Do people actually believe that Lebron will return to the Cavs?

[Meticode]

Maybe I'm weird, but I just don't care about anything that happens behind the scenes. Watching games is entertainment. Having actual emotions about what a player does off the court is like the same territory as creepy wrestling fans who get emotional about a good guy switching to the bad side.

Except wrestling is written up and laid out. Basketball players switching teams, changing futures of teams and the cities economy much like LeBron did in Cleveland means millions of dollars, in fact $500 million dollars. Those are actual decisions being made, not horrible acting scenarios played out in a square.

[Meticode]

Maybe I'm weird, but I just don't care about anything that happens behind the scenes. Watching games is entertainment. Having actual emotions about what a player does off the court is like the same territory as creepy wrestling fans who get emotional about a good guy switching to the bad side.

Also, I have nothing against your point of view as far as entertainment. Because in the end, when it's all said and done, that's why it makes money. It entertains people. That's what it's there for.

But putting down people for supporting a team and being emotional involved in that team is just ignorant.

[BrownEye007]

Who the fυck do you think you are?

Hes a basketball player. That's it. Not your deadbeat dad who abandoned you. Grow the fυck up.

Who the **** do you think you are? Telling people how they should or shouldn't feel about a situation. One that you also clearly don't understand if you still think rba and other cavs fans are were upset because he left instead of how he did it.

[RedBlackAttack]

Oh come on, you know you want to. You've done it so many times before already.

I've actually carefully steered around going through the whole "Decision" thing for the past couple years. I know what it leads to and I've been down that road too many times in the last four years. Enough is enough with that stale back-and-forth.

I will, however, expound on any number of other topics, LeBron related or otherwise. You know this. I've never been accused of being short-winded.

Maybe I'm weird, but I just don't care about anything that happens behind the scenes. Watching games is entertainment. Having actual emotions about what a player does off the court is like the same territory as creepy wrestling fans who get emotional about a good guy switching to the bad side.

It's not as if there's some kind of running off-court narrative for every player on the team. LeBron had to go WAY out of his way for me to finally throw my hands up and say, "f#ck this guy." It was an unprecedented situation in sports, really.

I'll toss out a (somewhat) neutral voice since anything I say is going to be questioned because I'm from NE Ohio and, like I said, I really don't want to re-hash it myself again. Here's what Bill Simmons had to say the day after The Decision...

July 9, 2010:

One of my first ESPN.com columns was titled, "Is Clemens the Antichrist?" It covered how my relationship changed with Roger Clemens as a Red Sox fan -- in five years, he went from my favorite baseball player to my least favorite athlete in any sport -- and how the turning point happened in 1996, when Clemens signed with Toronto and showed no remorse at the ensuing news conference.

I still remember seeing that Blue Jays cap squeezed on his fat stupid face for 45 solid minutes, waiting for him to throw Red Sox fans a bone, waiting for him to say anything that would make me think, "Regardless of how this turned out, the past 12 years meant something to me," or "Just know that this happened because of Boston's front office, not their great fans." He only threw us a couple of canned comments, the same way someone would throw table scraps to a dog. I remember how angry it made me. I remember wanting to whip my remote control through the television, then realizing that I couldn't afford a new one. I remember taking down my autographed photo of Clemens' 20th strikeout against Seattle and sticking it in a closet. I remember thinking that I would never like sports quite as much ever again.

So when Clemens went to Toronto, got in shape, won two straight Cy Youngs and forced a trade to the Yankees, really, a column called "Is Clemens the Antichrist?" became inevitable as soon as I found a bigger forum to write it. I hated that guy as much as you could hate a professional athlete without things getting creepy.

And you know what? What LeBron did to Cleveland last night was worse. Much worse.

It's one thing to leave. I get it. You're 25. You don't know any better. You're tired of carrying mediocre teams. You want help. You want the luxury of not having to play a remarkable game every single night for eight straight months. You want to live in South Beach. You want to play with your buddies. I get it. I get it. But turning that decision into a one-hour special, pretending that it hadn't been decided weeks ago, using a charity as your cover-up and ramming a pitchfork in Cleveland's back like you were at the end of a Friday the 13th movie and Cleveland was Jason ... there just had to be a better way.

I blame the people around him. I blame the lack of a father figure in his life. I blame us for feeding his narcissism to the point that he referred to himself in the third person five times in 45 minutes. I blame local and national writers (including myself) for apparently not doing a good enough job explaining to athletes like LeBron what sports mean to us, and how it IS a marriage, for better and worse, and that we're much more attached to these players and teams than they realize. I blame David Stern for not throwing his body in front of that show. I blame everyone.

We are already fools for caring about athletes considerably more than they care about us. We know this and we do it anyway. We just like sports. We keep watching for moments like Donovan's goal against Algeria, and we keep caring through thick and thin for moments like Dave Roberts' steal and Tracy Porter's interception. We put up with all the sobering stuff because that's the price you pay -- for every Gordon Hayward half-court shot, or USA-Canada gold-medal game, there are 20 Michael Vicks and Ben Roethlisbergers. Last night didn't make me like sports any less -- my guard has been up since 1996 -- it just reinforced all the things I already didn't like.

For LeBron not to understand what he was doing -- or even worse, not to care -- made me quickly turn off the television, find my kids, give them their nightly bath and try to forget the sports atrocity that I had just witnessed. He just couldn't have handled it worse. Never in my life can I remember someone swinging from likable to unlikable that quickly. I will forgive him some day because I like watching him play basketball, and whether you're rooting for or against him, his alliance with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami created one the greatest "Holy s---, how is this going to play out?????" scenarios in recent sports history. Sports are supposed to be fun, and eventually, this will become fun -- for everyone but people in Cleveland -- because we finally have a Yankees of basketball.

But I will never, ever, not in a million years, understand why it had to play out that way. If LeBron James is the future of sports, then I shudder for the future.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2...simmons/100709


...and that was coming from arguably his biggest fan in the national media. Acting as though this is just some contrived nonsense that should have nothing to do with sports is disingenuous. This actually had everything to do with sports and what it is to be a fan. Most of the time, I couldn't care less what a guy chooses to do off the court.

This particular instance was a completely different animal, though.




But, it's four years in the past. He's gone a long way to "making it right" in the past few months, so whatever... it is what it is. Just don't think that I was secretly hoping James was going to come back and rescue us for the past four years. I meant every word that I said in this thread when I said it.

[poido123]

I've actually carefully steered around going through the whole "Decision" thing for the past couple years. I know what it leads to and I've been down that road too many times in the last four years. Enough is enough with that stale back-and-forth.

I will, however, expound on any number of other topics, LeBron related or otherwise. You know this. I've never been accused of being short-winded.



It's not as if there's some kind of running off-court narrative for every player on the team. LeBron had to go WAY out of his way for me to finally throw my hands up and say, "f#ck this guy." It was an unprecedented situation in sports, really.

I'll toss out a (somewhat) neutral voice since anything I say is going to be questioned because I'm from NE Ohio and, like I said, I really don't want to re-hash it myself again. Here's what Bill Simmons had to say the day after The Decision...

July 9, 2010:


http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2...simmons/100709


...and that was coming from arguably his biggest fan in the national media. Acting as though this is just some contrived nonsense that should have nothing to do with sports is disingenuous. This actually had everything to do with sports and what it is to be a fan. Most of the time, I couldn't care less what a guy chooses to do off the court.

This particular instance was a completely different animal, though.




But, it's four years in the past. He's gone a long way to "making it right" in the past few months, so whatever... it is what it is. Just don't think that I was secretly hoping James was going to come back and rescue us for the past four years. I meant every word that I said in this thread when I said it.

That Bill Simmons take on it is an amazing read. Whether you like the guy, he make writing so effortless.

Exactly how I felt about the situation back then. I knew at that point the NBA landscape had changed for better or worse. The NBA product is more diluted now, its missing some of the best things I used to love watching it for.

[RedBlackAttack]

That Bill Simmons take on it is an amazing read. Whether you like the guy, he make writing so effortless.

Exactly how I felt about the situation back then. I knew at that point the NBA landscape had changed for better or worse. The NBA product is more diluted now, its missing some of the best things I used to love watching it for.

Yep. For situations like that one, Simmons can still be very good... even though he annoys me much of the time these days.


It has been long enough now that it's easy to forget just how shocking The Decision was at the time. Not the fact that he chose to go to Miami, but the manner in which he did it.

Here's another article from the following day which I thought was well written. It's by NYMag.com, a New York City publication, so again this is as neutral a source as you are going to get. It pretty well summed up my feelings immediately following that whole debacle and it also highlights the fallacy of those who try to act -- now -- as if we're all "nuts" and "creepy" for even caring how he went about it.

LeBron React: Never Has Being a Sports Fan Felt So Stupid

By Will Leitch

The worst moment of a night full of bad moments tonight came at the end, after most disgusted fans had turned ESPN off, bile still sloshing in their gums, when LeBron James, 45 minutes after announcing he would play for the Miami Heat, returned to the camera with Jim Gray and the head of the Apollo Group, which owns and runs the University of Phoenix, one of the primary sponsors of the evening's festivities. At this point, we had seen the pain of the Cleveland Cavaliers fans, who had been so cruelly toyed with for weeks now, and we had seen Gray and Michael Wilbon, shockingly, so inept and seemingly disinterested in anything resembling a follow-up question. Fans of teams in the LeBron Derby were disappointed — though no one as much as Cavs fans — but mostly they were flabbergasted by the tone deafness of the whole enterprise. LeBron James was a man breaking hearts across the country, and there he was, with an old bald white man peddling for-profit online education, and a short smug onetime sportscaster now just happy to be on TV. There they all were, trying to sell us something. After that. It was hawking souvenirs before the wake was over. And no one onscreen seemed to find this wrong.

Loving sports, by definition, requires a certain suspension of disbelief and logic. We are all pouring our hearts and souls into cheering for men (and women) who do not care about us, who are not like us, who are not the type of people we would ever associate with (or even meet) in real life. We deify them because it is hard to find people to deify in the real world: Sports spans every age group, ethnic group, political persuasion, and all else that serves to divide us, separate us. We cheer for athletes because sports does not matter, not really. We cheer because sports is, ultimately, harmless.

And we trust that they will at least pretend. We trust that they will recognize the ultimate ludicrousness of this whole enterprise, that these are grown men wearing tank tops, throwing a ball up and around, running on wood, that this all exists because we allow it to exist, that the illusion must be maintained. We trust that they understand how good they have it, how much we give them, against our own self-interest. We trust that they are not laughing at us.

That trust felt broken tonight. Not because LeBron James went to the Heat, even though he referred to his destination as "South Beach," not "the Miami Heat and their fans." Not because LeBron James didn't go to the Knicks, even though of all the cities he mentioned enjoying during this free agent "courtship," New York was the one he omitted. Not even because LeBron was so, so cruel to Cleveland, not once thanking the fans who made him into what he was, the fans who have to wonder if their absurd investment in their sports franchises will ever be rewarded. No, tonight, it felt like everyone involved — LeBron, ESPN, Bing, the University of Phoenix, Stuart Scott, the man who once chastised fans for having the audacity to boo, Jim freaking Gray — treated the millions of people watching like stupid, mindless consumers, empty lemmings ready to follow Sport into the abyss. Here, here are the Boys & Girls Club props. Here, here is your search engine. Here, here is your online college, Here, here is your Athletic Hero. Eat. Eat. Consume. You like it. You love it. You'll always come back for more.

They're surely right, of course. But never has it been laid more bare, and never did it feel so empty. It felt like a break, the moment when the tide crested, when we looked at the games, and their players, and ourselves, and wondered: Why in the world are we watching these awful people? It was a question impossible to answer.

LeBron James, thanks to this debacle, will never be the same. (That he appears unable to understand why is the precise reason why.) ESPN, it feels, will never quite be the same: There were surely thousands of employees there who rubbed their eyes, aghast at what they were watching, guilty to be a part of it. The NBA, the hunger laid bare and the wound gaping for all to see, may never be the same.

And the fear is that we won't be the same. The fear is that we've truly seen the ugly, dark heart of sports, and we won't be able to come back. It feels extremely stupid to be a sports fan. It feels pointless. None of this felt harmless tonight. And we allowed this to happen. Perhaps this is what we deserve. Perhaps this will be good for us, all of us.

Let us all just hope everybody feels better in the morning. Some morning, someday.

http://nymag.com/daily/sports/2010/0...s_being_a.html



Everyone was pretty much outraged at the time, outside of Miami. It is just that it was easier for people outside of Cleveland to forget all about it. For us, his return brought with it a lot of mixed feelings, because we were the primary target of his awful handling four years ago. And, I think we had all the reason in the world to want certain things (like an apology for how it went down) before we could welcome him back.

It's not because of a contrived off-court drama or simply because he chose Miami. It's because he went way out of his way to embarrass the city and the franchise in the most public way possible.


Time to move on, though. He's made things right and we have one hell of a team. I'm not immune to second chances. We all make mistakes in our lives. God knows when I was in my early-20s, I made more than a few. Thankfully, there weren't any cameras around. I'm just glad he realizes and publicly owned how poorly it was handled.

[Real14]

Who the **** do you think you are? Telling people how they should or shouldn't feel about a situation. One that you also clearly don't understand if you still think rba and other cavs fans are were upset because he left instead of how he did it.

think about it man. You are a dealing with a guy who has a George w. bush avatar.

[poido123]

Yep. For situations like that one, Simmons can still be very good... even though he annoys me much of the time these days.


It has been long enough now that it's easy to forget just how shocking The Decision was at the time. Not the fact that he chose to go to Miami, but the manner in which he did it.

Here's another article from the following day which I thought was well written. It's by NYMag.com, a New York City publication, so again this is as neutral a source as you are going to get. It pretty well summed up my feelings immediately following that whole debacle and it also highlights the fallacy of those who try to act -- now -- as if we're all "nuts" and "creepy" for even caring how he went about it.



http://nymag.com/daily/sports/2010/0...s_being_a.html



Everyone was pretty much outraged at the time, outside of Miami. It is just that it was easier for people outside of Cleveland to forget all about it. For us, his return brought with it a lot of mixed feelings, because we were the primary target of his awful handling four years ago. And, I think we had all the reason in the world to want certain things (like an apology for how it went down) before we could welcome him back.

It's not because of a contrived off-court drama or simply because he chose Miami. It's because he went way out of his way to embarrass the city and the franchise in the most public way possible.


Time to move on, though. He's made things right and we have one hell of a team. I'm not immune to second chances. We all make mistakes in our lives. God knows when I was in my early-20s, I made more than a few. Thankfully, there weren't any cameras around. I'm just glad he realizes and publicly owned how poorly it was handled.

Forget what some of the heartless, brain dead posters say on here. Many of them are desensitized in every day life, lebron only reflects those same issues in our current society.

The "me" generation and the instant gratification cancer has spread into our sports now. Money and getting things easy is par for course these days for NBA athletes.

How many guys coming out of college do you see with good fundamentals? Times are changing, people want different things now. Nobody wants to work on all facets of their game if they can get the big pay day on talent and/or athleticism alone.