The Chris Moeller Archives

The King James edition

LeBron James has the prerogative to walk away from his hometown basketball team in Cleveland-- he's actually from Akron-- but for him to do so in such a spectacular and humiliating fashion towards the town and the team-- wow!

I don't follow the NBA so closely these days, but I've been dumped enough times in relationships to know there are proper ways to go about doing the dumping, and certainly one way not to do it is to needlessly string the dumpee along for weeks before selecting your next partner in front of the entire world with a prime-time special on national television. All the while, you shill your corporate "brand," and promise that all of the advertising proceeds from the telecast will go to charity. True story.

It could have been worse, I guess. He could have broken up with Cleveland and the Cavaliers on Facebook. Hey, it just dawned on me-- I'm seeing a lot of Miami "Heat" puns on headlines, but that was pretty cavalier of James to do all of this. I digress.

I find myself perversely enjoying the spectacle now because of some of the freakish reaction around the league. Cavs owner Dan Gilbert has some justification for his anger, for the reasons stated above, but his public comments last night incorporated the word "betrayal" a few too many times for my taste. After all, James does reserve the right to play for whomever he wants. I recognize that Stan Musial would have been a lifelong member of the Pittsburgh Pirates organization, and Ozzie Smith a Los Angeles Dodger, if those two Cardinals greats had played out their professional baseball careers for their hometown and favorite teams of youth.

Gilbert went further today by accusing James of "quitting" during the team's playoff run this spring, though if this had actually happened, instead of being simply the angry ramblings of a spurned employer, it would render highly dubious Gilbert's attempts during this past month to deliver to this star athlete an annual income of better than $15 million. It doesn't compute.

I think it's been fun to watch the triumvirate of NBA free agents-- James, Chris Bosh, and Dwayne Wade, teammates now for the Miami Heat-- act in tandem to chase down a championship or two. I've often said (though never written) that the most needless occupation in sports, aside from David Wells' personal trainer, is the team owner, and every fat contract awarded to an athlete leads us one step closer to a world without them.

The NBA is the closest thing we have to a "players' league" in American team sports, as this story helps to prove out, and though media critics have almost universally condemned the maneuvering by James, Bosh, and Wade to become teammates, what the commentators really fear is not the weakening of competitive balance among teams, as they claim, but an end to the owner-controlled power structure. As it is, the current system has given us a competitive imbalance that would be difficult to duplicate. Six of 30 NBA franchises have won all but two of the last 31 league championships. The Miami Heat, incidentally, are not one of those six teams.

posted by CM @ 8:44 PM