The Boston Herald has the details of West’s pending return to Beantown.
From a pure basketball standpoint, West is a great player to get for the league minimum, but the reason that his market value is so low is because he’s a little crazy and he may or may not have caused the Cavs’ playoff implosion earlier this summer. The signing would definitely add a little extra umph to a potential Heat/Celtics playoff series.
Nevertheless, he’ll bring shooting, defense and versatility off the C’s bench.
GQ interviewed LeBron James before and after “The Decision,” and is publishing a story in the September issue chronicling those pressure-packed days surrounding that widely-panned ESPN special.
Moehringer had unprecedented inside access: a pair of face-to-face meetings shortly before The Decision and a follow-up phone call six days after the fact. During that postmortem interview, when Moehringer asked James what he’d change if he had a do-over, James replied, “Nothing at all.” Bottom line: LeBron doesn’t really care how it went down.
James on Cavs owner Dan Gilbert: “I don’t think he ever cared about LeBron. My mother always told me: ‘You will see the light of people when they hit adversity. You’ll get a good sense of their character.’ Me and my family have seen the character of that man.” He went on to say that Gilbert’s post-Decision screed “made me feel more comfortable that I made the right decision.”
Wow, he wouldn’t change a thing about “The Decision”? This guy really is living on another planet. How could someone be so pigheaded as to not admit that the hour-long special was a bad idea?
And while I agree with the sentiment about Dan Gilbert’s character, by preceding his wise little anecdote about his mother with a reference to himself in the third person, he loses all credibility.
The author of the piece, J.R. Moehringer, answered a few of TrueHoop’s questions. One thing he said was especially interesting:
…but it seems to me that [James] has one formula for success in his life and that comes out of his high school experience.
This really comes across when you watch the “More Than a Game” documentary about LeBron and the Akron Fab Five. He thrives, he’s happiest, he does his best when he is surrounded by friends. He just didn’t feel like that was happening in Cleveland. It seems pretty clear that Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh aren’t just the best talent he can surround himself with, but they’re a combination of talent and friends. He’s looking for camaraderie. That’s the formula that has worked for him — and the only one that has worked for him. And that comes out of his early childhood when he was completely alone in the apartment he shared with his mother, not knowing his father, not knowing when or if she’d come home. It seems to me these were formative scarring moments that created this need for constant intimate contact. It came across to me watching the documentary. It came across to me reading Buzz’s book. And it especially came across to me when he was introduced to the fans in Miami with Wade and Bosh by his side. He’s not just looking to win. He’s also looking to be happy, and he’s only happy when he’s surrounded by people he cares for and trusts. He’s at his best when he has his brothers in arms around him and he’s at his worst when he’s completely alone.
This puts his decision into a different context, especially when those rumors about Delonte West are thrown into the mix.
While a host of Redeem Team members were interviewed on the Radio City stage during yesterday’s Team USA scrimmage, LeCon became the noticeable exception. Nike did not want its World Basketball Festival to turn into a boo-fest.
“We wanted to stay away from that,” a Nike official said.
First of all, you have to love the Post writer, Marc Berman, calling him LeCon. It’s clear that the Knicks faithful — even the beat writers — are not going to let this summer’s snub go anytime soon.
Chad Ford comments on TrueHoop:
We shall see where this goes from here, but IMHO James being muzzled and kept off-camera is a development that will be dissected and debated ad nauseum by the sports business media, and deservedly so. When the biggest basketball star in Nike’s stable is front and center yet silent and relatively unseen on one of the world’s most famous stages, it certainly qualifies as a strange circumstance.
It’s certainly an odd thing for a company to bench his biggest name even if it meant he was going to get boo’ed by the Knick faithful. This might just be a symptom of a bigger problem, which Charles Barkley alluded to on Fanhouse.
“This thing that he’s taking mental notes, I’m bothered by him taking mental notes,” Barkley said. “He thinks he can’t get criticized. Every player who ever played the game has been criticized. I played against Michael Jordan. They said he couldn’t win in the beginning (of his career before later winning six titles). It’s the notion you can’t get criticized I have a problem with.”
While Barkley doesn’t have a huge problem with LeBron’s decision to play in Miami, he thought “The Decision” was a ‘punk move,’ but told Fanhouse that it was a poor choice of words.
“I should have never used that word,” said Barkley, sounding at first as if was an apology. “It was bull (bleep). Bull (bleep) is a better word.”
Gotta love Charles. The guy always speaks his mind.
Why LeBron is spending his summer heaving up bricks at a Sandusky, Ohio amusement park is beyond me, but here he is doing just that…
Steve Kerr appeared on the B.S. Report with Bill Simmons and had some interesting things to say. Feel free to head over to ESPN and spend an hour with Bill and Steve or read the highlights below:
On Ron Artest’s game-winning put-back in Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals…
I wake up at night still thinking about that rebound — I mean, why didn’t it just hit the rim, and taken a normal bounce. I’ve thought about the game constantly, but as far as how that would have impacted my job, I haven’t looked at it that way.
On Ron Artest…
He was fantastic in the last couple of games of the Finals. I just think that Artest is one of the strangest players in the league because in a normal environment, in a normal game, sometimes he doesn’t look that great. He doesn’t make shots, he takes bad shots, he makes weird decisions, but when the game becomes kind of a street fight, especially like Game 7 of the Finals, there’s nobody you’d rather have. He’s just so strong and physical. And like that play he made against us in Game 6 — or Game 5 I guess it was — he just seems to have a knack for coming up with the loose ball, the rebound, whatever it is. He’s a crafty player, he really is.
On whether or not Amare Stoudemire is worth $100 million…
I was on the same page with Robert [Sarver, the owner of the Suns], with our management. We talked about it all year long. We really wanted him back, but if the price was too much though, then it didn’t make sense. And the main reason was because of the injuries. He’s had four knee surgeries, including a microfracture. You’ve seen what’s happened over the last few years with guys like Tracy McGrady and Jermaine O’Neal — the guys who come out of high school and play huge minutes right away. Their clock ticks a lot faster and they get to 29, 30, and they really start to slow down. I think you’ve even seen it a little bit with KG and Kobe last year although both guys really turned it on in the playoffs. But because of that, with Amare, I think he’s got a few really good years left in him. You know, years four, five and six though, if he can’t go and can’t produce, now you’re really tied up and locked down with a bad contract and that can be a major problem.
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