LABron James Discussion: Olympics MVP

The most entertaining outcome would have been if LeBron went to NY with Stoudemire and Bosh still joined Wade in Miami.

 

this is what i'm talking about. amare ended up being perpetually hurt, but the opportunity was there that summer to form some fun teams and instead we got that junk.

 

and this is exactly why lebron took on his "leGM" role after leaving cleveland the first time. he had to make sure that what happened in his first stint there didn't happen again

 

Sure they wanted to win and they wanted to form a superteam but how is it non-competitive when Lebron fully played out his contract and for 7 years was on absolute s*** team but SAS doesn't get the same level of scrutiny for blatantly tanking when they had an MVP David Robinson hurt for the best prospect in a decade in Duncan. It's like people getting mad at the Pau Gasol trade - that was clearly "non-competitive". Or the equally ridiculous KG to Boston or Rasheed to Detroit moves. Again big discrepancy in thought if your team does this versus a player but also memory holes a lot of moves such as the Malone and Payton LAL signings, Barkley to join Hakeem's Rockets because those player driven moves specifically to win a title didn't work out!

In regard to the comparison with Durant: I don't find your argument convincing when trying to compare Durant who went from a stacked OKC team that came within an all-time playoff performance to getting to the Finals a second time and then joining a 72 win team to Lebron leaving the s*** show he was stuck with in Cleveland

 

Yep I don't think anyone can understand James thought process without understanding how awful Cleveland management was and the lift Lebron had to do.
This is the Cleveland team he got Lebron to the Finals with Z, Gooden, Varejao, Larry Hughes, Sasha Pavlovic. This is the team that won 66 wins and was considered the best Cleveland team of all time till the second Lebron stint: Z, Ben Wallace, Varejao, Mo Williams, Delonte West, Wally World.

If you're talking about legacy winning with that crap is freaking amazing

 

gasol was a trade where one tanking team got what they wanted and the contending team got what they wanted. gasol was shopped for a year with no takers. teams were witholding their third best players in all trade scenarios.

and trades aren't free agency, so i'm not even sure where you're going.

and once again, this isn't about which is worse between durant and lebron, it's about what lebron doing being what made what durant did possible. if durant did it first, i'd be mad at him. name the player who pulled something like this before lebron. C Bags were drafts and trades. lakers were drafts and trades for showtime, shaq FA and draft for threepeat era.

malone and payton were out of the league a year later, just like barkley. man, you're making arguments about irrelevant stuff to defend lebron's non-competitiveness. just admit it was a punk move. durant's was also a punk move.

leGM was basically as bad as cleveland, except he'd have traded their botched lotto picks for flawed veterans, then demanded the actual front office fix his mess.

 

lol: a player tries to create a super team after having s*** talent for 7 years - he's a punk, a team creates a super team completely ok. If we actually take the argument to the logical end, great players should be demanding to go worse teams to prove they are competitive History and context matters though and with Lebron it clearly does.

 

and if it wasn't for allen, lebron would've only won one ring in miami

 

the team's job is to create a super team. the player's job is to compete.

if you want to grandstand for folks who stack the deck, fine.

the logical conclusion of the argument is that competitors don't stack the deck. when you played ball with your friends, you didn't put all the good ones on one team. unless you were a d*** or a coward.

bird and magic both commented at the time that they'd never have done something like that, and i believed them. they wanted to prove they were the best. joining the other ones who were supposed to be the best to play against people who weren't simply isn't that. i'm not sure why this is complicated, tbh.

edit: btw, check the receipts--thought it was good that kawhi didn't join us and instead went to the clippers. joining us would have been lame, and he knew it.

 

To this day most of the time I've played you shoot to make teams and if the other team is too lopsided winning 2-3 easy you flip a guy over to even things out. With Lebron this was flipped he didn't have stacked teams like Bird and Magic (easy to say you want to compete when you have two of the most dominant teams of all time on your side), he was the dude who got the short end of the stick and made a move to change it.

 

LeBron and KD both made horrible PR choices for the sake of getting over the hump. Both were like hiring a hooker to lose your V card.

LeBron was playing with absolute crap for years and management seemingly did very little to add necessary talent. Miami with Bosh and Wade was gross, though. Stacking the deck beyond belief.

But Durant's seemed worse to me, personally. The Warriors were 2 minutes away from a title and capping off a historic season. He basically joined the title team that beat him. I don't think it's any different than if Luka was a free agent this year and joined Boston. Ultimate, ultimate soft move.

 

and changing it honorably would have been teaming up with one and not two of the top 10 players in the game at the time. again, their whole point was that they felt that they had not evened the odds, they had tilted them entirely. that was the point. they basically said so. that's not sporting. that's gaming the system. some people appreciate that; i don't. if you like that sort of thing, follow corporate investment and not something that's supposed to be a sport. interestingly, i view this the same i way i view defending harden's antics at his peak--that's not sports, man. "the refs let him do it" doesn't absolve him from being fundamentally impure from sporting perspective.

and this whole discussion started because i said without lebron, kd wouldn't have dared do what he did (which was, yes, even worse). prior to lebron, there really isn't an example of a prime superstar pulling such a thing. now, it's become accepted to the point that there are suggestions that you're stupid for not doing it. i think that's bad for the game and the fans.

 

Can't dispute Abeer's underlying point that LeBron going to Miami broke the dam of players forming these super teams, rather than front offices assembling them. I would ultimately like to go back to a pre-Decision NBA where LeBron went to the Knicks or stayed in Cleveland, Durant stayed in OKC or even went to the C-Bags, and the Durant/Kyrie/Harden trio never assembles in Brooklyn (especially because I think its much less likely we do the Russ trade if that Brooklyn trio doesn't exist).

But we ultimately still got some compelling basketball from 2011 to 2014, which was the fear when LeBron and Bosh signed in Miami. In contrast, I've never been as uninterested in the NBA as I was from 2017-2019.

 

Oh, it is surely at the top of the list.
Nobody could honestly argue the contrary- at least not throughout the time period in which I’ve been alive.
Looking back at LeBron’s LeGM-ing, the only thing that really bothered me, as well as most sports fans, is the manner in how he made his announcement- he had to make a spectacle with his own sit down special. He would have gotten a lot less shade if they did it low key, instead of all the planned celebrations before they even played one game for the Heat together. Well, there is also the forcing of Klutch players onto his team each season, which severely limits the GM’s options.

 

i believe he said he regretted making it a spectacle almost immediately after it happened

the 2011 finals loss changed lebron. no more caring about what other people say or trying to be the villain. that loss made him focus 110% on bball and expanding his game to add a post/midrange game as well as a 3 pt shot instead of relying on his athleticism so much. losing this finals made him a better player

 

Are teammates not allowed to contribute? lol How much would Kobe and Shaq have won without Horry?

 

Pipe down. That doesn’t fit the anti Bron narrative!

 

at least 2

 

Hell, we may not have won back to back in 2009 and 2010 without FISHER.