After a week of pulling for the formerly despised Boston Celtics to eliminate LeBron James and his Miami Heat from the NBA playoffs, Cleveland has now taken up for Carlos Boozer’s team, the Chicago Bulls, to do the same.
It hardly matters that it’s the same Carlos Boozer who infamously backed out of a handshake agreement with former Cavaliers owner Gordon Gund and skipped town for Utah once the Cavs, pursuant to the deal, let a contractual restriction on Boozer’s free agency expire. The enemy of the guy in the No. 6 Heat jersey is our friend, no matter who or what else he might be. Really. One popular Cleveland sports website recently went so far as to invite a comparison between LeBron and Osama Bin Laden, apparently with a straight face.
Say what you will about an environment where it’s OK to equate free agents with mass murderers, but make no mistake that it’s been openly cultivated by Cavs owner Dan Gilbert. And why not? The mere suggestion that any kind of failure on the part of the Cavs front office could have had anything at all to do with LeBron’s decision to leave for Miami has been effectively choked out from the start by Gilbert’s comic sans rallying cry and the dichotomy that’s resulted: “Real Clevelanders” and the heroic billionaire mortgagee on one side, and the traitor, the shamefully selfish cowardly quitter, LeBron, on the other. No room for any reality in between.
With the stage thusly set, it seems the only way “Real Cleveland” can come out on top here is if the Cavs make good on Gilbert’s “personal guarantee” that his Cleveland franchise “will win an NBA Championship before the self-titled former ‘king’ wins one.” So here we are in our Boozer jerseys, living and dying with the more palatable traitor, and Chicago’s Bulls.
Hand it to Gilbert for at least keeping us in the game. But for how long? In only the first year of the LeBron/Dwyane Wade/Chris Bosh run, Miami has already advanced to the NBA’s final four without having to put up a fight. There’s every reason to think that the three superstars will only become more comfortable playing together with time, and with each off-season comes a better chance for the Heat to surround the three with complementary players.
We saw LeBron collapse in a heap of exultation after beating the Celtics last week, the only player in league history to shed tears for advancing past the conference semifinals. We read the national reports about LeBron “coming to peace with himself” in a “sweet turnaround.” If the Bulls do manage to keep the Heat from the title this season, aren’t we only set up for a more nauseating “redemption” for LeBron and Co. next season, or the one after that?
We could set that question aside — along with related questions about the moral implications of actively rooting for career-ending injuries — if everyone could just agree that there’s not really any such thing as redemption for an NBA team when two of the three best players in the league decide to play together, along with another one of the ten best. If the same thing happened at your pickup game at the Y, you would just call it an early night. An NBA title for the Heat this season versus having to wait a year or three could well be the most efficient path to such a consensus and the most efficient path to indifference — the true opposite of love.
That LeBron himself couldn’t see the relative emptiness of his choice before he made it, and that nobody close to the situation could make him see it, is terribly sad. But it’s really no less so if he wins the next one, two, three, or five NBA titles. The team that’s stacked is the team that wins. Why get worked up about any intervening drama when it’s just as well that there isn’t any? Why get worked up about any of it at all?
Pattakos is a Northeast Ohio attorney and publisher of ClevelandFrowns.com.
This article appears in May 18-24, 2011.
I don’t understand this article at all. Who is this guy. Can he write in clear English?
Peter, equating someone who went to great, calculated lengths, to publicly humiliate a city and someone who pulled a fast one on the Cavs when they were trying to cheat league rules is hardly fair. They’re both enemies in these parts, but one is clearly worse than the other.
Your analysis of the Heat shows a tremendous lack of understanding of how the league is evolving. If Miami doesn’t win a title this year, they are in a CRITICAL state. Wade will turn 30 next year, Haslem 31, and Miller 32. Those three are either already in decline or soon to be in decline. The team is completely capped out for eternity and Lebron is unlikely to get any better than he is right now. Assuming that cohesion will more than offset these declines is a bit presumptuous. They’ve already played some 80 games together. If anything, in the coming years, you’re likely to see more “me first” destructive forces come into play than the selfless “us against the world” mentality they’ve taken on this year. Meanwhile, teams like Chicago and OKC have elite stars who haven’t even reached their primes yet. If Miami doesn’t win now, they may never win.
We understand that you are and have always been a Gilbert hater and Lebron apologist, but don’t try to turn that into a lecture as to why the rest of us shouldn’t root for the Heat team bus to crash on the way to the arena (non-life-threatening injuries only, of course).
Biff is right. If they don’t win this year, they could be looking at a long road ahead. The way the labor situation is going, it looks like there may not be a full season next year. The longer they go without winning one the more toxic the situation will be and the more “me first” situations will occur.
The Decision was a clear failure in the community (whether you want to define that as Akron, the Cavs, LBJ’s inner-circle, or the adult’s in LBJ’s life while he was growing up) to properly raise someone with immense talent to handle success. That being said, at some point people stop being “immature” or a “communal failure” and start being “jerks.” In other words, at some point, you can’t give LBJ a pass because of his upbringing or how he was handled by the Cavs. At some point, he isn’t a kid anymore and is able to observe the world around him and be responsible for his own decisions. Has that time come? Maybe, maybe not. But his stupid little thing at the end of the Celtics series clearly shows you that he doesn’t fully grasp his situation.
If the Bulls win this series, the most interesting thing will be to see how LBJ handles himself and the situation.
On another note, thank astrology or whatever that Irving decided not to go LRMR Marketing as his agent (although he was heavily pursued). That would have been an awkard negotiation…
Maybe I don’t know basketball as well as you guys do but I’m going to stick with the assumption that people tend to get better at working together as they gain experience working together, which goes to the big three themselves, as well as the Heat organization in surrounding them with complementary parts.
Peter, I agree that they will continue to improve as they learn to play together, but I think those gains will be offset by aging (especially with a slasher and mediocre shooter like Wade) and offcourt distractions. As for the Heat surrounding them with complementary parts, that absolutely WILL NOT happen. Even with a soft cap, like we have now, it would be virtually impossible. Everything is committed to 6 guys, three of whom wouldn’t be in most teams top 7. When the league goes to a hard cap, you’re looking at 4 full years of the big three being surrounded by two corpses, Joel Anthony, and a bunch of minimum salary guys. I’ll say it again: If they don’t win now, my money is on it never happening.
Thusly, Peter? Thusly? Is that what you learned in CLR?