It's been nearly a year since I wrote on the subject of LeBron James. Since he has just recently added to his legacy, I felt it was the right time. Before I get into all things LeBron, I must point out that Dirk Nowitzki won a championship. Though I maintain the NBA is fixed or, even worse, incompetent, he has to get his due. I have routinely said I think Dirk is a great guy with a ton of skills that seemed like he could never get it done. Regardless of how he did it, he did beat LeBron and get it done. He immediately vaults into the conversation of top NBA guys of his generation. Now let's get to LeBron.
The above picture I found while playing around with Google Image
s, pretty much sums the Finals for Dirk and LeBron. He lost. Again. Badly. This guy doesn't do anything small. W
hen he goes down in flames, it's a total tailspin. Fate, it seems, has a sense of irony, or at the very least dark humor because of how it all went down with the Heat losing to the team they took out in 2006. I also find it ironic on a personal
level because Dirk is a guy who I've compared LeBron to in the past.
Before this year, I argued that they were the same player in terms of accomplishments. Both had MVP awards, a Finals appearance in whic
h they got toasted and great regular season numbers. The difference was the media spin and the public perception. Dirk was viewed as an underachiever and it was a forgone conclusion that LeBron was going to win 10+ championships. It's amazing how quickly the script can be flipped. Dirk is now being flung up into the stratosphere as a greatest ever candidate and LeBron is getting kicked by every news reporter with a spare foot. I have three words for these people, cut the shit. You made him, now you get to keep him. Let him cry on your collective shoulder.
I might feel bad for LeBron, as I have for Dirk, if I thought he was a guy that "gets it", but he clearly do
esn't. This is obvious from his post Finals comm
ents that basically amount to, "you can all say what you want but I have millions of dollars and so what if I was exposed as a fraud for the second year in a row?" In a way I feel like Denny Green in full on press conference profanity laced tirade mode. To paraphrase Mr. Green, LeBron, at least to me and few of my buddies, is who we thought he was. He isn't the best ever, he's not even the best on his team.
LeBron fail
ed for a few reasons. Primarily, he failed because he doesn't have a hyper developed skill to rely on. All the great ones have it. In the case of Dirk it's his shooting. He will get you to his spot and hit mid range jumpers all day. Jordan and now Kobe will post you or pick and roll you to death. LeBron doesn't have a skill like this. Despite being built like a defensive end, his post game is atrocious and he isn't a good enough shooter to rely on it for long stretches. When the defense decides to take away his athletic drives to the basket he has no plan B and it showed. Blame him for planning parades when he should have been in the gym working on his moves. He has never put the time in to develop his skills and it's catching up to him.
The bigger issue is the heart and
desire that weren't to be found. LeBron was scared. One of his teammates should have told him that "Checkout is at 11" only meant from his hotel room, not the 4th quarter. He wanted nothing to do with it. Zero. No one who embraces the best player ever role shrinks from a moment like that. Those are THE moments for players like that. No one told Jordan that games were big or 4th quarters were huge, that came from within. LeBron doesn't have that. The heart is like any other muscle, if you exercise it, it doesn't develop. LeBron is such an athlete that he has never had to dig deep to g
et it done and develop the heart needed to overcome. He doesn't have it in him. He has global icon crap and a serious lack of guts. I could have respected him if he shot every single time and went into full on chuck mode, he's paid to do that and should as "the best player on the Heat". He didn't because he couldn't.
It's like when your mom told you to get your room clean by the weekend. You had all week to clean it and be fine. What did you do? You walked around like a king all week, blowing it off. Then Friday came and you realized you were screwed and by that time it was too late, Saturday was pulled from your clutches. That's how LeBron was delivered into Finals. He's spent the last seven years walking around like a king and
when the big moment finally came, the one that would shut every doubter he have up, he blew it because he set himself up to fail. He never worked to put himself in a position to succeed.
Maybe he will learn, like Dirk did, from his failures but I doubt it. He'll deflect blame, make excuses and hope the long summer and possible lock out help people forget that on the biggest stage the biggest players brought their best and LeBron had to run home to clean his room.
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