Magic
Michael
Bird
Russell
Kareem
C'mon people, LBJ is not better than Larry Bird.
This was cemented the moment he had to team up with his rivals to win a ring. Lebron also benefits greatly from the new hand check rules. Sure he's a supreme athlete, but will never be the shooter that Larry was.
LBJ playing in the 80's = Dominique Wilkins.
Can we really blame Lebron that Cleveland in his 7 years there couldn't even get him a top 50 player in the league to play with? To sum up how bad Cleveland's management was, they had Carlos Boozer. They tried to pull a fast one with the rules and let Carlos Boozer leave. People want to blame Boozer for that, but that was all on the Cavs management. That is what Lebron was dealing with. Lebron also suffers from being just so darn good almost immediately that he made Cleveland too good to have realistic shots at giving him talent in the draft. The Cavs didn't linger in the lottery for awhile like Durant's Thunder. The Cavs also didn't pull a Scottie Pippen out of thin air. The Cavs didn't luck into a top 3 pick the year after Lebron was drafted like the Celtics did (in order to draft McHale). I mean the Lakers landed Magic Johnson to a team that had a top 5 center of all time.
Had Lebron James been drafted to a well run organization, he wouldn't have had to leave to win a title. But the simple reality is the Cavs were a horribly run franchise that made horrid free agent decisions and drafted atrociously bad. The new owner and management seems to actually be drafting fairly well, but they certainly did not when Lebron was there.
My feeling was LeBron was always pressuring the team to make big moves to bring in more talent if they wanted to have a chance of him sticking around. He basically used his ability to leave the team to hold the franchise hostage and the results were fairly predictable.
My feeling is that the alternative (quietly waiting while Cleveland fails to get him much help) wouldn't have been all that palatable a solution. It sure didn't work for KG.
exactly. Lebron didn't really start making a stink until the 08-09 season (when Cleveland lost to Orlando). You know his 6th year there and after he had already re-signed the first time.
The problem was quite simply, Cleveland is not a desirable free agent location and Cleveland did a horrible job of drafting so they had very few good players and almost no one that they could trade to bring in a good player.
Everyone loves to pile on Lebron for intentionally teaming up with Wade and Bosh, but some how Shaq+Kobe, Magic/Worthy/Kareem, Bird/Mchale/Parrish/DJ feel more "organic," even though the endgame is identical. It's just the latter three were due to smart management and the first was due to smart players.
It's more that the best player on the Lakers and Celts didn't switch to teams with better players in order to win.
This is just conjecture on my part, but I'm guessing that if LeBron had Kareem and Worthy on his team or McHale, Parish, and DJ, he probably wouldn't have switched to a team with better players in order to win. We'll never know.
His options were to 1) leave and make a more effective run at the NBA title or 2) stay and be like KG in Minnesota, carrying well inferior players. He chose to leave. I can't blame him.
In his last series loss against the Celtics, Boston had the better coach and four of the five best players in the series. His best teammate in Cleveland, Mo Williams, certainly isn't McHale, Kareem, Pippen, or Kobe.
His Finals team in 2007 might be the worst starting lineup in Finals history : Larry Hughes, Sasha Pavlovic, Drew Gooden, and Zydrunas Ilgauskas coached by Mike Brown. That's putrid.
No NBA player has ever won an NBA title alone. LeBron gave Cleveland 7 years. The best they could do was Mo Williams and Mike Brown. I'd be willing to bet that Pat Riley, Jerry West, Danny Ainge, or Red Auerbach would have done better in 7 years. Don't you agree?
