The Chris Moeller Archives

Thoughts upon the NBA Finals

Congratulations to the city of Cleveland, and to the king of basketball on this particular planet, LeBron James. These Finals deserve to be remembered for a long time. I felt as if I was watching the most important sporting event I'd seen in about five years as Game 7 unfolded last night. This makes six trips in a row to the Finals for James between his time spent with two franchises. It’s his third championship.

This is clearly the crowning achievement of his career, not only for the importance of winning for a sad sack city, but because they beat the mighty Warriors, winners this year of 73 regular-season games against only 9 losses, an NBA record. It’s at least the equivalent of the New York football Giants defeating the undefeated New England Patriots in Super Bowl 42, yet I’m not so sure Golden State was really the better team here. Indeed, the Cavaliers at full strength this year (James assisted by a healthy Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love) overcoming a home-court disadvantage, plus a three-games-to-none deficit, makes one wonder whether Golden State would have won last year’s championship if James had had any supporting cast at all. It was certainly a colossal mismatch to have Steph Curry switched off into almost helplessly guarding LeBron in the closing moments of the game (and vice versa), and it makes at least this one observer question whether the MVP voters got it right. In their 93-89 Game 7 victory last nigh, the Cavaliers held Golden State scoreless for the final 4 minutes and 41 seconds of the game, which is a shocking thing to consider.

Michael Jordan’s fans are out in force last night and today defending his “best ever” rep against high-profile Tweeters like Chris Rock, who declared James the new champ. Of that debate, I have these following comments…

-LeBron has three championships, Jordan six, Bill Russell eleven.

-If any of the six Jordan championship teams in Chicago (from 1991 to 1998) were playing their game this year in the NBA, they would have all been home watching the Cavs play the Warriors. It goes without saying that the Bulls never met a team in the Finals as good as these Warriors. When Kyrie Irving hit the go-ahead three-pointer with under two minutes to play, I could practically hear Jordan’s supporters saying to themselves that Jordan was always the man called upon to take a shot like that, but LeBron has never been that kind of teammate. Contrary to popular thought, LeBron’s relocating to Miami years ago was a “team first” decision. He wanted to win, above all.

-Jordan never had a moment in his career on the defensive end of the floor to come remotely close in iconography to the chasedown shot-block off the glass that LeBron performed on Andre Iguodala during the Warriors' second-to-last possession of the season. (The image of such should be the NBA's new logo.) It was perfectly-timed, athletic, and it was a hustle play.

-These stats may not be well-trumpeted yet, but in this 2016 NBA Finals series, LeBron led both teams in scoring, rebounds, assists, blocked shots, and steals. That is insane.

-Let’s say that Jordan still has the more impressive career. I still take LeBron because of the social consciousness. He’s going to be the more transformative figure. When Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, LeBron and his Miami teammates posed for a photo wearing “hoodies” in solidarity with the dead child, and that action was not an uncontroversial one at the time. It was criticized even by the likes of Jordan acolyte Kobe Bryant.

This sounds terrible to say, but I feel like, if the same situation had presented itself during Jordan’s career, we might have gotten a statement from him along the lines of “white people buy shoes too.” Am I saying that Jordan was a sell-out to black people? No, but during his own time he was incapable of seeing that the struggle of those engaged in slave labor in Southeast Asia, was the same struggle that engaged black people in the United States. African-Americans that can’t see their struggle in the context of the larger struggle of black and brown people globally have no currency to spend with me. Isn’t this the exact legacy of Muhammad Ali, who did see the parallel when his fame and fortune brushed up against the issue of violent struggle in Southeast Asia? Let's put it this way. The dedicatedly-apolitical Jordan may still have been the better player on the court, but I’m jealous of young people today that are growing up with James as a role model when my generation had Jordan.

posted by CM @ 10:10 PM