of a lot of jokes, a city with long suffering but fanatical fans. And Brett Favre wasn’t The Chosen One who grew up on the Streets of Green Bay hoping that one day he would get the chance to play for them and save them from it all.
I think it’s hard for an outsider to understand.
The reporter on the news feeds say the crowd is estimated in the 800k-1m range. One of the reporters speculated that that might make it the biggest sports victory parade there has ever been, but I have no idea if that’s anywhere near being true. It’s gotta be the highest ratio of market size to parade attendees, certainly. How big do these things usually run?
Kansas City just estimated their WS parade last fall at 800K, and that’s pretty much the same market size as Cleveland.
The first Sox parade in '04 was apparently estimated at 3 million from what I can Google up. No idea if that’s completely accurate, but given that Boston is about 2.5 times the market size and that particular championship was another special case, it seems in line.
Chicago estimated around 2 million for the Blackhawks first Stanley Cup parade. Having half the Greater Cleveland show for the parade probably blows pretty much every ratio comparison out of the water.
Brooklyn Dodgers.