Blogger 365 Day 211 - Lebron watch

     Now that the media firestorm has subsided somewhat I guess I should take a run at my opinion of Lebron James playing basketball in Cleveland this coming year.  I don't care.  Easy enough, right?  I am not much of an NBA fan to begin with and I did not lose all that much sleep over whichever team decided that they were going to pay him tens of millions of dollars a year to play in their city.  It's just not one of my pressing concerns.

     That being said, the initial narrative when Lebron first joined the NBA was that here was the typical story of hometown boys does good, playing for the closest thing to a hometown team that the NBA could offer in the Cleveland Cavaliers.  But during his first stint in Cleveland there were plenty of incidents where Lebron put pressure on the team to sign certain players he liked and let go of players he did not. While his basketball skills are quite formidable, Lebron's skills as a general manager aren't quite as good, because even surrounding King James with players pretty much of his own choosing, the Cavaliers went nowhere.  So when his contract ran out, Lebron did what any self respecting guy would do after helping to create the situation Cleveland was in, he made a giant media spectacle of deciding he would rather play in Miami.  Because with teammates like Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, surely King James would win a title.  In fact he won two there, though when he first showed up in Miami he though about winning a few more than that....




But again after hand picking his teammates, once things started to get tough in Miami Lebron did what Lebron does best, he left.  This time though he didn't have a television spectacle telling us where he would play this coming year, he grew up and learned from his mistakes after all (or so was the narrative), instead it was a quietier media circus this time around before announcing that he was going back to Cleveland.  And Clevelanders, who must suffer some sort of short term memory loss, acted as if a conquering hero had returned home, as opposed to a spoiled athlete who left their town when he couldn't get everything his own way and returned only to start the process again, pressuring his new/old team to sign certain players that he wanted to play with. 

There has always been an argument as to who the greatest basketball player of all time is, and usually the names of people on that list are pretty short, including Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Lebron James.  I honestly don't know who is or isn't but I do know that Jordan and Bryant never quit on their teams.