Saturday, July 10, 2010

LeBronakah!

After The Most Important Person In The World made The Most Important Decision Ever Decided, and after listening to Bill Simmons' post-LeBronakah impressions and thoughts, a few points of order.

1) Yes, it's silly to care about professional sports. It's a special subset of silly to care about which city an enormously wealthy young man will continue to recieve enormous paychecks in.

2) That being said, there are drawbacks to what the Miami Heat has done. Injury, for one-although these three (Bosh, Wade, and James) are all relatively young men, Wade is getting towards 30 and has a lot of miles on his NBA odometer. One serious injury and suddenly this plan doesn't look so good.

3) Defense. None of these players are especially gifted defenders. One of the themes of recent NBA seasons has been the importance of defense in winning titles. I can't think of a single NBA champion who simply outscored everybody.

4) This team is going to walk into every arena with a target on its back. If things start to go wrong, the long knives will come out.

5) Every NBA champion-without exception-has had an alpha dog-a player who sets the tone, on offense and defense, both by example and through inspiration. Pair this player with two or more very good players and you have yourself a great team. It is hard to imagine LeBron or Wade willingly deferring to the other. We shall see.

6) A top shelf NBA star takes about 1500 shots per year. An NBA team takes about 6000 shots per year. Three stars on one team? Something's got to give-somebody won't be getting the ball enough.

7) Personnel. As Simmons keeps noting, you need 5 players to play basketball-IIRC, the Heat now have, officially, four. Can you have a legitimate team with 9 scrubs to go with your superstars?

8) As Simmons also says, the NBA is headed for labor trouble after the coming season. Players aren't going to be willing to take less money, even to play with a super team, because they are afraid there won't be any paychecks after that.

9) The whole spectacle (which I missed because I was working) seemed gross in the extreme. James had always seemed like a decent sort, but he loses some class points.

10) Cleveland. Oh, Cleveland. Being from Boston, I thought I knew sports misery. Oh, Cleveland.

1 comment:

  1. The only thing I can say about this is to repeat the headlines on the Toledo Blade's sports page:

    LeBron Shames...

    ReplyDelete

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