Decision II, The Sequel

If LeBron James is close to making a decision about his basketball future you wouldn’t know it, at least from him.  The speculation and scenarios being drawn are all on the if/come and mostly exist in that odd space where wishful thinking repeated often enough magically turns into fact.

James will make whatever decision he needs to make soon enough.  The basis on which that decision will get made has not changed.  He will play basketball for the team that gives him the absolute best path to continue to win championships.  It really is as simple as that and as complicated, for the team that gives him that mythical best chance is a matter of opinion, not fact.

If there is anything amusing at the moment or perhaps delicious is watching/listening/reading the angst of the Miami Heat fan as they ponder life without James, first, then Dwyane Wade, second, then Chris Bosh a distant third.  It’s as if Heat fan continues to harbor the belief that this so called Big 3, in and of itself, presents the best opportunity for more NBA rings.  That belief was delivered a hard blow of reality in this year’s NBA Finals, but why let the facts get in the way.

Dan Le Betard, writing in Monday’s Miami Herald, had a column that mostly rings true until it doesn’t.  His overarching message is that Heat fans need to relax because rumor isn’t fact and unless and until James speaks, there is nothing to see.  That’s fine as far as it goes.  Unfortunately it goes further as Le Betard then essentially runs down the same rat holes to offer the counter theory that James isn’t going anywhere because, I guess, wishful thinking. 

He says James likes Miami, is a team player, yadda yadda yadda.   This is supposed to give a suddenly anxious Miami fan looking for any good news comfort?  Maybe.  But offering it up is to simply provide counterpoint to the other theories out there and why, for example, James will end up back in Cleveland, nothing more.

Nature abhors a vacuum and so do sports fan.  In the absence of real news, they’ll make it up.  The whole Twitter explosion on Sunday about Dan Gilbert’s plane is just another version of “so and so has his house on the market” or “so and so was in town looking for houses.”

So let’s return to, as that great American statesman and linguist Don Rumsfeld would say, to the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns.

James is a mercenary, plain and simple.  He may love Miami.  He may love Akron.  But in truth if this were the mid 1930s and Munich, Germany had a team in the NBA owned by a guy with a funny moustache, James would sign with Mr. Hitler’s group if it presented him with the absolute best path to championships.  Plenty of NBA players took the blood money from serial racist Donald Sterling for years.  James isn’t motivated as much by money because he earns so much off the court.  He’s motivated solely by winning and if that’s with the Munich Stormtroopers James would be the last person to express regret.

James is loyal to this friends and teammates.   That was true in Cleveland and is true in Miami.  It was also be true should he land in still another city.  Remember, kids change schools all the time.  New friends get made.  When you have f-you money, your friends tend to find you anyway.  James didn’t stay in Cleveland out of loyalty to friends and he won’t do it in Miami either unless that loyalty presents him with the absolute best path to championships.

Those are the known knowns.  The known unknowns consist mostly of what James believes provides him the best path to championships.  This will remain unknown until, again to channel Rummy, it’s known and not before.  All of the great and not so great NBA writers with well-placed sources and high minded opinions can speculate all they want about Cleveland’s core of young players and their view of where that puts the team in the league pecking order.  The only analysis that means anything is the one James is currently pondering as he vacations while others simultaneously start and extinguish fires.

The unknown unknowns are the trickiest for it’s theoretically possible that James will alter his thinking and leave his talents in Miami or take them elsewhere based on something other than the absolute best path to championships.  And this is where these kinds of columns tend to fall apart. 

As writers, as speculators, as fans, we crave information.   The less available it is the more we crave it.  In the absence of information we’ll just fill in the blanks ourselves based on nothing more than wishful thinking as to how we want it to turn out or think it ought to turn out.

Truthfully, here anyway, there are no unknown unknowns.  When all is said and done and James has made his decision he’ll say what he’s always said: “I want to win championships and this is the place that gives me the best chance for that.”  If that exact quote or something close enough for government work isn’t said at the time of Decision II, The Sequel, I’ll eat my hat.

There isn’t any real romance to sports.  Things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to.  The only thing you get is what you actually deserve and even then that’s up for grabs.  You don’t get a hole in one on the golf course just because it’s your birthday and you don’t land the best basketball player on the planet just because you think you got screwed by him 4 years ago.

It would mean a great deal to this town to once again have a viable winter diversion.  When James left he took a piece of everyone with him.  He may have matured in these last 4 years but never confuse maturity with sentimentality.  He won’t come to Cleveland just because he thinks he owes it to this town.  He’ll come if at all because, let’s say it together, it gives him the absolute best path to championships.  We can talk about the potential of Kyrie Irving, Andrew Wiggins, Anthony Bennett and whoever else is on the roster when the dust clears. 

The only opinion that has ever mattered in this equation is James’ and if the roster falls short relative to what he sees elsewhere then Cavs fans can again lament their misfortune.  And so that we don’t confuse the issue, the misfortune is not that James didn’t choose Cleveland.  It’s that the Cavs and all their front office changes over the last four years didn’t accomplish nearly enough to make his decision easy for him.

Always a Follower, Never a Leader

The reactions to the Dallas Mavericks winning the NBA Championship, or more likely, the Miami Heat not winning the NBA Championship, are about as expected. You can’t just take a dump on an entire city and its fan base the way LeBron James did on Cleveland and not expect a little backlash.

And for however thoughtful James can appear to be at times, he does have a tendency to become his own worst enemy at just the wrong time, which only feeds the beasts. His press conference afterward was classic James: poorly masked irritation mixed with a healthy disrespect for anyone who doesn’t agree with him and wrapped in a giant tortilla of egomania.

It’s true as James said that once those people who feel good about James losing will eventually have to return to their own lives filled with their own problems while James goes off and lives what he views as a better life. But it’s the underlying premise of it all that eventually will come back to teach him another hard lesson.

James didn’t have the best upbringing and the remnants of it are still ever present. He had no father and his mother had her own problems to deal with. He floated from family to family just looking to belong. He often found himself around people with money but had none himself.

So it doesn’t surprise that so much of how James measure himself against others is on a material scale. He lives in a house in Bath Township that is more on the scale of a hotel than on the scale of the 3,500 square foot houses that surround it. He has a collection of cars he garages separately. He’s got every material good his little heart always wanted but couldn’t afford. He jets around the world, has countless other celebrities as friends and his occupation amounts to shooting a ball into a hoop.

But the suggestion that an abundance of material goods is the only path to happiness is too ridiculous to spend much time debating. I suspect that even James would admit to being content for long stretches of time earlier in life when money wasn’t ever present.

And even if that weren’t ever true for James, it is true for many, many others. People have a way of making the best of almost any situation.

It’s not like James’ life is unencumbered, no matter what he’d have you believe. Generally speaking, the more overhead you take on the more problems you take on as well.

It also can’t be any fun to constantly deal with your own mother and her predilection for public flameouts. As his celebrity grows his circle of true friends probably shrinks. There’s always someone looking for a piece of him, from every worthy charity you could think of to every acquaintance he’s ever made who’s now down on his luck.

And then there is the abject failure he’s had as a professional to reach the only goal that really matters: championships. Division titles are nice. So too are MVP trophies. But until he wins a title, he’s Charles Barkley.

As much fun as it is to celebrate James’ comeuppance for the way he handled the business side of his basketball life, there is a larger point that is being missed and that goes back to that same upbringing. The story as written is that James failed because he once again couldn’t lead a stacked Heat team to the championship. The story that doesn’t get written enough is that James is never going to lead any team to a championship because he’s not a leader in the first place. He’s the most talented follower professional sports has ever seen.

Much has been made about James’ fourth quarter failures in the Mavericks series and indeed in the larger sense James did consistently come up short in that regard. He had a total of 18 fourth quarter points in 6 games and according to the Elias Sports Bureau had the biggest single drop off between regular season scoring average and finals scoring average in NBA history.

Surely much of this should properly be attributed to the Mavericks’ defense and James gave them the proper respect. But if you were looking for anything more from James as to why he wasn’t able to help his team more, he wasn’t offering. Where once all he wanted was just to belong he now lacks the self-awareness to recognize that he’s still on that same search.

Instead, he bristled at any questions about his performance, particularly in those crucial fourth quarters, by suggesting that his other contributions, such as his defense, were being overlooked. It’s akin to the argument that right now Indians fans shouldn’t focus on Shin-Soo Choo’s lack of offense because he’s still a fine defensive player.

But Pat Riley didn’t make a mockery of the NBA’s free agency system just so he could get James to play really nice defense while another team, this time the Mavs, won the championship. He bought and paid for James because he damn well expected James to live up to his 30 ppg average and then some when it was really needed, like games 4, 5 and 6 against those Mavs.

Ah but what Riley and everyone else puzzled by James’ passiveness continues to overlook is that they can pay James a king’s ransom for now and evermore but that isn’t going to fundamentally change his make up. James is passive and deferential. He doesn’t possess the single-mindedness of purpose that Michael Jordan did. James has always just wanted to fit in while someone else drives the car.

James was always the best pure player on any team he was on, from CYO through high school and now as a professional. But until he came to the Cavs, James was never the leader of any of those teams nor was he asked to be. Ultimately, he left Cleveland not because the Cavaliers could never surround James with enough talent to compete for a championship but because in Cleveland the focus would always be on James.

As much as people like to think of James as the center of his own universe, it’s just not how James sees himself. He’s the guy who’d really rather get the assists. If he were in a band, he’d be the drummer. Perhaps he’d be the greatest drummer in the world, but he was never looking to form his own band and insert himself as lead singer.

If James were truly the alpha male of the NBA and had all the leverage the most people attribute to him, then there is no way that a middling role player like Chris Bosh turns his back on him as he did in deciding to go to Miami instead of Cleveland.

Brian Windhorst, writing for ESPN, noted that while James asked both Bosh and Wade to join him in Cleveland, neither player ever gave it any real consideration. Wade flirted with Chicago but wanted to stay in Miami. Bosh told James he was headed to Miami as well. Ultimately, it wasn’t James who made The Decision at all. It was made for him by much stronger and forceful personalities. It was made by Wade and Bosh.

In that context, all of what happened with James in the Boston series last season or what happened to James against the Mavs this season makes perfect sense. It’s convenient to think that James quit but in reality he just lived up to his instincts to play second fiddle and wilted when the spotlight was turned on him alone.

His teammates and his new transient fans in Miami may have expected more but as they will eventually discover, just like his teammates and fans in Cleveland discovered, James gave them all he could.

The Decision

Hollywood could learn something from LeBron James.

Playing his free agency drama as if it were a movie scripted by David Mamet and directed by Oliver Stone, James is keeping the collective basketball fans of several major cities on the edge of their seats with absolutely no idea just yet how this story turns out.

With James’ decision now the culmination of the ultimate reality television show on ESPN Thursday night, James has maximized the tension and angst, particularly for fans in Cleveland. Once Chris Bosh decided to sign with the Miami Heat and Dwayne Wade decided to stay right where he’s at, the focus once again turned to James, just as he wanted it all along.

The only question now is whether “The Decision” ends up taking its place along side “The Drive,” “The Fumble,” “The Shot,” and “The Move” on the shelf of greatest Cleveland sports letdowns. The latter four events are still major headaches to Cleveland fans but the pain has slowly been receding. James has an opportunity to either freshen the pain and keep it throbbing for another decade or so or give Cleveland fans an appropriate retort every time they’re reminded of all their other sports failures.

Yea, we know how this is supposed to turn out. But for once, just once, hope still remains, even as the clock ticks off its final hours.

Listening to both Bosh and Wade explain their rationale for playing in Miami, you get the sense that all of this isn’t as scripted as it certainly could have been. Bosh discussed his decision with ESPN and gave mildly conflicting reasons for playing the prime of his career in South Beach.

First he essentially said that he made his decision irrespective of James because, supposedly, Miami is the best situation for him and his family. That tends to be code for it’s the place that allows him to earn the most money. (Before you send the emails, I fully understand that depending on how it all works out, particularly if there is not a trade with Toronto, that Bosh may earn less salary in Miami than, say, Cleveland. But salary is always just one piece of the money pie anyway.)

Later, in discussing why he didn’t want to come to Cleveland in a sign-and-trade deal with the Cavs, Bosh said he didn’t want to commit without knowing where James would be playing.

Taken together and giving Bosh the benefit of the doubt, it really sounds like the three marquee free agents, Wade, Bosh and James aren’t orchestrating this as much as it might seem.

It also suggests that neither Wade nor Bosh wanted to steal James’ spotlight or be subservient to it. Certainly Bosh could have waited for James to commit and then made a decision, but that would have made him look like, well, James’ bitch, and that’s not a position a guy making $100 million wants to be. This way, I suppose Bosh looks like his own man and you can’t begrudge him that.

With Wade and Bosh now out of the way, the media frenzy around James only grows more intense. In some sense, his decision (lower case “d”) to reveal where he’ll play on ESPN is a master stroke. For a guy building a brand you have to applaud, at least a bit, his ability to commandeer an hour of prime-time and then dictate where the sponsors’ dollars will be spent.

And yet, it still seems all a bit much, if not a bit unseemly as well, particularly if he uses the platform to give Cleveland the shaft. It would be about the worst way I could imagine for James to leave, publicly humiliating the team and town that has nurtured him and provided him every resource it could possibly muster in order to allow him to develop as he has.

It’s hard to overstate the embarrassment the city of Cleveland will feel starting about 1.5 seconds, if that long, after James announces he’s playing for anyone other than Cleveland on Thursday night. Art Modell stuck it to the city from a platform in Baltimore with all the media in attendance. But at least he didn’t stand front and center on primetime in a show of his own making to do it.

Rest assured, though, that if James does leave in this most public of ways, it will easily become at least as big a story as Modell moving the Browns to Baltimore, which up to now qualifies as the biggest story in Cleveland sports history. There’s a good argument it’s a bigger story than the Modell’s sell out.

The immediate economic impact will be huge, but temporary. What will linger far, far longer is the psychological damage. Essentially it will mean that Cleveland, given every economic advantage in this race still couldn’t convince one of its own citizens to stay at home for an extra $30 million.

And while I have great faith in Dan Gilbert and his ability to move forward and put a credible team together without James, it still does make you wonder how the team can ever attract a marquee free agent after having been turned down twice in two days, first by Bosh and then by James.

This is all a negative way of saying that I still think James is staying though my faith is a bit shaky at the moment.

The fallout from James leaving and doing so on national television seems so enormous that I simply have trouble believing he’d do that. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking that James is more thoughtful than that, we’ll see. But for another day or so I struggle with the notion that anyone could be that cruel to the city.

I also get the sense that James ending up in Miami makes it look like he was the follower in this process and not the leader. It’s possible, certainly, that James, Bosh and Wade collectively made the decision and decided on the order in which it would be announced, but it just doesn’t seem likely. Again, perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

However this all turns out, the one saving grace is that this story will finally come to a screeching halt. We can dispense with the dozen or so daily rumors from all the “insiders” and other know-nothings and get on to cursing or praising a decision actually made and then moving on to wherever the road takes the Cavs next.

And as Cleveland sports fans, we’ll know how to deal with it, like we always do. With a shot and a beer and the quiet recognition that given the same choice, we’d have the same hard time actually volunteering to winter in Cleveland, irrespective of the money.