With LeBron James finally winning his first NBA championship, his well-known vocal detractors will spend this offseason looking for new material to hold against the self-appointed "King".
No more witty Facebook/Twitter memes with Kobe and MJ about LeBron not having a ring.
No more talk about LeBron shrinking in big moments.
No more nonsense about LeBron James being Dwyane Wade's sidekick.
The Miami Heat is LeBron James' team and the NBA is now the property of "The Akron Hammer".
Of course, that didn't stop the anti-LeBron crowd from rushing to make excuses.
"Oh, it was a shortened season. They should have a asterisk."
Try telling that to Tim Duncan when he won his first title in the strike-shortened 1998-99 season. Also, would you be so quick to discredit this year's Finals if the Heat had lost? I'll answer that for you: No, you wouldn't.
"Derrick Rose was hurt. LeBron got lucky!"
Injuries are a part of the game. The Bulls were a 1 seed with last year's MVP missing almost half the season. Would having D.Rose have gotten Chicago out of the first round? Absolutely. Would it have guaranteed the Bulls getting past Boston? No. Lest we forget, LeBron beat these same Bulls last year in the Eastern Conference Finals, and did so by stifling Rose for most of the series. What exactly made this incarnation of the Bulls different from last year? The signing of Richard Hamilton?
"Well, it took LeBron much longer to win a ring that it should have. Kobe and Jordan did it way sooner."
Kobe had Shaq from the minute he laced up a pair of shoes for the Lakers. Jordan didn't win his first until '91, at the age of 27(same as LeBron), and needed a Hall of Famer like Scottie Pippen and one of the greatest coaches in any sport in Phil Jackson to do so. Maybe it's because LeBron blew through the regular season so effortlessly that we are lead to believe that those Cavalier teams he carried were stacked. Truth be told, neither Kobe or MJ would have beaten teams like the "Big Three"-led Celtics with guys like Mo Williams and Antawn Jamison as the leaders of their supporting cast. Jordan's last title came on a Bulls team with Pippen, then one of the NBA's 50 greatest players, and Dennis Rodman, one of the game's best rebounders and interior presences, entrenched as sidekicks. Those six Bulls title teams featured some excellent role players with guys like Steve Kerr, John Paxson and Horace Grant. Why are we so quick to assume Jordan was the sole reason for that Bulls dynasty. As for Kobe, he had the game's best big man and one of the five greatest centers of all-time in Shaquille O'Neal. His supporting cast had clutch shooters like Glen Rice, Robert Horry and Derek Fisher. When Shaq left, he was replaced eventually with an All-Star forward in Pau Gasol and eventually joined by Ron Artest, the game's premier perimeter defender. This wasn't two legends winning titles with school kids.
It's the Jordan comparison that brings us to why we are here. Since he was a junior in high school, the bar for LeBron James' expectations were to be the "next Michael Jordan", which is funny because we were always lead to believe there would never be another Michael Jordan. All of the criticisms laid upon King James could have just as easily be laid upon His Airness.
LeBron's a me-first showboat. He's selfish(not true on either side, but probably more true for Jordan as LeBron is one of the best passing forwards to ever play the game). He's too commercial, too focused on globalizing his own brand.
While, this piece will inevitably come off as another me resurrecting my role as a "LeBron apologist", I will say that LeBron did spend a lot of his career hot-dogging and being a bit over-celebratory for his achievements. I'll also re-state that I hated everything about the idea of "The Decision", which is something I wrote on here shortly after it happened.
With all that said, this is my retort. LeBron James came into this league as a 18-year old phenom. He grew up before our very eyes. He didn't have the luxury of going to a great basketball institution like North Carolina and being mentored by a legend like Dean Smith. He rushed into the NBA because that's what the people in his ear kept telling him he had to do. It turns out that wasn't a mistake from a basketball standpoint but it hurt him from a maturity standpoint. Michael Jordan would have never done anything like "The Decision" because he was smart enough and mature enough to know better. He didn't have people in his corner telling him it was a good idea when it wasn't. LeBron made a mistake. He apologized for it. Some may never forgive him and that's fine, but the reaction over that debacle, two years later, is a bit overblown.
My other response is two open-ended questions, which I am asking honestly to get an answer from the anti-LeBron movement, but also am willing to offer my own take on.
My first question is, if LeBron James didn't get his need to pound his chest after every dunk and market himself as a brand from the great Michael Jordan, the man he grew up(like most kids) idolizing, who did he get it from? Did he get it from the father that was hardly there throughout his life? His mother? His friends, who didn't possess an eighth of his talent?
You see, we spent so much time during the 90's being in awe of the greatness of "Air Jordan" that we never contemplated the effects of the seeds that were being planted. We never thought about what kids growing up emulating their role model would be like when they become adults who follow the same path to the NBA. LeBron James is a product of the Michael Jordan experience. So was Kobe Bryant. So was Harold Minor, J.R. Rider, Tracy McGrady, Gerald Green, and a slew of other young athletes who grew up wearing Jordan's sneakers and working on their vertical while sticking their tongue out during every jam, They are like his illegitimate children. Some went on to lengthy careers. Some flamed out. But they are all trees that grew from the seed of America's Jordan obsession.
Now, Jordan wasn't a complete hot-dog. Sure, he stuck his tongue out a lot and shrugged his shoulders when he put up ridiculous shooting performances. He raised his fist in the air after clutch moments or jumped into the air swinging his fists like after he hit "The Shot" against Cleveland, but Jordan mixed a whole lot of flash with hard work and professionalism. That's why Kobe draws more of a comparison to MJ than LeBron does. Kobe has made a career of walking like Mike, talking like Mike, acting like Mike, cheating on wife like Mike and using Mike's career as the bar he tirelessly works to surpass. LeBron took the other stuff from Mike. He plays with his mouthpiece, yells to the heavens after thunderous dunks and seemingly does everything with the idea of the best possible marketing effect in mind, hence "The Decision".
However, from a potential standpoint, LeBron has a chance to surpass Kobe and even "His Airness" in terms of legacy and THAT is why LeBron haters(who are also Jordan lovers) come out of the woodwork to take shots at King James whenever they get a chance. They see him as a threat, a threat to a throne that seemed unreachable. LeBron James is a bigger, stronger, faster, equally(if not more so) athletic version of Jordan. The way the NBA sits right now, he has a chance to win at least the next three championships if he and his team continue to mature. He's been to three NBA Finals and he's just 27. He has three MVP's and, unlike Mike, he shows no interest in leaving the hardwood for the baseball diamond. Six rings seems like a stretch for King James but how LeBron dominates the league during his prime will determine how he stacks up against MJ. After all, Jordan's prime coincided with Larry Bird's back failing him and Magic Johnson getting infected with HIV. The level of competition was relatively low beyond the Malone-Stockton Jazz and some spirited efforts from Patrick Ewing's Knicks and Reggie Miller's Pacers, among others. As for LeBron, Kobe may be fading into the sunset as are Boston's "Big Three" as well as Time Duncan, but he still has guys like Derrick Rose, Chris Paul, Dwight Howard, and Kevin Durant to compete with. If the path back to the Finals seems easy for LeBron going forward, the same can be said about Durant's ownership of the West. Who really stands in either two's way in the next couple years?
LeBron James is the mutated version of Jordan's seeds. Michael Jordan was the father of flash and marketing and he himself was a product of guys like David Thompson and Julius Erving, athletic showmen who didn't have the marketing vehicle that Jordan did to become worldwide phenomenons. MJ's two greatest sons were Kobe and LeBron. Kobe followed Dad's orders and became a spitting image of his legendary father(Jordan, not his actual father "Jelly Bean" Bryant). LeBron was more of the rebel, taking aspects of his father's infamy but realizing that he was too big, fast and strong to follow a career similar to his smaller younger brother and father. If Jordan is Biggie, Kobe is Jay-Z and LeBron is Kanye. Jay-Z clearly is a Biggie clone, but became his own entity by benefiting from the technological advances at his exposure(and also by not getting killed in Las Vegas). Kanye followed Jay-Z, but eventually realized that he was different and set out to make his own mark in his own way by being rebellious. People used to hate Jay-Z for being a Biggie wannabe but Jigga earned their respect and flourished as a master of his craft and a businessman. Jay-Z's "retirement" is like Kobe's sexual assault charge, a dark spot in a brilliant career that he had to bounce back from. LeBron's first NBA Finals was like Kanye's "College Dropout", a masterful performance that showed a young star coming of age but showed that he wasn't quite there yet. His first MVP was "Late Registration", a sign of great things to come. His Finals loss to Dallas last year was Kanye's outburst at the MTV Awards, a shocking disappointment that brought the vitriol of his detractors out in full force. Obviously, Kobe and LeBron will never come together to "Watch The Throne" but it would be just as astounding of a collaboration if they do. The bottom line is, if you're going to knock LeBron for his faults, you should also criticize who he got it from. Like any unruly child, eventually you have to blame the parents.
My second question doesn't really have an answer so much as it a starting point for a hypothetical debate. The day after the Finals ended, I posed this question on Facebook: If we had Facebook and Twitter and the round-the-clock media access and technological advances we have now back in the 90's, would we have rooted as hard against Michael Jordan getting his first ring as we did against LeBron James?
This question kind of speaks to the last one, in that we never knew what glorifying the greatness of a guy like Jordan would mean for the future. We never realized how lucky Jordan was and, really, neither did Jordan(although he's finding that out now as failed office exec). Jordan didn't have the prominence of YouTube re-capping all his hits and misses on an endless loop. He didn't have bloggers throwing daggers at him on a nightly basis. Hell, he didn't even have writers throwing darts at him because they were all so enamored with him. SportsCenter wasn't the entity in the 90's that it is today. He didn't have guys like Skip Bayless endlessly bashing him on a national television show like Bayless does to LeBron every chance he gets. He didn't have every play he made analyzed on Twitter. He never had to worry about "trending". He didn't have to worry about Facebook groups being made about him. There were no funny memes taunting his failed achievements. There was nothing more than some beat writers singing his praises in articles and occasionally on "The Sports Reporters". LeBron doesn't have a guy like Ahmad Rashad being the Fonsworth Bentley to his Diddy like Rashad was for Jordan. LeBron's "yes men" are in his entourage. Jordan's "yes men" were in the media and the league offices. If Michael Jordan thought the pressure of being a global superstar was too much and he had to take a sabbatical and go play baseball in the mid-90's, imagine how tough it would have been for him with 24/7 news coverage and networks needing to fill air time by posing endless rhetorical questions or displaying meaningless stat comparisons. Imagine if Jordan turned on the TV every day to see him being compared side-by-side to Magic or Bird or watch writers blast him on "Around The Horn" or "PTI" and question whether he's clutch or if he can "win the big one". Jordan had it relatively easy. By time we had the vehicle to criticize him, he was long gone from the NBA and wearing a suit and tie as an owner. That's why writers go so hard on Jordan now as he's ruining the Charlotte Bobcats and after he ruined the Wizards. They're making up for lost time and missed opportunities. All that time they spent kissing Jordan's ass, they could have spent kicking it. That's also why they ridicule LeBron so much. Somebody has to suffer for the sins of the father.
It's a hypothetical question with no real answer. We can't put LeBron in a time machine and zip him back to the 90's so he can dominate during easier times, both from a competitive standpoint and a media standpoint. We also can't make Jordan relive his prime in today's world. But the purpose of the question is to offer perspective. It's hard to be a great athlete in today's society because fans have an almost insatiable need to be loved and their expectations are far too lofty. Try telling Charles Barkley it took LeBron too long to win a ring. Try telling Karl Malone that LBJ disappears in big moments. Try telling Patrick Ewing that LeBron's career has been disappointing.
LeBron James is a champion now. He's leaped over the hurdle that all the Negative Nellies in the country have feverishly tried to raise higher and higher. I'm not demanding you love LeBron because, Lord knows, I don't love Michael Jordan but I do believe you have to respect him. Don't hold LeBron accountable for being like every other kid in America who wanted to "be like Mike". Don't hate him because he gets too much media coverage because he's not the only athlete to dominate SportsCenter. Look at Brett Favre or Tom Brady or Peyton Manning. He's a product of a legacy we built. We helped create LeBron James.
Instead of finding reasons to pick him apart, why not just sit back and enjoy? Trust me. He's just getting started and he's gonna be here awhile.
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