Four years ago LeBron James left Cleveland. I agreed with that decision.
He took his talents to South Beach. I shook my head and couldn't believe it.
I wanted James to leave Cleveland and never look back. If I'm honest, as a Mavericks fan, I wanted him to come to Dallas. Besides that pipe dream, I wanted to see him in New York. Or on the Clippers, creating a legacy that would be the subject of documentaries and books for years to come.
Instead, LeBron teamed up with his rival Dwyane Wade and went to four straight Finals, winning two of them. But maybe to LeBron, Wade wasn't a rival. Maybe it was the Big Three of the Celtics--Ray Allen, Paul Pierce, and Kevin Garnett--that he perceived as his rival. Maybe he saw Wade as an ally and friend instead of a challenger to his title as the best player in the Eastern conference and the NBA.
This brings up a lot of questions. Does the public's perception of a player matter to his historical legacy? Or is the legacy solely up to the player and what he wants to accomplish in his career? Was Dwyane Wade really a contender for LeBron's crown? Who decides which players are rivals? Let's hash it out:
Who decides a player's legacy? When we talk about a player's legacy, we're dealing with a subjective topic. You and I might disagree about who is the best player of all time. We might even disagree on the criteria we use to decide who that is. Do we use championships? Career scoring totals? Anecdotes from former teammates and opponents? It's not scientific and people rarely agree. It's why ESPN has about 23 hours of debate programming on now days.
Ultimately what we're trying to do is put the player's career into perspective. We'll never get the chance to see LeBron James and Michael Jordan play against each other, so we have to find a way to compare them. So we look at their career, and what they accomplished, and whether they achieved more or less than we expected them to throughout their time in the NBA.
But the question remains--who decides that legacy? For instance, maybe LeBron James only set his sight on one championship. When he was a boy, just dreaming of playing in the NBA, maybe he said to himself, "I'm going to work as hard as I can and become good enough to win one NBA championship. That's all I want. I just want to taste that victory once."
If that's the case, LeBron has accomplished more than he set out to as a kid. Based on his letter in Sports Illustrated, one of his goals is to win a championship in Cleveland. If he does that, maybe he's satisfied with his career. Maybe he has numerous other goals we don't know about.
The point is we (NBA fans and the general public) decided almost a decade ago that to be successful LeBron James would have to win as many or more championships than Michael Jordan did. We decided this without LeBron. We put it on him without asking. So why do we get to decide that James didn't reach his full potential? Maybe as an 18 year old kid in Akron, Ohio, LeBron wrote down a list of goals that included making $500 million, winning a championship in Cleveland, and scoring 40,000 career points. If he checks off every one of those items, would he consider himself a success? Would we consider him a failure for only winning three championships?
I don't think there's a right or wrong answer here. It's just something worth considering. Maybe it's a combination of both.
Were Dwayne Wade and LeBron James ever rivals?
I considered LeBron and Wade rivals. After a few years, it was obvious that they were the two best players in the 2003 draft. Carmelo was lurking, but LeBron made the Finals once and Wade won a championship with Shaq. They were both in the Eastern Conference, it looked like they would be meeting in the conference finals year after year.
Except Miami bottomed out after winning the title in 2006. And the Celtics formed their Big 3 of Ray Allen, Paul Pierce, and Kevin Garnett. And Wade, James, and Bosh enjoyed playing with each other in the 2008 Olympics. A lot.
LeBron kept running into the Celtics teams more talented than the ones he carried into the playoffs. I believe he saw those Celtics as his rivals. They kept beating him. They berated him while they did it. Especially Garnett. And Cleveland kept failing to get him any help. The best teammate he had was way past his prime Shaquille O'Neal. He looked around and thought, "I'm supposed to beat three Hall of Famers by myself?"
Dwyane Wade was Lebron's natural rival. It made sense, based on their talent and the situation and the history of the NBA as we know it. But that rivalry never got a chance to develop because of the reasons mentioned above. So it doesn't surprise me that James started looking at Wade as an ally and friend. Both of them knew they weren't going to have a chance at winning a title with that three-headed Celtics monster lurking in their conference unless they teamed up.
Who decides rivalries?
Again, this is real subjective. And I think rivalries are almost never "decided." They just form organically over time, because of insults and circumstances and familiarity and geography. There are a lot of sports rivalries that mean a lot to fans and nothing to the players. Think Yankees-Red Sox.
A lot of times fans will want a rivalry that's just not there. And sometimes rivalries appear out of nowhere, because someone dissed someone, or hit on someone's girl, or strutted a little too much after a dunk, or threw an elbow under the basket. Sometimes rivalries happen just because two teams want to win a title really, really, badly. There's really no predicting these things or making them happen artificially.
In my mind, Wade and James were the perfect rivals. A new Magic and Bird situation. But it never materialized, and I guess that's okay. Celtics-Lebron and Celtics-Heat was really fun to watch. So was Heat-Spurs and Heat-Mavs. And all that matters is if this stuff is entertaining.
No comments:
Post a Comment