At least there's one media member who's not a LBJ jock-sniffer

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At least there's one media member who's not a LBJ jock-sniffer Empty At least there's one media member who's not a LBJ jock-sniffer

Post by babyskyhook Thu May 13, 2010 2:36 am

Thankfully, Woj has the balls to tell it like it is.


http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_ylt=AtnnjaydsM5dPwhbLT9_Qb28vLYF?slug=aw-lebroncavs051210



LeBron’s moment of truth awaits

By Adrian Wojnarowski, Yahoo! Sports
May 12, 4:05 am EDT

CLEVELAND – This isn’t important enough to LeBron James(notes). That’s the uncompromising, unconquerable truth. Everything has come too easy to him, and he still doesn’t believe that winning championships takes a consuming, obsessive desire that borders on the maniacal. He is chasing high school and college kids on recruiting trips for his fledgling marketing company, medicating his insecurities with unending and unfolding free-agent dramas.

James is chasing Warren Buffett and Jay-Z the way he should be chasing Russell and Jordan and Bryant. He wants CEOs to bow before him, engage him as though he is a contemporary on the frontlines of industry. Only, the truth of the matter is, he’s a singular talent who’s going to watch his playoff failures start to chip away at the thing that seems to matter most to him: his marketability and magnetism.

Most of all, James is forever selling something of himself – an ideal, an image, a possibility. Something nebulous, something promised. He’s chasing a global platform, the bright, blinking billion-dollar fortune, and he’s largely gotten the natural order of things backward.

Stop strutting, stop preening, stop stomping away as an ungracious winner, a sore loser, and win something, LeBron.

Win something now.

No more excuses. Not now, not after this biblical bottoming out that pushes the Cleveland Cavaliers to the brink of an unthinkable collapse. And yet, after Tuesday’s ferocious failure of his professional career, the encompassing embarrassment of a 120-88 Game 5 loss to the Boston Celtics, James dismissed his unthinkably poor performance with this colossal cop-out: “I spoil a lot of people with my play. When you have three bad games in seven years, it’s easy to point them out.”

Who is he to be indignant after he gave a playoff game away? What’s he ever won to be so smug to the masses? That’s what drives the Celtics crazy about James. Eventually, he will understand his greatness isn’t measured on the hit-and-runs through NBA cities across a long season. It’s measured now, in the teeth of the battle, when a tiny guard, Rajon Rondo(notes), has stolen his stage and nearly a series.

Somewhere, the whispers of the game’s greatest talents became a murmur louder and louder: James still doesn’t understand part of the price of greatness is inviting the burden on yourself and sparing those around you. He missed 11 of 14 shots. James didn’t score a basket until the third quarter. He was terrible, just terrible, and yet James couldn’t bring himself to say the worst home playoff loss in franchise history began and ended with him.

For all of James’ unselfishness on the floor, he can still be so selfish off it. They could’ve lined up the greatest players in the game’s history Tuesday night in the primes of their championship lives, and there isn’t one of them who would’ve deflected and deferred like the self-proclaimed King James. They would’ve been livid and they would’ve put it on themselves. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant(notes). Tim Duncan(notes) and, yes, Shaquille O’Neal(notes).

They had titles, and they would’ve mutilated themselves for public consumption. James is too cool, too stubborn and maybe too self-unaware. This is on me, they would’ve told you, and, I’ll get us out of this. They would’ve made sure teammates and opponents, fans and enemies understood. They would’ve made sure the whole world understood: This isn’t how an MVP plays in the playoffs. This isn’t how he lets a legacy linger in limbo. What you heard out of James was self-righteous: “I put a lot of pressure on myself to go out and be great and the best player on the court. When I don’t, I feel bad for myself.”

This wasn’t the night to feel bad for himself. There’s been enough pity for him in this series. As much as anything these past two years, the Cavaliers have taken on James’ persona: Entitled, arrogant and expectant that the sheer divine right of his greatness will win them a ring. Only, the Celtics are proud, old champions arisen out of the rubble and on the brink of closing out the Cavaliers on Thursday night at the Boston Garden. No one saw this coming on Tuesday night, the surgical removal of the Cavaliers’ hearts surrounded with a stunned silence that devolved into the debris of boos.

James lorded over one of the most agonizing, humiliating losses a championship contender ever endured. So much comes with this collapse, bookended with decades of a city’s championship sports futility set against the free agency for the son it spawned in neighboring Akron.

This collapse will cost people jobs. This will change the course of the franchise. Where’s James going? And as job security goes, the CEO of British Petroleum has more going for him than Mike Brown right now. Forty feet away Tuesday night, Kentucky’s John Calipari was sitting under the basket with Leon Rose, the agent Cal shares with his buddy, LeBron.

James invites these storylines into the gymnasium, this drama, and leaves everyone else to live with the consequences. Owner Dan Gilbert has fostered a culture of permissiveness with James that hasn’t served him or the franchise.

The Cavs live in fear of him, his moods, his whims, and it’s the reason no one ever tells him the truth: Hey ’Bron, you looked childish for refusing to shake the Orlando Magic’s hands last season. You sounded small grumbling about criticism for your wildly up-and-down play in this series. James walked out of the Q on Tuesday night and there’s no guarantee he’ll ever return as a Cavalier here.

Yet make no mistake: James has enough around him. This team isn’t perfect, isn’t assured of beating the Los Angeles Lakers, but it has no business losing in the conference semifinals – never mind failing to even compete. And, yes, as much as ever, this is on James.

He invited all this drama about walking out on his hometown team this summer, and now free agency hung over the Q like an anvil. Here’s a city that’s waited 46 years for a championship, a town that reacts viciously to the sheer suggestion that James could leave for New York this summer. These fans have been much better to James than he’s been to them. It hasn’t been the media that’s built his role in the summer of 2010 to a crescendo, but James himself. He constantly manipulated it with suggestions and hints and wink-winks to New York.

James proclaimed July 1, 2010, as the biggest day in the history of basketball, ramping up suspense of his ultimate decision: Do I stay or do I go? What it has done is throw more palpable pressure in the air, more desperation, and it’s come back to haunt him now.

James says the Cavaliers know all about what it takes, but he knows about winning in the regular season. This is a different time, a different game. Three bad games in seven years? He’s kidding himself. Now, he has a championship cast around him. Now, he’ll be judged. No one gives a damn what he did in the regular season.

Perhaps sooner than later, he’s going to get his coach fired for losing this series. Or the next to Orlando. He’s mocked Brown for acting too angry with the Game 2 thrashing, but the coach understood what James refused to acknowledge until Tuesday night: The Cavs have been wildly inconsistent in these playoffs and they’re nowhere near playing championship ball.

Across the regular season, James can play hard, let his talent take over and embark on all the side gigs that gobble his time.

This isn’t a part-time thing. Winning everything takes a single-minded, obsessive devotion. Michael Jordan had it. Kobe Bryant does, too. They didn’t want to win championships, they had to win them. They needed them for validation and identity and, later, they became moguls. LeBron James is running around recruiting college kids to his marketing company. He picks up the phone, tells them, “This is the King,” and makes his pitch to be represented in his stable. Think Kobe would ever bother with this? Or Michael? Not a chance when they were on the climb, not when they still had a fist free of rings.

LeBron James is on the clock now, and Game 6 in Boston could be for his legacy in Cleveland. He has been prancing around the edges for too long now, angling for a transcendent existence he believed his brand could bring him. Only, it’s all a mirage. It’s all vapor until he does the heavy lifting that comes now, that comes in the shadows of Magic and Larry, Michael and Kobe. This isn’t about selling an image to Madison Avenue, about pushing product through all those dazzling plays across the winter months. This is an MVP’s time, his calling, and there was LeBron James standing in the middle of the Cavaliers’ locker room at 11:25 p.m., staring in a long mirror, fixing his shirt before the long walk down the corridor to the interview room.

James stood there for five seconds and 10 and maybe now 20, just staring into the mirror, just taking a long, long look at himself. For the first time in his career, the first time when it’s all truly on him, maybe the sport stood and stared with him. All hell breaking loose, all on the line now. Forget everything in his life, all the make-believe nonsense, Game 6 and maybe Game 7 will promise to serve as the most honest hours of his basketball life.
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Post by sinus007 Thu May 13, 2010 9:08 am

Hi babyskyhook,
You're right. He's not afraid to be critical of LJ. There was one more article he wrote. I believe it was about jersey # change. Very critical.

AK
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Post by jeb Thu May 13, 2010 10:01 am

I think this is lbj 's last chance to get his shit turned around. Very accurate little article.

Espn's and co's fawning over the guy has been comical. The respect and room the refs have given him has been bad for the game. This is a guy who aint done a damn thing. Nothing. George Mcginnis had a better resume.
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Post by Sam Thu May 13, 2010 10:05 am

This article is one more example how the combination of Lebron's self-promotion and the media machine make it all about him. IF the Celtics should be fortunate enough to prevail in this series, it will never go down in history as a remarkable achivement spawned by fantastic game plans carried out with unswerving perseverence by a band of uncommon professionals. It will always go down as the series the great Lebron and his minions blew.

I'm not complaining, simply observing rather wryly. Frankly, I'm used to it. As I noted in another thread, most of the basketball world has always been outwardly oblivious to the ways in which the Celtics are different. Columnists, who live and die by pandering to the sensationalist tastes of the masses, invariably focus on what's most titillating. Hollinger invents convoluted formulae that glorify stats and downplay the kinds of intangibles that have always been the Celtics' hallmark. Time and again, the "experts" follow the well-worn formula: predict the worst for the Celtics, and wind up explaining away their achievements by featuring defects among the vanquished. Elgin Baylor was hobbling, or Wilt Chamberlain had to leave the game, or Moses Malone had a hangnail, or poor Rambis was clotheslined by McHale, or Lebron was more detached than some retinas.

Not only am I not complaining. I'm more than resigned to it. In fact, I'd rather miss it if the fourth estate and the masses actually recognized and acknowledged that the Celtics win by not following the conventional, entertainment-driven, star-studded templates. Winning would then lack the added pleasure of observing their consternation.

The media machine is already setting the stage for yet another grand rationalization. Cavs fans are writing open letters to Lebron, asking why he's not winning the series or exhorting him to do so. Not his teammates. Just Lebron. Lost in all the hubbub is any admission that the Boston Celtics might just have something to do with the current state of the series.

Come on Celts. Keep playing like the united band of professionals you are. Circle the wagons if necessary. But find a way to win this thing. I'm badly in need of watching another bout of consternation.

Sam
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Post by sinus007 Thu May 13, 2010 12:18 pm

....IF the Celtics should be fortunate enough to prevail in this series, it will never go down in history as a remarkable achivement spawned by fantastic game plans carried out with unswerving perseverence by a band of uncommon professionals. It will always go down as the series the great Lebron and his minions blew....
Sam,
Very, very true. Thank you.
As for being fortunate tonight - forget about it. I'm afraid refs will go out of their way to give LJ cart blanch and slap all possible fouls on guys in green. IOW, everybody except Celtics will do everything possible to force game 7.

AK
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Post by Sam Thu May 13, 2010 3:47 pm

Oh no, I'll never forget about tonight's game. Not a chance. This is now a one-game series from my point of view. I want them to win that one game. One game at a time.

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Post by NYCelt Thu May 13, 2010 4:52 pm

Me, I've always given LeBron the benefit of the doubt. I sincerely believe he's a supremely gifted athlete and one of the most talented to ever lace 'em up and take the floor. I actually respect his stated desire to ascend to a different plain and become among the worlds wealthiest businessmen. Good for him; I find that goal admirable and I like that drive and ambition. I would never criticize him for that. We're a nation built on opportunity for those willing to work and use whatever leverage they can muster.

I'm never going to blame him for the adoration the media or the league showers on him. He didn't ask for the accolades, he earned them by playing. I don't even think he needs a championship to be among the best ever; there are too many Hall-of-Famers in too many sports who never got a ring to think otherwise.

However, despite that, his "me first" attitude is starting to leak out bigger than the blown oil rig in The Gulf. This is still a guy who owes what he has and what he builds to the fan base around him and his dismissive, conceited remarks about spoiling the fans with his play knock him down a ton compared to the game's greats that helped pave the way for him.

The "King" has forgotten the most important ingredient to obtaining the success he desires; humility.

Here's to knocking a little of that back into him tonight. Ultimately, and oddly, if we can whip his and his teams butt it could end up being the best thing that ever happened to him.

I hope we can help him out.
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Post by bobheckler Thu May 13, 2010 5:18 pm

Sung to the tune of "I'm So Pretty"

me me me me;
me me me me;
me me me me, me me me me, me MEEE!!

Welcome to LeBron's universe. We're privileged to be allowed to drool in it.

If there's a silver lining here (I mean, other than being up 3-2 and playing in Boston), it might be that fans and the big smoochy bears on TV (you know who I'm talking about Chuck) will start to remember old school basketball, which was all about team, and publicly discount David Stern's Cult of the Individual.

bob
.
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Post by bobheckler Thu May 13, 2010 5:32 pm

Another heapin' helpin' of humility, this one from Mike Wise of the Washington Post:

http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/37122223/ns/sports-washington_post/

bob

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Post by Sam Thu May 13, 2010 6:01 pm

Great post, NYCelt

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Post by gyso Thu May 13, 2010 6:05 pm

Bobh,

Here's a little ditty you may remember:

I Me Mine, the Beatles:

All thru' the day I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
All thru' the night I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
Now they're frightened of leaving it
Ev'ryone's weaving it,
Coming on strong all the time,
All thru' the day I me mine.

I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine.

All I can hear I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
Even those tears I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
No-one's frightened of playing it
Ev'ryone's saying it,
Flowing more freely than wine,
All thru' Your life, I me mine.

I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine.

All I can hear I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
Even those tears I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
No-one's frightened of playing it
Ev'ryone's saying it,
Flowing more freely than wine,
All thru' your life I me mine.

_________________
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Post by bobheckler Thu May 13, 2010 6:28 pm

All thru' the day I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
All thru' the night I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
Now they're frightened of leaving it
Ev'ryone's weaving it,
Coming on strong all the time,
All thru' the day I me mine.

I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine.

All I can hear I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
Even those tears I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
No-one's frightened of playing it
Ev'ryone's saying it,
Flowing more freely than wine,
All thru' Your life, I me mine.

I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine.

All I can hear I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
Even those tears I me mine, I me mine, I me mine.
No-one's frightened of playing it
Ev'ryone's saying it,
Flowing more freely than wine,
All thru' your life I me mine.


gyso,

Here's the updated King James hip hop version:



All through the game; it be mine, it be mine, it be mine.
All of the fame, it be mine, it be mine, it be mine.
Now they're frightened I'm leaving it
'cause I've been trying to deceive them
Blowing hot and cold all the time.
But all through this game, it be mine...

I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine,
I-I-me-me mine.

All I can hear is it be mine, it be mine, it be mine.
For all of your tears, they're not mine, they're not mine, they're not mine.
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Post by jeb Thu May 13, 2010 7:54 pm

nyc

just beautiful
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Post by babyskyhook Fri May 14, 2010 12:21 am

It's amazing how so many of the talking heads, even after Game 5, were still picking the Cavs.

Do they even watch or understand the game ?
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Post by jeb Fri May 14, 2010 12:24 am

sky

they need a daddy.
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