Scoop Jackson isn't the best of writers. The archive of Scoop's writing contributions to this blog is full dumb or bad ideas. Last time I wrote about him he thought that Derrick Rose needed to risk long-term injury to win the NBA title this year. He also thought Michael Jordan should have just done whatever he could to draft Anthony Davis, as if Jordan's want to draft Davis would cause the Pelicans (then the Hornets) trade the #1 overall pick to the Charlotte Hornets (then the Bobcats) out of kindess and respect. Scoop has not run out of bad ideas and he thinks the Cavaliers losing to the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals has saved the NBA. Because the NBA can't have players dominating or else it is bad for the sport. We all remember how the NBA was wrecked when the Chicago Bulls won six NBA titles in a span of eight years and it's not like the NBA Finals have been dominated by a subset of NBA players over the past 15 years or anything like that. Scoop thinks Cleveland, yes Cleveland, needs to be hungrier for an NBA title. This makes not of sense. It sounds more like Scoop is a Bulls fan who has to dream up ideas why it's good that LeBron didn't win another title.
Thankfully, the basketball gods looked out and did not allow the King,
aka "I'm the best player in the world," to win this chip. At least not
this year.
LeBron IS the best player in the world. And yes, thank goodness James was denied an NBA title this year. LeBron has been in the NBA for 12 years and been in six NBA Finals, we wouldn't him to just have another title handed to him. It's much better if Steph Curry appears in one NBA Finals after six years in the league and then wins the title. You know, at least he's earned it.
Nothing against what LeBron James
and the rest of his survival unit did to make the NBA Finals as
compelling and competitive as they were, but nothing good surrounding
the Cleveland Cavaliers'
epic overachievement would have come from their Dellavedovian efforts
resulting in a victory over the best team in the NBA, the Golden State Warriors.
Other than the stories about how he singlehandedly carried an inferior team to an NBA title and how this would add to LeBron James' legacy. Other than that, no good would come of this victory.
A MASH unit beating the Splash unit wouldn't have been a good look for the NBA.
Yes, the best player in the NBA winning another NBA title would have been a death knell for the NBA and the league would have been forced to immediately fold.
They can't lose to a team that, without LeBron, would have struggled to even make the playoffs.
The Warriors could have lost to the Cavs, because the Cavs did have LeBron. A victory in the Finals would have added immensely to LeBron's legacy.
And in the Cavs' case, they needed to lose. Losing breeds hunger, always
the prelude to greatness. And a team is only as great as its appetite.
Scoop Jackson is showing some great recognition of history and self awareness based on writing these two sentences. The one thing professional teams from Cleveland need to do is lose more important games so they don't feel spoiled by all the titles their professional franchises haven't won over the past few decades. The city of Cleveland just needs to lose more games, simply to get that hunger back. We wouldn't want the citizens of Cleveland to feel spoiled by a playoff appearance or anything.
Did Scoop really just write this? The Cavs need to be more hungry so they can get a bigger appetite for victory? How dumb is this?
If Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love and Anderson Varejao are all back next year, what would LeBron have had to prove? What hunger would he have had deep inside to prove anything more?
Perhaps the same thing he had to prove after winning an NBA title with the Miami Heat and then coming back the next year to see if he could do it again with much of the same supporting cast around him that contributed to the first title. LeBron would want to prove he can do it again.
This is the dumbest argument for why it's good the Cavs lost to the Warriors. What does any NBA team that tries to repeat have to prove? What did Bill Russell's Celtics teams have to prove when winning all those titles? Why did Michael Jordan come back to play again after winning three NBA titles? Why did Michael Jordan come back (again) after winning three straight more NBA titles? If Scoop thinks LeBron wouldn't have had the hunger inside to prove anything else then he doesn't understand the competitive nature of sports.
Is the Cavs' loss good for basketball?
No. It is not bad either.
Yes, you can say that when looking at the big picture and what is in the NBA's best interest.
No, you can not say that when looking at the big picture and what is in the NBA's best interest. I love how sportswriters like Scoop are so obsessed with storylines and narratives as if these are as important as the actual competition on the court. Scoop is just looking out for what is in the NBA's best interests, you know. The Cavs loss isn't necessarily better for him as a sportswriter or gives him something different to talk about other than another LeBron James title. Scoop just really cares about the NBA and it's best interest. That's all.
A Cavs title this season would have made a general public -- which
already has a love-hate relationship with LeBron -- lose interest in
this team ever winning again.
Or, as has happened many times in the history of the NBA, there will be increased interest in another team taking down the current NBA champion. Those who lose interest in the Cavs winning another title could easily become interested in seeing the Cavs not win another title. Interest is interest and a team that is hated can help the NBA as much as a team that is loved. Scoop's background prior to joining ESPN was in discussing the NBA. Did he watch any games over the past 20 years though?
How would it have helped the NBA for the Cavs to go through the East with ease (only slightly challenged by the Chicago Bulls)
minus one All-Star (Love) and then win the championship minus another
All-Star (Irving), all the while doing that without their starting
center (Varejao), who was out for almost the entire season?
I mean, it would have meant the Cavaliers had to win another title during the 2015-2016 season to show they could do it again? It meant other NBA teams would try to beat the Cavs. It would have meant NBA fans would watch the games to see the Cavs lose. The NBA doesn't lose if the Cavs had lost, just like the NBA didn't lose when Michael Jordan win six NBA titles.
It would have all seemed too easy.
Haha! This is great. Scoop Jackson spends the first part of this column talking about how it's bad for the NBA if the Cavs win a title with a depleted team. Now he calls this title run "too easy."
(Scoop earlier in this column) "Why would it be good if the Cavs are dragged to an NBA title by LeBron James? There were no good players around LeBron on the Cavs team."
(Scoop Jackson now) "It would have been bad for the NBA if LeBron had won a title so easily. What does it mean if the Cavs barely struggled without their best players? Where is the motivation to win another title next year? Please ignore that I'm while asking this question, yet automatically assuming the Cavs would have enough motivation to win next year because I've already put them down as the NBA Champions for next year if they had won the NBA title this year."
Also, I like how Scoop believes there is a correlation between the 14-15 Cavs team winning or not winning a title and how the 15-16 Cavs team performs. As if now that the Cavs lost in the Finals then the 15-16 team isn't as strong, but if the 14-15 Cavs team won the NBA title, then the 15/16 team would have run roughshod over the NBA during the 2015-2016 season...you know, even though Scoop doesn't think they would be motivated.
Yes, they would have had the
overcoming-the-odds achievement of these Finals to fall back on, but
after that, what?
Try. To. Win. Another. Title.
Trying to win another title just like Michael Jordan, Bill Russell and every other NBA champion has tried to do for the past 50 years. This is a shockingly non-persuasive opinion coming from Scoop Jackson. Why would the Cavs be motivated to win another title? The same reason every other NBA champion will be motivated and the same reason the Warriors will be motivated to win another title.
How would that have helped the NBA?
Because teams would have lined up to try and beat the Cavs just like teams are going to be lining up to beat the Warriors.
The NBA, much like MLB and the NHL, is historically a league of
dynasties. Lakers, Celtics, Yankees, Canadiens, Red Wings, you get the
pic.
Dynasties can't be easy. There has to be some sort of struggle and
adversity. An interruption of a stretch of genius. Or at least some sort
of failure in the beginning.
Okay, so Scoop does realize the Yankees' dynasty that started in 1996 didn't have a struggle or adversity, right? There was no interruption of genius or failing in the beginning. They Yankees beat the Braves 4-2 in 1996 and then lost one World Series game from 1998-2000. I am sure Scoop will say 1997 was "the interruption of a stretch of genius," but that's just not accurate. The Yankees had on a single World Series and had not yet reached their stretch of genius. The Yankees faced little adversity during that five year stretch of the dynasty run. The difficulty started AFTER the Yankees stopped winning World Series titles in 2001.
In sports, we love the players and teams that play, but what we fall in love with are the players' and teams' stories.
A happy ending to the Cavs' story this season could have ruined the rest of their story before it was even told.
This is ridiculous. A happy ending would have forced the Cavs to try and repeat. That's interesting to NBA fans. So how is the Warriors victory good for the NBA? The Warriors have their story ruined before it was ever told and they didn't struggle. I guess Scoop just assumes the Warriors aren't going to be a dynasty like the Cavs are going to be. Why are the Warriors not held to this same standard as the Cavs? The Warriors didn't struggle before winning the NBA title.
Had the Cavs won, an offseason narrative about LeBron's greatness and
place in history -- making the LeBron-Michael Jordan debate finally a
legit one -- would not have been bad for the NBA. But on the flip side,
had he won it with the depleted team around him, that narrative would
have shared space with an open-ended discussion about how weak the NBA
is.
Again, narratives and the story the media wants to tell have nothing to do with what is and is not in the best interest of the NBA.
Coming in, they were given only a 27.6 percent chance of winning it,
according to the NBA BPI Playoff Projections. After losing Game 1 (and
losing Irving), their chances dropped to 19 percent. After tying the
series 1-1, the chance jumped to 39.3 percent. When they took a 2-1 lead
and had home-court advantage, it peaked at 56.4 percent. Then, when
reality set in and the Warriors evened the series, their index sank to
29.4 percent, then to the all-time series low of 14.8 percent before
Game 6.
From a pure basketball standpoint, how good would it have been for the
future of the NBA if a depleted team that was only once given a better
than 50 percent chance of winning the Finals had walked away with a
championship only to add back two All-Stars and its starting center the
next season?
I don't know if it would have looked bad for the NBA more than it would have looked like LeBron James performed a Herculean effort to win an NBA title with an epically high usage rate and not very good teammates. I think a Cavs win makes LeBron even more of a legend and with Love (maybe) and Irving coming back next year puts the focus on "who can beat the Cavs?" Having the spotlight on the best NBA player is not bad for the NBA.
LeBron and the Cavs winning it all this time would have been as bad as
or maybe even worse than Magic Johnson winning one with the second-best
player on the Lakers being Kurt Rambis. No Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, no James
Worthy, no Michael Cooper. What if they were all injured and then they
all came back? Think the NBA would have blown up to historic heights in
the 1980s had that been the case?
Yes, the NBA would have blown up to historic heights in this situation. Kareem, Worthy and Cooper would have come back and then played the exact same NBA teams in this alternate universe as they played in the real universe. I don't think Scoop understands the concept that one NBA Finals won't have an impact on further NBA Finals. If LeBron had won a title with an inferior team, this doesn't mean next year's NBA Finals will be boring or non-competitive. Much like how if Magic had won a title without his Hall of Fame teammates then it would have had no effect on the historical heights the NBA reached in the 1980's. Just like because the Cavs lost to the Warriors it doesn't mean the Cavs are going to win the 2015-2016 NBA title.
The impact of such a scenario? No rebirth of a rivalry with the Celtics. No Sixers and Pistons challenges.
Why in the holy fuck would there have been no rivalry with the Celtics or challenges from the Sixers and Pistons? These teams would have still existed in the same way no matter who was or was not injured for the Lakers when they won an NBA title. I would like to know what Scoop thinks would have happened to the Celtics if the Lakers won a title with Kurt Rambis being the second-best player? Would the entire team have retired out of frustration? Where the hell does he think these three teams would gone or why would they just quit?
The Cavs would be too good for anyone to really care about. And that is not good for any team sport. Especially one in which a single great player can pull off a miracle by his own damn self.
They would have been too good to cheer for, but because the Cavs were so good, there would be a population of NBA fans who would watch the games to watch the Cavs lose (like how fans watched the NBA to see Kobe and Shaq lose when they played for the Lakers). This is good for the NBA.
The Cavs during this Finals proved that the field in the 2015-16 season
-- even with major free-agent signings, big-name offseason player
movement and the draft -- might not be ready.
You can't do epic s--- with basic people. That saying would have lost all credibility and substance with a Cavs victory in the Finals.
No, it would not have lost all credibility and substance with a Cavs victory. And somehow Scoop is forgetting that the Cavs struggled for a portion of the 2014-2015 season, plus Kyrie Irving is ALWAYS injured for some reason. So Scoop's assumption the Cavs will just run roughshod over the NBA during the 2015-2016 season has some holes in it based on past evidence this isn't true. Not to mention, Scoop is trying to tie all of this into how the Cavs running roughshod over the NBA during the 15-16 season is bad for the NBA, when this wouldn't necessarily be true. I hear sportswriters claim all the time that there aren't any dominant teams that polarize fans and get fans to watch the games. Now Scoop thinks a dominant team that fans can love or hate is a bad thing for the NBA.
And had he done that, just ask yourself, for the sake of parity and
competition, how thoroughly uneventful the next four or five NBA Finals
stood to be once a fully loaded Cavs squad got back together to play for
something already achieved.
Just like how uneventful the NBA Finals were in the 90's when Jordan's Bulls teams ruled the NBA. I remember how the NBA just thrived after Jordan retired. Because nobody had any interest in watching a dominant team play and the NBA struggled so badly during the time Jordan and the Bulls won six NBA titles. I don't know how the NBA ever survived the era where Bill Russell and the Celtics were winning title after title.
Scoop Jackson must remember the history of the NBA differently from me. Also, I can't figure out why the Warriors winning a title on the first try isn't bad for the NBA, but LeBron winning with the Cavs after multiple tries with the team would have not been in the best interest of the NBA.
Showing posts with label Cleveland Cavaliers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cleveland Cavaliers. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Thursday, July 17, 2014
15 comments Bill Simmons Confirms that God Does Indeed Love Cleveland
Remember when Bill Simmons threw a very minor hissy fit on the NBA Countdown set about the Cleveland Cavaliers getting their third #1 overall draft pick in four years? Bill didn't think the Cavaliers deserved another #1 overall pick for mismanaging their team. It turns out he doesn't like that Cleveland gets the #1 overall pick again, but he's perfectly fine with the Cavs signing the NBA's best player. Because after all, he needs to be liked and he can only rail against the Cavs so much before he could start alienating and losing the audience he used to work so hard to get. So while Bill manages to think the Cavs don't deserve another #1 overall pick, he's fine with the team getting LeBron James. Why? Because Bill issues the final proclamation that God loves Cleveland. Bill uses the word "God" loosely because he doesn't want to offend anyone or contradict many of his Simmonsites' idea that he himself is indeed God.
Yeah, I read LeBron James’s classy letter in Sports Illustrated. I believe him.
Rest easy now, LeBron! Bill Simmons believes you. I know this is a load off your conscience.
In the summer of 2010, LeBron handled everything wrong. He knows that now. His hometown turned on him. His former owner excoriated him. Everyone else hated what he did.
No, "everyone" didn't hate what he did. I didn't hate what he did. He chose his team and did it in a poor fashion, but I'm pretty sure Miami Heat fans didn't hate it.
We turned him into a wrestling heel, pushed him to a dark place, affected his personality, planted seeds of doubt that blossomed like a black rose during the 2011 Finals.
"WE" did this. Not the media, not Bill, but "WE" did this. I hope we are proud of ourselves.
But he never forgot what happened, and deep down, he probably always wanted to atone. When the time arrived this summer, he flipped the script on us.
"US" got the script flipped on us. We did. Consider the script to have been flipped. Hope you can read backwards, planet Earth!
Those four Miami seasons made me sure of one thing: He’s one of the greatest NBA players ever.
Write it down on a tablet, because it's now official. Congratulations on getting your very own chapter in the "Book of Basketball Part 2," LeBron James. You have moved up in Bill's arbitrary rankings.
Add everything up and it’s the best possible story. He’s the conquering hero who came home, and, hopefully, will conquer again.
It’s also not entirely accurate. I think LeBron would have stayed in Miami — for at least one or two more years — if he truly believed he had a chance to keep winning there.
So what about the story isn't accurate? LeBron came home, he stated he wanted to come home and so he did. In fact, Bill said this a couple of paragraphs earlier in this column:
I think he wanted to come home. I think he always wanted to come home.
It turns out now that Bill's own statement isn't entirely accurate. You know what that means, right? WE are wrong about LeBron wanting to come home.
If you think of him like a genius, it makes more sense.
Here's the part where Bill Simmons writes thousands of more words than he has to in order to push out a column and overcomplicate an issue. Simply stating that LeBron chose where he thought he could win doesn't make for a great column, so Bill has to go off on a long tangent about how LeBron is a genius and that's why he chose the Cavaliers over the Heat. Sure, this whole part of the column could be summed up by writing, "LeBron didn't think he had a chance to win long-term in Miami, so he chose to go back to Cleveland," but that doesn't make Bill feel like he's smart and overcomplicate an issue in order to kill space.
He’s smarter about basketball than you and me, and, really, anyone else. He sees things that we can’t see. During that last Miami season, I don’t think he liked what he saw from his teammates. LeBron James wanted to come back to Cleveland, but he also wanted to flee Miami.
I think anyone who saw the NBA Finals understood Wade wasn't exactly at the peak of his career and Bosh is still a very good NBA player, but the Heat had to do better at putting a supporting cast around LeBron. It didn't take a genius to see this. So LeBron is much smarter about basketball than Bill and me, but what I saw from LeBron's teammates were that he had to work hard to carry the team at times. Anyone watching the games could see it wasn't sustainable.
And his brain works like very few brains — not just now, but ever.
Bill is really, really overcomplicating things here. Cleveland had a good, young core on their rookie contracts, while Miami was getting older. LeBron chose to take a step back rather than ride out his time in Miami and hope they could put a good team around him.
Do you think Michael Jordan was a genius?”
I asked Doug Collins that question during the 2014 NBA Finals, on the afternoon of Game 3, hours before San Antonio transformed into some crazy hybrid of Russell’s Celtics, Walton’s Blazers and Bradley’s Knicks. We were eating lunch at our hotel’s pool, flanked by the radiantly blue ocean off Brickell Key, talking hoops, because that’s what you do when you’re around Doug.
Ah yes, it is the "Stories about the NBA Countdown Crew" section of Bill's column. It has become a staple along with "Throw up a YouTube video to kill space" and "Here's a Half-Assed Theory" whenever Bill writes a column.
The man has enough stories for three books, but too much respect for the game, and for the relationships he has cultivated over the years, to ever actually write one.
Meanwhile Bill doesn't give a shit about the game or his relationships, he just wants money and fame, which is why he was going to write a book with Steve Nash about his time in the NBA. I'm not blaming him. Money is great. Just pointing this out.
Fourteen years later, he started coaching Michael Jordan — someone who collected more ripped-out hearts than anyone. Do you think Michael Jordan was a genius? I barely got the words out of my mouth.
And Bill had not spoken for a full ten minutes, so he was really pissed off Doug Collins barely let him finish the sentence.
“Oh yes,” Collins said. “There’s no question.”
What did Bill expect Collins to say? "No, Jordan was a dumbass"?
If he sensed that a particular teammate would fail him, he’d gesture to Collins to remove that person from the game. All these years later, Collins delights in imitating how Jordan did it — by making eye contact with his coach, glancing toward the offending teammate, then unleashing one of those “Get him the F out of here” grimaces. Almost always, his instincts were right.
Of course prior to Michael Jordan being the super-winner that he ended up being, teammates found this behavior annoying and there was a book called "The Jordan Rules" by Sam Smith that detailed how Jordan would often try to fight and mentally tear down his teammates. So while Jordan's instincts were right, he wasn't quite the genius under Doug Collins he is played up to be.
Michael Jordan was an excellent basketball player who had a feel for how to play the game and was a genius in terms of understanding basketball. He had the experience, instincts and the knowledge required to be considered a genius in his field of sport. Great basketball players (or anyone who is an expert in his respective field) are geniuses compared to others who play the game of basketball that aren't professionals (or an expert in his/her respective field).
Of course, the greatest sequence of Jordan’s career didn’t involve teammates: Game 6 of the 1998 Finals, 41.9 seconds remaining, Chicago trailing by three. Pippen inbounded the ball at half court, and after that, nobody on Chicago touched it again. Jordan ripped through Utah’s defense for a floating layup, swiped the ball from Karl Malone like he was snatching a purse, then drained the title-winning jumper in Bryon Russell’s mug. It wasn’t just the storybook ending that made it so unforgettable, or even Jordan’s incomparable brilliance, but how premeditated everything seemed. There was something genuinely spooky about it.
It's like Jordan was intentionally trying to score points in order to win the game and he was attempting to score these points as quickly as possible because there was less than a minute left in the contest. It's eerie how Jordan knew the Bulls were losing and his team had to score points at a faster pace. Was Jordan's ability to score points based on the premeditated decision to win the game or is there something innate in him that encourages him to win games during the NBA Finals?
I watched Jordan play in person, many times, at various stages of his career.
But never from the makeshift NBA Countdown set with the small television, so Bill never really WATCHED Jordan play in person.
when the Bulls occasionally rolled through Boston and eviscerated the carcass of Celtic Pride. One particular night, we turned on the locals and started cheering what we were watching. It didn’t happen because we were selling out, but because we had witnessed a special kind of greatness during the Bird Era. We knew what it meant. We knew how fragile it was. We missed seeing it.
Hey, it's a story about the Celtics and their fans. Remember when this column was about LeBron James coming back to Cleveland? As usual, every Bill Simmons column about the NBA is really about the Boston Celtics and their fans. In this case, it's not that the Celtics fans were selling out, it's just they are so much smarter than any other NBA fans only they could appreciate the greatness that was Michael Jordan. No other fans understood what it meant to see greatness because they didn't go through the Bird Era. Could Bill be more insufferable?
Pippen moved like Michael, saw the court like Michael, jumped passing lanes like Michael and blended with Michael’s game like a non-identical twin. It was crazy. I will never forget watching it for the rest of my life. Bird and Magic were genuises, too, but shit, they never figured out how to replicate themselves.
Yes, but shit, Bird and Magic didn't replicate themselves like Jordan did. Probably because there aren't too many 6'9" point guards out there nor are there basketball players with the high basketball IQ that Bird had. But Pippen was a replicant of Michael Jordan. The same thing, no differences, as long as you don't count all the differences between them.
For that reason and many others, I am never seeing a better basketball player than Michael Jordan.
I mean, shit, he replicated himself and all. That's some high-end science stuff right there.
“I was there,” Doug Collins will tell you. “We need to stop comparing people to Michael. We are NEVER seeing that again.”
Bill Simmons will now indeed start comparing LeBron to Jordan by stating they are both geniuses. Not basketball geniuses, but just geniuses overall.
From December 1990 through the 1998 Finals, not including his baseball sabbatical, the Chicago Bulls never lost three straight games with Jordan. Given the unforgiving NBA schedule, nonstop travel and general wear and tear, that’s basically impossible. But it happened. The man hated losing THAT much. Either he brought the best out of a teammate or he dumped that teammate like a showrunner killing off a struggling character.
This doesn't make him a genius. It makes him a very good basketball player who brought out the best in his teammates. Intelligence doesn't translate to winning games or else the Ivy League would have won quite a few NCAA Tournament titles over the last 20 years.
Still, that was an exclusive genius — Jordan couldn’t transfer those gifts to others, with Pippen the lone exception.
Yeah, but Jordan replicated himself through Pippen. It wasn't a direct translation of skills but a replication of skills. It's a totally different scientific process.
Bird and Magic went the other way — if they made their teammates better, it gave them a better chance to win. Like Jordan, they were basketball savants who possessed a supernatural feel for what should happen collectively on every play, as if they had already studied the play’s blueprint and come up with a plan of attack.
Yeah, Larry Bird was great. Unfortunately this article is about LeBron James, so maybe we should either write about LeBron James or get to the fucking point quickly. Sound good?
Bird’s first Celtics coach, Bill Fitch, affectionately nicknamed Bird “Kodak,” explaining to a writer that Bird’s “mind is constantly taking pictures of the whole court.” You could have said that about Magic, too. That’s what made them such devastating passers; they always knew where every teammate would be.
Yep, Bird and Magic were great. Of course it's easy to trust your teammates and make them better when you have teammates you can trust to be in the right spot at the right time. Kareem, Robert Parish, Kevin McHale, James Worthy, Danny Ainge, Dennis Johnson, Bill Walton, Michael Cooper, and Mychal Thompson could be counted on to be on the right spot at the right time. Luc Longley, Will Perdue, and Craig Hodges? Not quite as much. It's almost like there are different methods to achieve the goal of winning, but that can't be true, can it? How could Bill waste space if his point was capable of being made in just a few sentences?
Bird learned how to fully harness “it” during the 1984-85 season; for Magic, “it” didn’t happen until two seasons later. And here’s what “it” is. Each guy could assess any basketball game — in the moment, on the fly — and determine exactly what his team needed.
It's halfway through this article and Bill still hasn't gotten to the point about LeBron James and why God loves Cleveland. He is so out of ideas that even when he is inspired to write a column, he is only inspired to write a short column and has to fill the rest of the column in with rambling around about topics ancillary to his intended topic.
That seems simple, right? It’s impossible.
You need to understand every strength and weakness of your teammates.
You need to realize that you can’t dominate every game, that your teammates have to shine occasionally — if only because it enables them and allows you to count on them later. You can make that concession because you know, deep down, that you can take over whenever you want.
You need to be so good, so talented, so ridiculously dominant, that you don’t even think about it anymore. It’s almost like breathing.
And you need to embrace the performance aspects of what you’re doing.
You’re not just playing basketball anymore. You’re an artist. You’re creating something that you want people to remember. Every arena is filled with people who may not have seen you before. On the road, you love silence. That’s your favorite sound. You want to hear cheering and yelling, you want to hear the panic, and then, you want nothing. Just a sound vacuum other than your teammates yelling and screaming. You want them dejectedly filing out of their arena, feeling like someone just hit them with a wrecking ball. You want them muttering that you’re the best player they ever saw, and that they have absolutely no idea how to stop you. That’s your goal on the road.
I include this portion of the column because I want you, the reader of this blog, to know what I have to wade through when covering a Bill Simmons column. If you are not reading the column I link, then you are probably a smart person. That's my point. This is just a bunch of space killer.
Collins told me a fantastic Bird story once.
I ask this despite the fact this column should obviously be about Larry Bird since it is about Larry Bird, but has Doug Collins ever told you a fantastic LeBron James story? If so, I think it would fit in this column supposedly about why God loves Cleveland in regard to LeBron James signing with the Cavaliers as a free agent.
In Chicago, Bird was feeling ornery because the Bulls had screwed up his complimentary tickets. He noticed Collins on the sideline, complained about the tickets and asked him what the “house record” was. Then he vowed to break it. Uh-oh.
I'm guessing Bill models his childish temper tantrums over fairly irrelevant matters after Larry Bird as well.
You don’t get the nickname “Larry Legend” because of Game 7s, you get it because you brought it on those random November nights in Chicago because someone messed up your tickets. That’s a very specific kind of art, a genius crafting his performance with anger and competitive drive. That’s the final level of basketball. And when you get there, it’s not just about titles anymore.
(Falls asleep at the keyboard realizing it's over halfway through this column and Bill is still introducing the topic)
So what about this? What if LeBron James cared about making everything right in Ohio … but he also cared about protecting his ceiling as an artist? He couldn’t create what he wanted to create in Miami.
The replication machine that Michael Jordan used to replicate himself is only available in the Midwest, so obviously LeBron had to go back to Cleveland to take advantage of this. LeBron is an artist and the only cure for improving his portraits was finding more talented brushes.
This had quietly become 2009 and 2010 all over again — LeBron stuck on the wrong team, with the wrong teammates, being asked to do too much like he has been throughout his career.
This had not quietly happened. In fact, Bill wrote article (after the season was over, granted) about how Wade was declining and Bosh was becoming Sam Perkins. I think anyone who viewed the NBA Finals saw the burden being placed on LeBron. If he didn't perform well, the Heat struggled.
During Game 5 of the 2014 Finals, something happened that few people noticed because San Antonio played so wonderfully. Trailing by seven after halftime, LeBron came out for the third quarter and wouldn’t shoot. Every pass was sent with a little extra zip, as if he were telling Micky Arison and Pat Riley, here’s the team you stuck me with.
I'm going to need a chart explaining when it is fine for LeBron James to start giving up on his team. When he was with the Cavaliers and mailed in a playoff game then he was a bad person who only cared about himself, but when he's mailing it in while playing for the Heat, he's just sending a message to management that he needs better teammates...despite the fact he went to Miami from Cleveland originally for the reason that he would have better teammates. So please, I need the chart showing when LeBron is being an asshole by not playing up to his ability or when he is justified to not play up to his ability in order to prove a point.
Watching it in person, you could tell he was tired and pissed, but you couldn’t tell if it was because the season was slipping away … or because of something deeper.
I love this "watching it in person" crap Bill throws in now that he is on NBA Countdown. Funny how he sees things that no one else can see because he's watching the game in person. Of course, this doesn't mean his observations about the NBA, as seen through the television over his previous 40 years are any less insightful of course. He's still preaching the truthful gospel when he can't attend a game, but he wants his readers to give extra weight to the observations he makes while watching a game in person. Because, he's there.
Midway through the fourth quarter, trailing by 18, he missed a 3 and didn’t even run back on defense. The man was totally spent, mentally and physically. He had given everything he could give.
If LeBron didn't run back on defense when he was with Cleveland then he was a quitter who had given up on his teammates. In this situation with the Heat, he was completely justified. He was just spent, not being an asshole.
When he signed with Miami in 2010, I wrote that LeBron copped out, that he joined forces with Wade over doing the honorable thing and trying to defeat him. But the more I watched LeBron and the more stories I read about him, the more I wondered if something more organic had driven that decision.
You are going to love this. Rather than just write, "I was wrong" like any normal, non-ego driven writer who can't stand the thought of being wrong would do, Bill throws another half-assed theory out there to cover up for his original half-assed theory that was eventually proven incorrect. Bill wasn't wrong, he just wasn't as right as he is now.
What if LeBron was a genius like Bird and Magic?
What if he KNEW he was a genius?
I never thought about that, mostly because I don't make things up and then believe I discovered something deeper than I really have in overcomplicating an issue, but I didn't think of this. What if LeBron James knew he was a genius? What if he had never told anyone this, but he KNEW he was one of the great NBA players of all-time. How did "we" not see that LeBron James is good at basketball?
What if he was searching for some basketball version of the Holy Grail, some higher state of being, a level of basketball that he couldn’t find in Cleveland?
You mean like win an NBA Title? That's exactly why LeBron left Cleveland, to win an NBA Title. So there is no "what if" in this situation. It was pretty standard knowledge that LeBron left to find something he didn't think he could find in Cleveland. As usual, Bill overcomplicates an issue in order to confuse his lemming-like readers into believing he is saying something of substance that has any originality.
What if those nights during that first season when Wade (still at the peak of his powers) and LeBron (hitting his prime of primes) would take off after a rebound and unleash the most devastating two-on-one fast breaks we’ve ever seen in our lives … what if THAT was what LeBron really cared about, just playing hoops with someone who saw the game the way he did?
Oh my gentle Jesus. This is exactly why LeBron left Cleveland. He left to play with talented players who he believed could win him the NBA Title he so desperately wanted to win. He played with Bosh and Wade on the Olympic team and thought they would be a good fit together.
I think Bill Simmons truly believes he is spitting out some sort of knowledge here, but he's simply summarizing in more hyperbolic words why LeBron left Cleveland to go to Miami in the first place. He wanted to play with guys who saw the game the way he did so they could complement each other. I mean, this is really, really basic information, no matter how much Bill tries to pretend it isn't.
We never talk about his brain enough. Somehow we talk about everything else, but not that.
Maybe "we" should talk about his brain more while "we" are on national television talking about LeBron James. I know "we" always forget.
Bill's use of "us," "we", and any other term used to lump a large group of people together is annoying. There's no way getting around it. Stop using words in the plural in order to throw an entire group of people together like they all have the same thought that you do.
He’s the most criticized basketball star since Wilt Chamberlain, blessed and cursed by his immense physical advantages. Maybe that’s what happens when you blend the best of Magic, Mailman and Scottie into one frightening 270-pound package, only if that human had an unstoppable motor and Bird’s DNA.
There is no Scottie Pippen, just the replicant clone of Michael Jordan. Remember?
But you know what he can’t do? Play basketball at an insanely high level without the right teammates.
He has this in common with EVERY OTHER NBA PLAYER FROM THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE.
At this point, his résumé is unassailable: He could retire tomorrow as one of the best seven players ever.
I can't wait for the 5000 word essay from Bill on where LeBron is on his Pyramid of Basketball or whatever the hell that thing was in his "Book of Basketball."
I'm kidding of course. I can wait.
We always point to his physical gifts, but none other than Paul George recently called him the league’s smartest player. Think about THAT for a second.
You are going to have to give me a few hours. I have a small brain that hasn't watched an NBA game with the NBA Countdown crew, so I can't process information as quickly as you can.
Then Bill re-writes the LeBron "I'm Coming Home" magazine article with the "I'm a genius" bullshit and it's as bad as you can imagine. In fact, it ends like this:
I want to use all of my skills. I am Magic and Larry and Barkley and Malone in the same body. I am an artist. That’s what I am.
Apparently LeBron writes like he's Popeye.
I have caught LeBron in person maybe 50 times.
(Bengoodfella dies, his life now complete knowing how many times Bill has caught LeBron in person)
My favorite night happened in Game 4 of this year’s Eastern Conference finals against Indiana, right after Lance Stephenson stupidly challenged him. LeBron said he didn’t take Lance’s buffoonery personally, only we knew that he did.
Oh, "we" totally knew.
His numbers weren’t mind-blowing: just 29 points and nine rebounds through three quarters. But he dominated the proceedings in every conceivable way. You never forgot he was out there, not for a second. He made the correct basketball decision every time, even something as simple as “I should push the pace right here” or “I’m just gonna assume that Norris Cole is in the left corner even if I can’t see him, so I’m going to throw a 50-foot pass over my head to that spot and hope he catches it.”
LeBron had two turnovers so it seems he didn't make the correct basketball decision every time. Sorry, hyperbole on...
During the third quarter, I texted a friend that “this was an all-time non-signature signature game, he’s made like 13 incredible plays.” Almost on cue, the man made two more, including an insane full-court push that finished with a reverse dunk in traffic.
Because Bill KNEW LeBron was having a non-signature signature game. This anecdotal evidence proves it as true. What an all-time non-signature signature observation by Bill Simmons.
LeBron loves playing at home — loves seeing the arena covered in white,
If LeBron likes to see white in his home arena, he should have signed with Boston then.
He’s been great at basketball for years and years, but now he’d figured out the sport itself. He reached that final level. This was art. This was genius plus performance.
It seems Bill has been hitting those hyperbole classes at ESPN hard lately. This column is the most hyperbolic column I have ever read in my entire life and probably the most hyperbolic column ever written. It's like Bill has reached that final level. His hyperbole is art now. This is bullshit plus space filler.
In an underrated movie called Six Degrees of Separation, Will Smith plays a scam artist who infiltrates the lives of four different wealthy families in Manhattan.
Since this movie is underrated, what is the proper rating for this movie? I'm just wondering. It's based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play, Stockard Channing was nominated for an Oscar for her performance, and it has a 88% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I would just like to know how it was underrated or the criteria Bill has used to come to this conclusion.
But as long as LeBron could keep cooking those Will Smith meals, Miami would be fine. Or so we thought. His Game 4 meal was a thing of beauty. He brought out the Magic course, the Jordan course and the Pippen course, even throwing in Bird and Barkley appetizers for good measure.
Charles Barkley doesn't do appetizers. Come on Bill, you know that about Charles. I would think you spend so much time looking up at him and TNT in the NBA pregame show ratings you would have studied Barkley enough to know he does buffets, not appetizers.
Who could have guessed that LeBron had only seven Miami games left?
There were a few people who guessed.
I thought they were headed for a three-peat. I thought LeBron was never leaving Miami. I couldn’t see the things that he saw.
Well, he is a genius, so...
I watched Game 4 from our NBA Countdown set, sitting on the metal steps, and at one point, I emailed an NBA Entertainment friend asking if their photographer could snap a picture. I thought it could be a cool photo — me wearing a blue suit, surrounded by happy Heat fans dressed in white, the Celtics fan trapped in enemy territory, all of us watching someone at the peak of their powers. I just wanted to have it for 30 years from now. I know that sounds sappy, but that’s how I felt.
The truth is, I didn’t know when this would be happening again. And I still don’t.
Based on this column, it seems this will be happening again this very upcoming 14/15 NBA season. After all, LeBron has:
He’s been great at basketball for years and years, but now he’d figured out the sport itself. He reached that final level. This was art. This was genius plus performance.
LeBron has figured out basketball, so this upcoming season Bill can watch LeBron in Cleveland while he is at the peak of his powers. I mean, right? Isn't that the point of this column? LeBron is a genius and he's figured basketball out. He isn't retiring and isn't on the wrong side of 30, so he still is at the peak of his powers for a few more years. So when NBA Countdown inevitably comes to Cleveland for a playoff game, this moment can happen again.
Magic and Bird were done before I graduated college. Jordan came and went before I turned 30. Duncan, Kobe, Hakeem and Shaq never quite got there — all of them were great, but they were never GREAT.
Oh man, I'm not even touching this right now other than to say I completely disagree in every way possible. Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that Bill stated if any NBA player could have another player's career that it would be Duncan's career? Now Bill states that Duncan wasn't GREAT. As for Kobe and Shaq, Bill must not remember the late 1990's and early 2000's. Shaq was the dominant force in the NBA.
After him, you’re looking at Anthony Davis — someone with an infinitely better chance of becoming the next Duncan than a basketball genius — and there’s nobody on the immediate horizon. This might be it for a while.
It also helps the Bill Simmons is completely making this "basketball genius" shit up based on subjective criteria that he determines. So it's hard to argue with him too much without turning into a crazy person.
So yeah, I wanted a picture. Shoot me. I was there for Larry. I was there for Magic. I was there for Michael. And I was there for LeBron James. Now he’s bringing his genius back to Cleveland.
And "we" had no idea that LeBron was a basketball genius!
It’s the right move at the right time for the right guy. This will be fun.
So in summary, the Cavaliers don't deserve the #1 overall pick three out of four years because they have mismanaged their roster in Bill's opinion, but they totally deserve to sign the best active NBA player and one of the four basketball geniuses that have ever played in the NBA. It's almost like he makes this stuff up as he goes along.
Yeah, I read LeBron James’s classy letter in Sports Illustrated. I believe him.
Rest easy now, LeBron! Bill Simmons believes you. I know this is a load off your conscience.
In the summer of 2010, LeBron handled everything wrong. He knows that now. His hometown turned on him. His former owner excoriated him. Everyone else hated what he did.
No, "everyone" didn't hate what he did. I didn't hate what he did. He chose his team and did it in a poor fashion, but I'm pretty sure Miami Heat fans didn't hate it.
We turned him into a wrestling heel, pushed him to a dark place, affected his personality, planted seeds of doubt that blossomed like a black rose during the 2011 Finals.
"WE" did this. Not the media, not Bill, but "WE" did this. I hope we are proud of ourselves.
But he never forgot what happened, and deep down, he probably always wanted to atone. When the time arrived this summer, he flipped the script on us.
"US" got the script flipped on us. We did. Consider the script to have been flipped. Hope you can read backwards, planet Earth!
Those four Miami seasons made me sure of one thing: He’s one of the greatest NBA players ever.
Write it down on a tablet, because it's now official. Congratulations on getting your very own chapter in the "Book of Basketball Part 2," LeBron James. You have moved up in Bill's arbitrary rankings.
Add everything up and it’s the best possible story. He’s the conquering hero who came home, and, hopefully, will conquer again.
It’s also not entirely accurate. I think LeBron would have stayed in Miami — for at least one or two more years — if he truly believed he had a chance to keep winning there.
So what about the story isn't accurate? LeBron came home, he stated he wanted to come home and so he did. In fact, Bill said this a couple of paragraphs earlier in this column:
I think he wanted to come home. I think he always wanted to come home.
It turns out now that Bill's own statement isn't entirely accurate. You know what that means, right? WE are wrong about LeBron wanting to come home.
If you think of him like a genius, it makes more sense.
Here's the part where Bill Simmons writes thousands of more words than he has to in order to push out a column and overcomplicate an issue. Simply stating that LeBron chose where he thought he could win doesn't make for a great column, so Bill has to go off on a long tangent about how LeBron is a genius and that's why he chose the Cavaliers over the Heat. Sure, this whole part of the column could be summed up by writing, "LeBron didn't think he had a chance to win long-term in Miami, so he chose to go back to Cleveland," but that doesn't make Bill feel like he's smart and overcomplicate an issue in order to kill space.
He’s smarter about basketball than you and me, and, really, anyone else. He sees things that we can’t see. During that last Miami season, I don’t think he liked what he saw from his teammates. LeBron James wanted to come back to Cleveland, but he also wanted to flee Miami.
I think anyone who saw the NBA Finals understood Wade wasn't exactly at the peak of his career and Bosh is still a very good NBA player, but the Heat had to do better at putting a supporting cast around LeBron. It didn't take a genius to see this. So LeBron is much smarter about basketball than Bill and me, but what I saw from LeBron's teammates were that he had to work hard to carry the team at times. Anyone watching the games could see it wasn't sustainable.
And his brain works like very few brains — not just now, but ever.
Bill is really, really overcomplicating things here. Cleveland had a good, young core on their rookie contracts, while Miami was getting older. LeBron chose to take a step back rather than ride out his time in Miami and hope they could put a good team around him.
Do you think Michael Jordan was a genius?”
I asked Doug Collins that question during the 2014 NBA Finals, on the afternoon of Game 3, hours before San Antonio transformed into some crazy hybrid of Russell’s Celtics, Walton’s Blazers and Bradley’s Knicks. We were eating lunch at our hotel’s pool, flanked by the radiantly blue ocean off Brickell Key, talking hoops, because that’s what you do when you’re around Doug.
Ah yes, it is the "Stories about the NBA Countdown Crew" section of Bill's column. It has become a staple along with "Throw up a YouTube video to kill space" and "Here's a Half-Assed Theory" whenever Bill writes a column.
The man has enough stories for three books, but too much respect for the game, and for the relationships he has cultivated over the years, to ever actually write one.
Meanwhile Bill doesn't give a shit about the game or his relationships, he just wants money and fame, which is why he was going to write a book with Steve Nash about his time in the NBA. I'm not blaming him. Money is great. Just pointing this out.
Fourteen years later, he started coaching Michael Jordan — someone who collected more ripped-out hearts than anyone. Do you think Michael Jordan was a genius? I barely got the words out of my mouth.
And Bill had not spoken for a full ten minutes, so he was really pissed off Doug Collins barely let him finish the sentence.
“Oh yes,” Collins said. “There’s no question.”
What did Bill expect Collins to say? "No, Jordan was a dumbass"?
If he sensed that a particular teammate would fail him, he’d gesture to Collins to remove that person from the game. All these years later, Collins delights in imitating how Jordan did it — by making eye contact with his coach, glancing toward the offending teammate, then unleashing one of those “Get him the F out of here” grimaces. Almost always, his instincts were right.
Of course prior to Michael Jordan being the super-winner that he ended up being, teammates found this behavior annoying and there was a book called "The Jordan Rules" by Sam Smith that detailed how Jordan would often try to fight and mentally tear down his teammates. So while Jordan's instincts were right, he wasn't quite the genius under Doug Collins he is played up to be.
Michael Jordan was an excellent basketball player who had a feel for how to play the game and was a genius in terms of understanding basketball. He had the experience, instincts and the knowledge required to be considered a genius in his field of sport. Great basketball players (or anyone who is an expert in his respective field) are geniuses compared to others who play the game of basketball that aren't professionals (or an expert in his/her respective field).
Of course, the greatest sequence of Jordan’s career didn’t involve teammates: Game 6 of the 1998 Finals, 41.9 seconds remaining, Chicago trailing by three. Pippen inbounded the ball at half court, and after that, nobody on Chicago touched it again. Jordan ripped through Utah’s defense for a floating layup, swiped the ball from Karl Malone like he was snatching a purse, then drained the title-winning jumper in Bryon Russell’s mug. It wasn’t just the storybook ending that made it so unforgettable, or even Jordan’s incomparable brilliance, but how premeditated everything seemed. There was something genuinely spooky about it.
It's like Jordan was intentionally trying to score points in order to win the game and he was attempting to score these points as quickly as possible because there was less than a minute left in the contest. It's eerie how Jordan knew the Bulls were losing and his team had to score points at a faster pace. Was Jordan's ability to score points based on the premeditated decision to win the game or is there something innate in him that encourages him to win games during the NBA Finals?
I watched Jordan play in person, many times, at various stages of his career.
But never from the makeshift NBA Countdown set with the small television, so Bill never really WATCHED Jordan play in person.
when the Bulls occasionally rolled through Boston and eviscerated the carcass of Celtic Pride. One particular night, we turned on the locals and started cheering what we were watching. It didn’t happen because we were selling out, but because we had witnessed a special kind of greatness during the Bird Era. We knew what it meant. We knew how fragile it was. We missed seeing it.
Hey, it's a story about the Celtics and their fans. Remember when this column was about LeBron James coming back to Cleveland? As usual, every Bill Simmons column about the NBA is really about the Boston Celtics and their fans. In this case, it's not that the Celtics fans were selling out, it's just they are so much smarter than any other NBA fans only they could appreciate the greatness that was Michael Jordan. No other fans understood what it meant to see greatness because they didn't go through the Bird Era. Could Bill be more insufferable?
Pippen moved like Michael, saw the court like Michael, jumped passing lanes like Michael and blended with Michael’s game like a non-identical twin. It was crazy. I will never forget watching it for the rest of my life. Bird and Magic were genuises, too, but shit, they never figured out how to replicate themselves.
Yes, but shit, Bird and Magic didn't replicate themselves like Jordan did. Probably because there aren't too many 6'9" point guards out there nor are there basketball players with the high basketball IQ that Bird had. But Pippen was a replicant of Michael Jordan. The same thing, no differences, as long as you don't count all the differences between them.
For that reason and many others, I am never seeing a better basketball player than Michael Jordan.
I mean, shit, he replicated himself and all. That's some high-end science stuff right there.
“I was there,” Doug Collins will tell you. “We need to stop comparing people to Michael. We are NEVER seeing that again.”
Bill Simmons will now indeed start comparing LeBron to Jordan by stating they are both geniuses. Not basketball geniuses, but just geniuses overall.
From December 1990 through the 1998 Finals, not including his baseball sabbatical, the Chicago Bulls never lost three straight games with Jordan. Given the unforgiving NBA schedule, nonstop travel and general wear and tear, that’s basically impossible. But it happened. The man hated losing THAT much. Either he brought the best out of a teammate or he dumped that teammate like a showrunner killing off a struggling character.
This doesn't make him a genius. It makes him a very good basketball player who brought out the best in his teammates. Intelligence doesn't translate to winning games or else the Ivy League would have won quite a few NCAA Tournament titles over the last 20 years.
Still, that was an exclusive genius — Jordan couldn’t transfer those gifts to others, with Pippen the lone exception.
Yeah, but Jordan replicated himself through Pippen. It wasn't a direct translation of skills but a replication of skills. It's a totally different scientific process.
Bird and Magic went the other way — if they made their teammates better, it gave them a better chance to win. Like Jordan, they were basketball savants who possessed a supernatural feel for what should happen collectively on every play, as if they had already studied the play’s blueprint and come up with a plan of attack.
Yeah, Larry Bird was great. Unfortunately this article is about LeBron James, so maybe we should either write about LeBron James or get to the fucking point quickly. Sound good?
Bird’s first Celtics coach, Bill Fitch, affectionately nicknamed Bird “Kodak,” explaining to a writer that Bird’s “mind is constantly taking pictures of the whole court.” You could have said that about Magic, too. That’s what made them such devastating passers; they always knew where every teammate would be.
Yep, Bird and Magic were great. Of course it's easy to trust your teammates and make them better when you have teammates you can trust to be in the right spot at the right time. Kareem, Robert Parish, Kevin McHale, James Worthy, Danny Ainge, Dennis Johnson, Bill Walton, Michael Cooper, and Mychal Thompson could be counted on to be on the right spot at the right time. Luc Longley, Will Perdue, and Craig Hodges? Not quite as much. It's almost like there are different methods to achieve the goal of winning, but that can't be true, can it? How could Bill waste space if his point was capable of being made in just a few sentences?
Bird learned how to fully harness “it” during the 1984-85 season; for Magic, “it” didn’t happen until two seasons later. And here’s what “it” is. Each guy could assess any basketball game — in the moment, on the fly — and determine exactly what his team needed.
It's halfway through this article and Bill still hasn't gotten to the point about LeBron James and why God loves Cleveland. He is so out of ideas that even when he is inspired to write a column, he is only inspired to write a short column and has to fill the rest of the column in with rambling around about topics ancillary to his intended topic.
That seems simple, right? It’s impossible.
You need to understand every strength and weakness of your teammates.
You need to realize that you can’t dominate every game, that your teammates have to shine occasionally — if only because it enables them and allows you to count on them later. You can make that concession because you know, deep down, that you can take over whenever you want.
You need to be so good, so talented, so ridiculously dominant, that you don’t even think about it anymore. It’s almost like breathing.
And you need to embrace the performance aspects of what you’re doing.
You’re not just playing basketball anymore. You’re an artist. You’re creating something that you want people to remember. Every arena is filled with people who may not have seen you before. On the road, you love silence. That’s your favorite sound. You want to hear cheering and yelling, you want to hear the panic, and then, you want nothing. Just a sound vacuum other than your teammates yelling and screaming. You want them dejectedly filing out of their arena, feeling like someone just hit them with a wrecking ball. You want them muttering that you’re the best player they ever saw, and that they have absolutely no idea how to stop you. That’s your goal on the road.
I include this portion of the column because I want you, the reader of this blog, to know what I have to wade through when covering a Bill Simmons column. If you are not reading the column I link, then you are probably a smart person. That's my point. This is just a bunch of space killer.
Collins told me a fantastic Bird story once.
I ask this despite the fact this column should obviously be about Larry Bird since it is about Larry Bird, but has Doug Collins ever told you a fantastic LeBron James story? If so, I think it would fit in this column supposedly about why God loves Cleveland in regard to LeBron James signing with the Cavaliers as a free agent.
In Chicago, Bird was feeling ornery because the Bulls had screwed up his complimentary tickets. He noticed Collins on the sideline, complained about the tickets and asked him what the “house record” was. Then he vowed to break it. Uh-oh.
I'm guessing Bill models his childish temper tantrums over fairly irrelevant matters after Larry Bird as well.
You don’t get the nickname “Larry Legend” because of Game 7s, you get it because you brought it on those random November nights in Chicago because someone messed up your tickets. That’s a very specific kind of art, a genius crafting his performance with anger and competitive drive. That’s the final level of basketball. And when you get there, it’s not just about titles anymore.
(Falls asleep at the keyboard realizing it's over halfway through this column and Bill is still introducing the topic)
So what about this? What if LeBron James cared about making everything right in Ohio … but he also cared about protecting his ceiling as an artist? He couldn’t create what he wanted to create in Miami.
The replication machine that Michael Jordan used to replicate himself is only available in the Midwest, so obviously LeBron had to go back to Cleveland to take advantage of this. LeBron is an artist and the only cure for improving his portraits was finding more talented brushes.
This had quietly become 2009 and 2010 all over again — LeBron stuck on the wrong team, with the wrong teammates, being asked to do too much like he has been throughout his career.
This had not quietly happened. In fact, Bill wrote article (after the season was over, granted) about how Wade was declining and Bosh was becoming Sam Perkins. I think anyone who viewed the NBA Finals saw the burden being placed on LeBron. If he didn't perform well, the Heat struggled.
During Game 5 of the 2014 Finals, something happened that few people noticed because San Antonio played so wonderfully. Trailing by seven after halftime, LeBron came out for the third quarter and wouldn’t shoot. Every pass was sent with a little extra zip, as if he were telling Micky Arison and Pat Riley, here’s the team you stuck me with.
I'm going to need a chart explaining when it is fine for LeBron James to start giving up on his team. When he was with the Cavaliers and mailed in a playoff game then he was a bad person who only cared about himself, but when he's mailing it in while playing for the Heat, he's just sending a message to management that he needs better teammates...despite the fact he went to Miami from Cleveland originally for the reason that he would have better teammates. So please, I need the chart showing when LeBron is being an asshole by not playing up to his ability or when he is justified to not play up to his ability in order to prove a point.
Watching it in person, you could tell he was tired and pissed, but you couldn’t tell if it was because the season was slipping away … or because of something deeper.
I love this "watching it in person" crap Bill throws in now that he is on NBA Countdown. Funny how he sees things that no one else can see because he's watching the game in person. Of course, this doesn't mean his observations about the NBA, as seen through the television over his previous 40 years are any less insightful of course. He's still preaching the truthful gospel when he can't attend a game, but he wants his readers to give extra weight to the observations he makes while watching a game in person. Because, he's there.
Midway through the fourth quarter, trailing by 18, he missed a 3 and didn’t even run back on defense. The man was totally spent, mentally and physically. He had given everything he could give.
If LeBron didn't run back on defense when he was with Cleveland then he was a quitter who had given up on his teammates. In this situation with the Heat, he was completely justified. He was just spent, not being an asshole.
When he signed with Miami in 2010, I wrote that LeBron copped out, that he joined forces with Wade over doing the honorable thing and trying to defeat him. But the more I watched LeBron and the more stories I read about him, the more I wondered if something more organic had driven that decision.
You are going to love this. Rather than just write, "I was wrong" like any normal, non-ego driven writer who can't stand the thought of being wrong would do, Bill throws another half-assed theory out there to cover up for his original half-assed theory that was eventually proven incorrect. Bill wasn't wrong, he just wasn't as right as he is now.
What if LeBron was a genius like Bird and Magic?
What if he KNEW he was a genius?
I never thought about that, mostly because I don't make things up and then believe I discovered something deeper than I really have in overcomplicating an issue, but I didn't think of this. What if LeBron James knew he was a genius? What if he had never told anyone this, but he KNEW he was one of the great NBA players of all-time. How did "we" not see that LeBron James is good at basketball?
What if he was searching for some basketball version of the Holy Grail, some higher state of being, a level of basketball that he couldn’t find in Cleveland?
You mean like win an NBA Title? That's exactly why LeBron left Cleveland, to win an NBA Title. So there is no "what if" in this situation. It was pretty standard knowledge that LeBron left to find something he didn't think he could find in Cleveland. As usual, Bill overcomplicates an issue in order to confuse his lemming-like readers into believing he is saying something of substance that has any originality.
What if those nights during that first season when Wade (still at the peak of his powers) and LeBron (hitting his prime of primes) would take off after a rebound and unleash the most devastating two-on-one fast breaks we’ve ever seen in our lives … what if THAT was what LeBron really cared about, just playing hoops with someone who saw the game the way he did?
Oh my gentle Jesus. This is exactly why LeBron left Cleveland. He left to play with talented players who he believed could win him the NBA Title he so desperately wanted to win. He played with Bosh and Wade on the Olympic team and thought they would be a good fit together.
I think Bill Simmons truly believes he is spitting out some sort of knowledge here, but he's simply summarizing in more hyperbolic words why LeBron left Cleveland to go to Miami in the first place. He wanted to play with guys who saw the game the way he did so they could complement each other. I mean, this is really, really basic information, no matter how much Bill tries to pretend it isn't.
We never talk about his brain enough. Somehow we talk about everything else, but not that.
Maybe "we" should talk about his brain more while "we" are on national television talking about LeBron James. I know "we" always forget.
Bill's use of "us," "we", and any other term used to lump a large group of people together is annoying. There's no way getting around it. Stop using words in the plural in order to throw an entire group of people together like they all have the same thought that you do.
He’s the most criticized basketball star since Wilt Chamberlain, blessed and cursed by his immense physical advantages. Maybe that’s what happens when you blend the best of Magic, Mailman and Scottie into one frightening 270-pound package, only if that human had an unstoppable motor and Bird’s DNA.
There is no Scottie Pippen, just the replicant clone of Michael Jordan. Remember?
But you know what he can’t do? Play basketball at an insanely high level without the right teammates.
He has this in common with EVERY OTHER NBA PLAYER FROM THE PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE.
At this point, his résumé is unassailable: He could retire tomorrow as one of the best seven players ever.
I can't wait for the 5000 word essay from Bill on where LeBron is on his Pyramid of Basketball or whatever the hell that thing was in his "Book of Basketball."
I'm kidding of course. I can wait.
We always point to his physical gifts, but none other than Paul George recently called him the league’s smartest player. Think about THAT for a second.
You are going to have to give me a few hours. I have a small brain that hasn't watched an NBA game with the NBA Countdown crew, so I can't process information as quickly as you can.
Then Bill re-writes the LeBron "I'm Coming Home" magazine article with the "I'm a genius" bullshit and it's as bad as you can imagine. In fact, it ends like this:
I want to use all of my skills. I am Magic and Larry and Barkley and Malone in the same body. I am an artist. That’s what I am.
Apparently LeBron writes like he's Popeye.
I have caught LeBron in person maybe 50 times.
(Bengoodfella dies, his life now complete knowing how many times Bill has caught LeBron in person)
My favorite night happened in Game 4 of this year’s Eastern Conference finals against Indiana, right after Lance Stephenson stupidly challenged him. LeBron said he didn’t take Lance’s buffoonery personally, only we knew that he did.
Oh, "we" totally knew.
His numbers weren’t mind-blowing: just 29 points and nine rebounds through three quarters. But he dominated the proceedings in every conceivable way. You never forgot he was out there, not for a second. He made the correct basketball decision every time, even something as simple as “I should push the pace right here” or “I’m just gonna assume that Norris Cole is in the left corner even if I can’t see him, so I’m going to throw a 50-foot pass over my head to that spot and hope he catches it.”
LeBron had two turnovers so it seems he didn't make the correct basketball decision every time. Sorry, hyperbole on...
During the third quarter, I texted a friend that “this was an all-time non-signature signature game, he’s made like 13 incredible plays.” Almost on cue, the man made two more, including an insane full-court push that finished with a reverse dunk in traffic.
Because Bill KNEW LeBron was having a non-signature signature game. This anecdotal evidence proves it as true. What an all-time non-signature signature observation by Bill Simmons.
LeBron loves playing at home — loves seeing the arena covered in white,
If LeBron likes to see white in his home arena, he should have signed with Boston then.
He’s been great at basketball for years and years, but now he’d figured out the sport itself. He reached that final level. This was art. This was genius plus performance.
It seems Bill has been hitting those hyperbole classes at ESPN hard lately. This column is the most hyperbolic column I have ever read in my entire life and probably the most hyperbolic column ever written. It's like Bill has reached that final level. His hyperbole is art now. This is bullshit plus space filler.
In an underrated movie called Six Degrees of Separation, Will Smith plays a scam artist who infiltrates the lives of four different wealthy families in Manhattan.
Since this movie is underrated, what is the proper rating for this movie? I'm just wondering. It's based on a Pulitzer Prize winning play, Stockard Channing was nominated for an Oscar for her performance, and it has a 88% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I would just like to know how it was underrated or the criteria Bill has used to come to this conclusion.
But as long as LeBron could keep cooking those Will Smith meals, Miami would be fine. Or so we thought. His Game 4 meal was a thing of beauty. He brought out the Magic course, the Jordan course and the Pippen course, even throwing in Bird and Barkley appetizers for good measure.
Charles Barkley doesn't do appetizers. Come on Bill, you know that about Charles. I would think you spend so much time looking up at him and TNT in the NBA pregame show ratings you would have studied Barkley enough to know he does buffets, not appetizers.
Who could have guessed that LeBron had only seven Miami games left?
There were a few people who guessed.
I thought they were headed for a three-peat. I thought LeBron was never leaving Miami. I couldn’t see the things that he saw.
Well, he is a genius, so...
I watched Game 4 from our NBA Countdown set, sitting on the metal steps, and at one point, I emailed an NBA Entertainment friend asking if their photographer could snap a picture. I thought it could be a cool photo — me wearing a blue suit, surrounded by happy Heat fans dressed in white, the Celtics fan trapped in enemy territory, all of us watching someone at the peak of their powers. I just wanted to have it for 30 years from now. I know that sounds sappy, but that’s how I felt.
The truth is, I didn’t know when this would be happening again. And I still don’t.
Based on this column, it seems this will be happening again this very upcoming 14/15 NBA season. After all, LeBron has:
He’s been great at basketball for years and years, but now he’d figured out the sport itself. He reached that final level. This was art. This was genius plus performance.
LeBron has figured out basketball, so this upcoming season Bill can watch LeBron in Cleveland while he is at the peak of his powers. I mean, right? Isn't that the point of this column? LeBron is a genius and he's figured basketball out. He isn't retiring and isn't on the wrong side of 30, so he still is at the peak of his powers for a few more years. So when NBA Countdown inevitably comes to Cleveland for a playoff game, this moment can happen again.
Magic and Bird were done before I graduated college. Jordan came and went before I turned 30. Duncan, Kobe, Hakeem and Shaq never quite got there — all of them were great, but they were never GREAT.
Oh man, I'm not even touching this right now other than to say I completely disagree in every way possible. Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that Bill stated if any NBA player could have another player's career that it would be Duncan's career? Now Bill states that Duncan wasn't GREAT. As for Kobe and Shaq, Bill must not remember the late 1990's and early 2000's. Shaq was the dominant force in the NBA.
After him, you’re looking at Anthony Davis — someone with an infinitely better chance of becoming the next Duncan than a basketball genius — and there’s nobody on the immediate horizon. This might be it for a while.
It also helps the Bill Simmons is completely making this "basketball genius" shit up based on subjective criteria that he determines. So it's hard to argue with him too much without turning into a crazy person.
So yeah, I wanted a picture. Shoot me. I was there for Larry. I was there for Magic. I was there for Michael. And I was there for LeBron James. Now he’s bringing his genius back to Cleveland.
And "we" had no idea that LeBron was a basketball genius!
It’s the right move at the right time for the right guy. This will be fun.
So in summary, the Cavaliers don't deserve the #1 overall pick three out of four years because they have mismanaged their roster in Bill's opinion, but they totally deserve to sign the best active NBA player and one of the four basketball geniuses that have ever played in the NBA. It's almost like he makes this stuff up as he goes along.
Saturday, July 12, 2014
3 comments Shut Down the Presses, Mark Kiszla Has the Hottest Sports Take the Interwebs Can Handle
I'm not sure if you heard or not, but LeBron James is going back to Cleveland to play for the Cavaliers. This news may have slipped through the cracks. Either way, prior to LeBron announcement he was going back home to Akron to play in Cleveland for the Cavaliers, Mark Kiszla had a hot sports take about LeBron. Wear your flame retardant suit, please, because this retardant take is extremely hot. See, LeBron may think he is the King, but Tim Duncan has the rings. It rhymes AND it's a play on "King James." It probably took 5-7 seconds to think of this brilliant column idea.
The NBA has a problem. His name is LeBron James.
The NBA's problem is that LeBron James is too good at playing basketball and brings too much interest to the NBA. He stays out of too much trouble and is too much of a role model for kids. He must be stopped immediately. Where's Tim Tebow when you need him? How dare LeBron inadvertently create interest in the NBA.
The league has sold its soul to the cult of King James.
When the NBA sold its soul to Michael Jordan, that worked out terribly. I mean, there was all this interest in the NBA and one of the NBA's greatest players was winning titles. (Shudders) What a dark period that was.
Remember when what happened on the court actually mattered in the NBA?
Yes, I do remember late June. Do you remember when LeBron James played basketball (right now) and he became a free agent (this just happened) and he was able to choose a new team to play basketball for (this just happened)? This resulted in LeBron James joining the Cleveland Cavaliers (he's coming home) and improved the product that they will put on the court (coming this 14/15 NBA season) and that's why his free agency mattered, because he is going to make the team he chose matter on the court this upcoming season.
These days, the only thing that really counts in the NBA is the courtship of the King. The wooing of James got so ridiculous, so fast, it even made 69-year-old Pat Riley look as desperate as a nerd begging for a date to the middle school dance.
Pat Riley planned for two years to wait for LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh to be free agents so he could sign them. This resulted in four NBA Finals appearances and two NBA titles. But yeah, the fact Riley wanted to spend a day convincing LeBron to win more NBA titles, that was so pathetic. What a loser that Pat Riley is to court the best basketball player on the planet and try to convince him to come back and re-join the Heat. He should have played it cool like Dan Gilbert is known for doing and acted like an adult.
James is either going back to Cleveland. Or he isn't. Next on "SportsCenter"!
Why is it LeBron James' fault that everyone (myself included) were speculating where he might end up signing? He has the right to take his time and choose the right team for him.
Well, the San Antonio Spurs won their fifth championship of the Tim Duncan era with some of the most beautiful basketball ever seen. But that's trivial stuff.
Because Tim Duncan has everything to do with where LeBron James plays during the 14/15 season.
So LeBron James is to blame for the speculation, and as Kiszla points out, Tim Duncan has won five NBA titles and plays beautiful basketball. That's totally relevant to the subject of LeBron James' free agency.
While the world of social media spins out of control 24/7, one truth regarding sports remains the same, forever and always: It's all about the scoreboard, baby.
Okay, so while Tim Duncan is the king then that means Bill Russell has the rings, right? Or is it while Tim Duncan has the rings, Michael Jordan is the king and has the rings? Scoreboard, baby!
When that ceases to be the case, we might as well be watching Miley Cyrus twerk.
I don't really understand this reference. It seems like a forced pop culture reference to me.
King James has no clothes.
I'm sure he can afford some now that he will be making $20+ million per year. Besides, it's the emperor who has no clothes, not the king.
And the NBA has been exposed as little more than his prop.
No, the NBA has been exposed as a league whose best player was a free agent and there was a lot of interest in where the NBA's best player would end up in free agency. Funny how this Denver-based writer didn't think the NFL wasn't Tim Tebow's prop during his time playing with the professionals. The interest in where LeBron ended up doesn't make the NBA a prop, it increased interest in the NBA.
To be sure, the two NBA championships won by James are nothing to sniff at.
Well, I'm glad he has your approval. I am sure it means a lot to LeBron to know a hack writer validates his championships as nothing to sniff at.
That gives the King one more ring than Dirk Nowitzki. And one ring fewer than Brian Shaw earned as a player.
And still fewer rings than Robert Horry. ROBERT HORRY IS A BETTER PLAYER THAN LEBRON JAMES BECAUSE HE MORE CHAMPIONSHIP RINGS! SCOREBOARD, BABY!
Everybody in the league puts life on hold for LeBron.
The best basketball player on the planet is a free agent for the second time. This never happens. It never happens that the best basketball player on the planet is a free agent once, but to happen twice, and for him to go back to the team that originally drafted him? It's an interesting story. Dismiss it as uninteresting or an example of the NBA as a prop, but it's a unique situation. Also, what the hell happened to the Tim Duncan strawman argument? I was looking forward to criticizing that line of thought for it's randomness.
The King builds teams as he sees fit.
He had the right as a free agent to choose his next team and he took his time, smartly I might add, choosing his next team. Criticizing James for wanting to play for a winning team surrounded by other quality players is hypocrisy when talking about Tim Duncan playing a beautiful game of basketball. Tim Duncan wants to play for a winning team and he helped build the Spurs team as he saw fit by giving the team cap room to add other players on the roster.
Hey, Houston Rockets, do you mind if free agent forward Chris Bosh puts you and your piddling $88 million offer on hold until James tells him it's OK what to do?
LeBron James didn't tell Chris Bosh to wait for him to make a decision. That was Bosh's decision to not sign with the Rockets until James chose a team. You can't blame everything on LeBron James.
Wait until you check out the unbearable case of inferiority complex the Timberwolves would acquire if Kevin Love forsakes them for Cleveland, all because James snapped his fingers.
I'm pretty sure Minnesota already has that inferiority complex due to Kevin Love essentially saying he would never re-sign with the Timberwolves and Kevin Garnett leaving for Boston a few years ago because Danny Ainge promised him a dream team with the Celtics.
Now, like some jealous little kid, Melo is afraid to announce whether he's staying in New York or joining the Lakers in the same news cycle as Decision 2.0 by James.
Carmelo's decision didn't have anything to do with LeBron. It had to do with him not being sure he didn't want to play in Chicago. Carmelo isn't sure where he wants to play. What a shock though. A Denver-based writer bashes Carmelo Anthony.
James broke the hearts of Cleveland when he took his talents to South Beach in 2010. What he's doing now is making a mockery of the games, all the flyover franchises and NBA stars groveling to be LeBron's wingman.
No, he's choosing his next team. All of this other ancillary stuff wasn't his fault or his doing. He has a right to choose his next team in free agency and shouldn't be on Mark Kiszla's time table simply because Kiszla doesn't like the impact around the NBA LeBron's choice had.
I don't begrudge James his power.
Mark Kiszla doesn't begrudge James his power, yet this entire column is Kiszla begruding LeBron James his power and criticizing James for taking time to make a decision in free agency. But no, he doesn't begrudge LeBron...just as long as you ignore this article as a great example this statement is a lie.
More power to him. James didn't write the rules of the collective bargaining agreement; he merely exploited them.
But you are acting like LeBron wrote the rules, forced NBA writers to speculate on his destination and intentionally isn't making a decision so that the entire NBA will revolve around him more than it already does. You also randomly bring up Tim Duncan in the conversation to show how LeBron doesn't have the rings worthy of being discussed at such length.
But any league where the whim of one man is more important than the final score is dribbling down the wrong path.
The whim of James isn't more important than the final score. The season is over. There are no more games. There is no final score. There is no reason James' decision had anything to do with the final score of anything. You have no point. Stop writing crap like this.
Anybody, however, who tells you James is as great as Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson or Hall of Famers who relished competition instead of moving on to whatever's convenient fails to realize how hard a meaningful legacy is earned in sports.
It does help that Bill Russell, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson didn't have to leave their teams to find great Hall of Fame teammates. Check out the teams that LeBron carried on his back in Cleveland prior to 2010. Heck, compare the Heat teams from 2011-2014. The Celtics and Lakers teams with Russell, Bird and Magic had as many Hall of Fame players (and other quality NBA players) on the roster during the years they won titles as the Heat had during their four year run with LeBron. Whatever though, make up your own narrative through revisionist history.
James wins Twitter.
Duncan wins rings.
Tim Duncan is also 37 years old. He had three NBA title at the age of 29 and LeBron James has two NBA titles at that same age. Randomly comparing Duncan at the end of his career, in terms of championship rings, to LeBron James in the prime of his career is a misleading comparison.
You tell me who the real king is.
Um, Bill Russell or any other NBA player with more than five NBA titles on his resume?
The NBA has a problem. His name is LeBron James.
The NBA's problem is that LeBron James is too good at playing basketball and brings too much interest to the NBA. He stays out of too much trouble and is too much of a role model for kids. He must be stopped immediately. Where's Tim Tebow when you need him? How dare LeBron inadvertently create interest in the NBA.
The league has sold its soul to the cult of King James.
When the NBA sold its soul to Michael Jordan, that worked out terribly. I mean, there was all this interest in the NBA and one of the NBA's greatest players was winning titles. (Shudders) What a dark period that was.
Remember when what happened on the court actually mattered in the NBA?
Yes, I do remember late June. Do you remember when LeBron James played basketball (right now) and he became a free agent (this just happened) and he was able to choose a new team to play basketball for (this just happened)? This resulted in LeBron James joining the Cleveland Cavaliers (he's coming home) and improved the product that they will put on the court (coming this 14/15 NBA season) and that's why his free agency mattered, because he is going to make the team he chose matter on the court this upcoming season.
These days, the only thing that really counts in the NBA is the courtship of the King. The wooing of James got so ridiculous, so fast, it even made 69-year-old Pat Riley look as desperate as a nerd begging for a date to the middle school dance.
Pat Riley planned for two years to wait for LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh to be free agents so he could sign them. This resulted in four NBA Finals appearances and two NBA titles. But yeah, the fact Riley wanted to spend a day convincing LeBron to win more NBA titles, that was so pathetic. What a loser that Pat Riley is to court the best basketball player on the planet and try to convince him to come back and re-join the Heat. He should have played it cool like Dan Gilbert is known for doing and acted like an adult.
James is either going back to Cleveland. Or he isn't. Next on "SportsCenter"!
Why is it LeBron James' fault that everyone (myself included) were speculating where he might end up signing? He has the right to take his time and choose the right team for him.
Well, the San Antonio Spurs won their fifth championship of the Tim Duncan era with some of the most beautiful basketball ever seen. But that's trivial stuff.
Because Tim Duncan has everything to do with where LeBron James plays during the 14/15 season.
So LeBron James is to blame for the speculation, and as Kiszla points out, Tim Duncan has won five NBA titles and plays beautiful basketball. That's totally relevant to the subject of LeBron James' free agency.
While the world of social media spins out of control 24/7, one truth regarding sports remains the same, forever and always: It's all about the scoreboard, baby.
Okay, so while Tim Duncan is the king then that means Bill Russell has the rings, right? Or is it while Tim Duncan has the rings, Michael Jordan is the king and has the rings? Scoreboard, baby!
When that ceases to be the case, we might as well be watching Miley Cyrus twerk.
I don't really understand this reference. It seems like a forced pop culture reference to me.
King James has no clothes.
I'm sure he can afford some now that he will be making $20+ million per year. Besides, it's the emperor who has no clothes, not the king.
And the NBA has been exposed as little more than his prop.
No, the NBA has been exposed as a league whose best player was a free agent and there was a lot of interest in where the NBA's best player would end up in free agency. Funny how this Denver-based writer didn't think the NFL wasn't Tim Tebow's prop during his time playing with the professionals. The interest in where LeBron ended up doesn't make the NBA a prop, it increased interest in the NBA.
To be sure, the two NBA championships won by James are nothing to sniff at.
Well, I'm glad he has your approval. I am sure it means a lot to LeBron to know a hack writer validates his championships as nothing to sniff at.
That gives the King one more ring than Dirk Nowitzki. And one ring fewer than Brian Shaw earned as a player.
And still fewer rings than Robert Horry. ROBERT HORRY IS A BETTER PLAYER THAN LEBRON JAMES BECAUSE HE MORE CHAMPIONSHIP RINGS! SCOREBOARD, BABY!
Everybody in the league puts life on hold for LeBron.
The best basketball player on the planet is a free agent for the second time. This never happens. It never happens that the best basketball player on the planet is a free agent once, but to happen twice, and for him to go back to the team that originally drafted him? It's an interesting story. Dismiss it as uninteresting or an example of the NBA as a prop, but it's a unique situation. Also, what the hell happened to the Tim Duncan strawman argument? I was looking forward to criticizing that line of thought for it's randomness.
The King builds teams as he sees fit.
He had the right as a free agent to choose his next team and he took his time, smartly I might add, choosing his next team. Criticizing James for wanting to play for a winning team surrounded by other quality players is hypocrisy when talking about Tim Duncan playing a beautiful game of basketball. Tim Duncan wants to play for a winning team and he helped build the Spurs team as he saw fit by giving the team cap room to add other players on the roster.
Hey, Houston Rockets, do you mind if free agent forward Chris Bosh puts you and your piddling $88 million offer on hold until James tells him it's OK what to do?
LeBron James didn't tell Chris Bosh to wait for him to make a decision. That was Bosh's decision to not sign with the Rockets until James chose a team. You can't blame everything on LeBron James.
Wait until you check out the unbearable case of inferiority complex the Timberwolves would acquire if Kevin Love forsakes them for Cleveland, all because James snapped his fingers.
I'm pretty sure Minnesota already has that inferiority complex due to Kevin Love essentially saying he would never re-sign with the Timberwolves and Kevin Garnett leaving for Boston a few years ago because Danny Ainge promised him a dream team with the Celtics.
Now, like some jealous little kid, Melo is afraid to announce whether he's staying in New York or joining the Lakers in the same news cycle as Decision 2.0 by James.
Carmelo's decision didn't have anything to do with LeBron. It had to do with him not being sure he didn't want to play in Chicago. Carmelo isn't sure where he wants to play. What a shock though. A Denver-based writer bashes Carmelo Anthony.
James broke the hearts of Cleveland when he took his talents to South Beach in 2010. What he's doing now is making a mockery of the games, all the flyover franchises and NBA stars groveling to be LeBron's wingman.
No, he's choosing his next team. All of this other ancillary stuff wasn't his fault or his doing. He has a right to choose his next team in free agency and shouldn't be on Mark Kiszla's time table simply because Kiszla doesn't like the impact around the NBA LeBron's choice had.
I don't begrudge James his power.
Mark Kiszla doesn't begrudge James his power, yet this entire column is Kiszla begruding LeBron James his power and criticizing James for taking time to make a decision in free agency. But no, he doesn't begrudge LeBron...just as long as you ignore this article as a great example this statement is a lie.
More power to him. James didn't write the rules of the collective bargaining agreement; he merely exploited them.
But you are acting like LeBron wrote the rules, forced NBA writers to speculate on his destination and intentionally isn't making a decision so that the entire NBA will revolve around him more than it already does. You also randomly bring up Tim Duncan in the conversation to show how LeBron doesn't have the rings worthy of being discussed at such length.
But any league where the whim of one man is more important than the final score is dribbling down the wrong path.
The whim of James isn't more important than the final score. The season is over. There are no more games. There is no final score. There is no reason James' decision had anything to do with the final score of anything. You have no point. Stop writing crap like this.
Anybody, however, who tells you James is as great as Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson or Hall of Famers who relished competition instead of moving on to whatever's convenient fails to realize how hard a meaningful legacy is earned in sports.
It does help that Bill Russell, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson didn't have to leave their teams to find great Hall of Fame teammates. Check out the teams that LeBron carried on his back in Cleveland prior to 2010. Heck, compare the Heat teams from 2011-2014. The Celtics and Lakers teams with Russell, Bird and Magic had as many Hall of Fame players (and other quality NBA players) on the roster during the years they won titles as the Heat had during their four year run with LeBron. Whatever though, make up your own narrative through revisionist history.
James wins Twitter.
Duncan wins rings.
Tim Duncan is also 37 years old. He had three NBA title at the age of 29 and LeBron James has two NBA titles at that same age. Randomly comparing Duncan at the end of his career, in terms of championship rings, to LeBron James in the prime of his career is a misleading comparison.
You tell me who the real king is.
Um, Bill Russell or any other NBA player with more than five NBA titles on his resume?
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
2 comments Bill Simmons Lazily Writes Another Fake Mailbag
After having written four original pieces of material in a row, FOUR!, Bill Simmons takes a step back and decides he hasn't done a mailbag in three weeks, THREE WEEKS!, and hasn't done a mailbag where he admits to making up the questions in almost a month. It's been a long time coming. So Bill decides he will write a "Self-Mailbag," which appears to be a mailbag where he admits to actually making up the questions, as opposed to his usual mailbags where I think he makes up some of the questions or at least edits them in a way they sound like Bill wrote them. So Bill has an idea presented in this mailbag that will shake up the NBA. Don't like you aren't excited.
Greetings from Miami, Florida, the gorgeous home of South Beach, LeBron and Wade, Pat Riley and the Miami Mafia, David Caruso’s sunglasses, the strongest coffee in America, Crockett and Tubbs (both semi-retired), my media nemesis Papi Le Batard (he calls me the “Great Houdini”),
Then Bill continues on with a long list of things in Miami including a mention of Jalen Rose and his friend/ex-teammate Juwan Howard, most likely discussing how they got a lot of hype at Michigan without actually having won an NCAA regular season Big 10 title or a title of any other kind during their two years there.
It’s an amazing city, one of those places that makes you feel like you’re walking around a 24-hour movie set.
And Bill has been on movie sets! He was an executive producer for "Million Dollar Arm," the movie that tanked at the box office because it looked shockingly uninteresting, AND he knows Jon Hamm. He also knows Jimmy Kimmel, and yes, he has his phone number.
It also has just about nothing in common with Indianapolis, a lovable city in its own right for an entirely different set of reasons. In fact, they barely have any direct flights between Indy and Miami, just a bunch of connections through Atlanta, Houston or wherever. It’s like the airlines decided, “Why the hell would anyone fly from Indianapolis to Miami unless it was for the NBA or the Indy 500?”
Or unless the Dolphins were playing the Colts, or unless someone from Miami wanted to attend the NCAA Tournament or unless a person from Indianapolis wanted to go to Miami.
I planned on writing off Game 2 and the NBA lottery for Wednesday, figuring I could bang the piece out on my two flights (Indy to Atlanta, then Atlanta to Miami). One problem: I forgot to charge my laptop. What a rookie mistake.
So this mailbag is going to feel even more rushed and half-assed than it usually does. Get excited! Bill was going to mail in a column about the NBA lottery, (as I predicted in a Tweet...I bring this up not to pat myself on the back, but to point out how predictable Bill's writing has become):
but he was too lazy to plug in his computer to charge it to lazily write the column, so he had decided to mail in a mailbag where he writes the questions.
Because the Grantland email page that forwards me reader emails has been broken since last weekend. (As soon as we fix it, I’ll post something on my Facebook page.)
In the words of Bob Dylan, "everything is broken," but in the words of Bill Simmons, "WE forgot to charge the laptop" and WE broke the Internet and prevented him from getting his reader emails.
So I’m going to attempt to GUESS your questions. Unlike always, these are not actual emails from actual readers.
You sure it's "unlike always"?
Q: Cleveland just won the NBA lottery for the third time in four years. Does this mean that God doesn’t hate Cleveland anymore?
Bill was upset that the Cavs won the NBA lottery for the third time in four years and expressed his displeasure on "NBA Countdown" immediately after the lottery. Bill even had the Cavs last in his "Lottery Karma Rankings," which didn't really make sense to me. Few teams in the lottery actually deserve to get the #1 overall pick. The Sixers tanked so they could get the first pick, the Kings are always in the lottery, and neither the Lakers/Celtics deserved a top-3 pick. The idea one team "deserves" the #1 overall pick is silly.
A: Or, you could say that He hates Cleveland so much that He gets bored just having them flounder or lose in agonizing ways, so occasionally, He sprinkles in a little extra hope just so He can squash it later. I would keep my guard up, Cleveland.
I'm not ready to give up on Anthony Bennett, but the Cavs have won the lottery two prior times when there wasn't considered a real franchise player available. Last year there were a few good players available and in 2011 Kyrie Irving was the clear best player in the draft. Compare that to the drafts over the past five years when the Cavs haven't had the #1 overall pick where Anthony Davis, John Wall (he is on par with Irving in my mind), Blake Griffin, Derrick Rose, Kevin Durant were available. This is the first time the Cavs have won the lottery in a fairly strong draft. The 2011 and 2013 drafts weren't bad, they just didn't have the quality and depth of other recent drafts.
Q: You mentioned on TV that “we need new rules” after Cleveland won the lottery again. What are those new rules?
A: I barely remember this because I was trying so diligently to avoid becoming the first ESPN talking head to say “motherf—er” on live TV. No offense, Cleveland fans. I’m happy for you.
Talk out of both sides of your mouth much, Bill? Bill listed the Cavs as last on the "Lottery Karma Rankings" and admittedly almost had a meltdown when the Cavs got the #1 overall pick. Does it sound like Bill is happy for them?
Lord knows you suffered enough over the past 50 years, and you certainly deserved some extended Ping-Pong luck after getting shanked by LeBron four summers ago.
On "NBA Countdown" immediately after the lottery Bill specifically made reference to the Cavs losing LeBron and said that doesn't mean they get permission to be an incompetent franchise. He said something like those words. But yeah, Bill is happy for you Cavs fans.
I ranked the Cavs last in Tuesday’s Lottery Karma Rankings for basketball reasons only. They wasted seven LeBron years and never found him the right help (or came up with a smart long-term plan to build around him). They went through three coaches and two GMs since 2009 … including the same coach twice (one year into a five-year deal, no less). They had four top-four picks in three years and thought Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters could coexist. They vowed to make the playoffs 12 months ago, then proceeded to unleash the strangest collection of front-office moves in recent league history — here’s a team that spent five picks renting Luol Deng and Spencer Hawes so they could get swept in Round 1, and they couldn’t even make the playoffs.
Regardless of whether it was personal or not, and it's weird for Bill to try and indicate he ranked the Cavs last "for basketball reasons only" as if anyone cares who Bill personally likes or doesn't like, it certainly doesn't sound like Bill is happy for Cavs fans. He's got a laundry list of why the Cavs should not have gotten the #1 overall pick.
The NBA treats franchises like Cleveland the same way absentee billionaire fathers treat their screwup sons — just keep buying them stuff and throwing money into their accounts and everything will be fine, right?
The NBA doesn't treat them any sort of way. It's a lottery. The NBA (supposedly) has no control over the lottery results, so they aren't doing anything to help the Cavs.
I just hate the mentality of repeatedly enabling poorly run franchises with the league’s best incoming talent.
Here you go, Cleveland — I bought you another Ferrari, try not to crash this one!
Bill wanted his Celtics to get the #1 overall pick. Reward the good, smart teams with the best players, that's what he wants. As I have stated before while recognizing the difference in the NBA/NFL/MLB in terms of the impact one player can have, the NBA is the only major sports league that attempts to punish teams for being terrible by not guaranteeing them the #1 overall pick. So I don't know what Bill expects the NBA to do about poorly run franchises. Adam Silver just can't decide the Kings don't get a draft pick this year.
And by the way, it’s not just the Cavs. Minnesota just made its 10th-straight lottery. Sacramento just landed its sixth-straight top-seven pick. Washington made the 2014 playoffs only after landing the no. 5, no. 1, no. 6, no. 3 and no. 3 picks from 2009 through 2013. I can’t accept that we created a professional basketball league in which …
A. The same incompetent teams get rewarded — repeatedly, over and over again — for being incompetent.
The Wizards made the playoffs this year and appear to be on the up-tick. Granted, they blew some of these first round picks but I don't know if they can be considered an incompetent franchise at this point. Doesn't it mean the Wizards did something right by landing those picks and then eventually making the playoffs? Isn't that the intended point of the NBA lottery?
B. The same team in a 30-team league can win the no. 1 overall pick three times in four years.
C. We refuse to put any rules in place to temper A and B.
"We"? How is it "we" won't put rules in place? Don't worry, Bill has the rules already in place. At this point it seems like he is suggesting the NBA rig the lottery so one team can't win the #1 overall pick three times in four years...or at least so the Celtics get the #1 overall pick.
Q: Is this response ever going to end? Can you tell us what those “new rules” would be?
A: Sure …
Rule No. 1: Once you win the no. 1 overall pick, you can’t win it again for four years.
If four years is good enough for an Olympic cycle or a presidential term, it’s good enough for the same team getting the no. 1 pick.
In today's episode of "Spot the False Equivalency..."
I'm not sure how Bill proposes this happen with the current lottery system. If the Cavs have their ping-pong balls removed from the discussion then this increases the chances every other team would get the #1 overall pick or does the NBA just remove the Cavs ping-pong ball if it's selected for the #1 overall pick? We don't learn the specifics because Bill is an idea man who can't be bothered with exactly how to prevent the same team from getting the #1 overall pick more than every four years.
Rule No. 2: No team can get two top-three picks in a three-year span.
In other words, anyone who landed a top-three lottery pick in 2012 or 2013 would have been ineligible for 2014’s lottery drawing. We’d toss their Ping-Pong balls out and everything. So on Wednesday, the Cavs would have been stuck at no. 9, Orlando would have been relegated to third or lower, and everyone else would have had better chances.
Bill better hope the same teams don't end up in the lottery over a two year span or else there is going to be a shit-show in the third year where six of the 14 teams can't get a top-3 pick. Much like Bill's other ideas, this seems really overcomplicated.
Rule No. 3: You can trade future Ping-Pong ball combinations to any other potential lottery team.
I’m suggesting this one for three reasons: It’s easier than it sounds, it would be an incredibly fun wrinkle for the Trade Machine, and the Cavaliers absolutely would have been dumb enough to do it last February (saving us from the stupidity of them winning another no. 1 pick).
Because the one thing that should occur is NBA trades need to be MORE complicated so the average fan can't understand at all what was given up and what was received. Great move. I'm not going to acknowledge this rule because it just seems too complicated.
But if those three rules get voted down, then let’s at least add this one …
Rule No. 4: If any NBA team wins the lottery for the third time in four years, the team’s representative isn’t allowed to celebrate in any way.
What are they allowed to do? Nothing. They just have to stand there stoically and soak in their own shame. No fist-pumping, no smiling, nothing.
It's not much of a punishment. The team still gets the #1 overall pick, and really, how often does the same team get the #1 pick three years in a row?
Q: When Ibaka got knocked out for the playoffs two days after you wrote that “What if this is OKC’s last shot?” column, did any OKC fans blame you for jinxing the team?
A: Of course! They sent me hundreds and hundreds of emails about it!
Hundreds and hundreds? I feel like this is a bit of an exaggeration.
Who knew I had the powers to tear Ibaka’s calf muscle? Could I just keep doing that to people? Am I like the Carrie of sports columnists? Miami fans — I would definitely NOT dump a bucket of pig’s blood on my head during Game 3 or Game 4 of the Eastern finals.
Yeah, who knew? It's not like Bill has referenced him jinxing a team in his columns for the last decade and it's not like he recently reminded his readers that he believes he jinxed the Patriots by taking a picture with his dad at the Super Bowl commemorating the Patriots perfect season? It's silly to suggest Bill can affect the outcome of a game, just not silly when he does it.
Q: Are you disappointed that Milwaukee didn’t win the lottery, followed by Arn Tellem refusing to show them Joel Embiid’s medical records and bullying them into taking someone else?
A: I was really looking forward to that! I love when Arn Tellem goes Frank Underwood on us. No way Milwaukee could have taken Embiid without knowing if the stress fracture in his back totally healed.
Now remember that Bill is writing these questions himself, so...well, you will see.
Anyone who could pull off this Embiid/medical records thing just 10 months after getting New Orleans to spend $44 million on Tyreke Evans probably just needs to run our country. By the way, Embiid’s back is fine. I watched him work out last week.
There we go. Bill writes a fake question just so he can brag to his readers that he saw Embiid work out last week. Bill is very impressed with himself and as a veteran of watching tall men walk to determine whether they have a back problem or not (like he did with Greg Oden), Bill pronounces Joel Embiid medically cleared. So, no need to do a physical and Bill just had to brag to his readers he saw Embiid work. And guess what? That's not all the bragging Bill is going to do to show how impressed with himself he is.
Q: Wait … what? You watched Joel Embiid work out last week?
A: Yes — at a secret location in Santa Monica.
It was a secret location that Bill was invited to and you WERE NOT invited to. It was a super-secret location where Embiid played basketball by himself. Be jealous. After all, Bill wants his readers to be jealous and that's why he brought this up in the first place.
He wasn’t playing against anyone, just going through a two-hour workout with Will Perdue. Here’s what I can tell you: He moves around as effortlessly as a 7-foot Serge Ibaka; he’s such an athletic freak that he’s one of those “still going up as he’s finishing the dunk” guys; his freakish wingspan might make Jay Bilas pass out; he has been playing basketball for only four years (which seems impossible); he gave up a world-class volleyball career; he has 3-point range; he can shoot jump-hooks with both hands already; he couldn’t have seemed more coachable/agreeable/likable; he’s a hard worker with a goofy sense of humor; his voice is just a touch Mutombo-y (deep with a heavy African accent); and his friends call him “Jo-Jo.” And again — his back seemed totally fine.
If this were Peter King then I would be wondering if his agent was also Embiid's agent, but I don't think Bill's agent is Arn Tellem. This is quite the review of Embiid's abilities, as well as some background on Embiid that most people who follow college basketball already know.
News flash: As I said on TV before the lottery, Embiid was always going first. None of these teams was passing on him. Repeat: none of them. The amount of smokescreening going on in April and May was high comedy. We keep hearing his back is really screwed up, this could be another Oden situation … Just stop it.
The truth is, Wiggins and Parker never separated themselves enough this season to warrant anyone saying, “We’re passing on a potential franchise center with a good chance of becoming the 7-foot Serge Ibaka.”
I will remember this. I really hope "we" aren't wrong that Embiid is going to be the first pick in the draft.
Q: What could have happened at the 2014 NBA draft lottery that would have inspired the worst rom-com of the last 20 years?
If Bill is going to make up questions then shouldn't he at least do a better job than this of making up the questions? Oh, a question about a romantic comedy involving the NBA! Great, everyone loves bad romantic comedy jokes.
If Embiid and Mallory fell for each other on lottery night, followed by Embiid demanding that only Milwaukee could see his medical records (so they’d take him second), then Tellem turning evil and trying to break them up, followed by some sort of Romeo and Juliet scenario developing and Embiid and Mallory going on the run. They’d definitely call this rom-com either The Love Lottery or Drafting My Heart, and it would definitely star Jennifer Lawrence as Mallory and Michael B. Jordan as Embiid.
I don't know if this is supposed to be funny, creative or what. It fails on all counts and I don't see the purpose of this question and answer.
Q: Can you give us four more predictions for the 2014 lottery?
Sure! I’ll even throw on my Clairvoyant Bill hat for you …
Because that hat has worked out so well for Bill in the past...
Prediction No. 1: Utah tries like hell to trade up for Jabari Parker.
Because Jabari Parker is Mormon and a lot of people in Utah are of the Mormon faith. This is analysis!
I’m almost positive that Jabari is the first Mormon who can be described like this: “A little bit of Paul Pierce and a little Carmelo offensively, only if they were more fun to play with, and they were trapped in Rudy Gay’s body if Rudy needed to go gluten-free and hire a personal trainer.”
There have only been rumors of Parker being out of shape and no verification I have seen. I also enjoy how scouts nitpick prospects like Durant when he was coming into the NBA saying, "I'm not sure how much more muscle mass he could add to have an NBA body," but kid with a bit too much fat but an NBA body and a strong work ethic has a knock against him too. They are never happy.
Prediction No. 2: Orlando happily jumps on Dante Exum.
And not just because he might be really good, but because that could ignite Victor Oladipo’s career. He’s not a point guard and he’s too small to defend certain 2-guards … but if he could defend point guards and play 2-guard offensively? Boom! I love the Exum-‘Dipo backcourt.
Me too. Because the one thing many NBA teams look for is a backcourt combo where neither player is a true point guard and both want to score. What could go wrong?
(Important note: I’m making all Exum judgments so far based on 3 a.m. viewings of him on YouTube as well as the ravings of the Grantland office’s international basketball expert, Danny Chau, who loves Exum as much as I love both of my children combined.)
And really, based on Bill's stories about taunting his daughter after the Kings lose, I wouldn't be surprised to hear Danny Chau only sort of likes Exum. Also, 3 a.m. viewings of Exum on YouTube is almost as good as Bill making his usual judgments on American players after having seen two weeks of the NCAA Tournament.
Prediction No. 3: If the Celtics don’t trade their pick, they’re taking Shawn Marion 2.0 (a.k.a. Aaron Gordon).
Of course there is going to be a Celtics draft prediction. Of course.
I believe that Gordon is destined to become this year’s Russell Westbrook — a.k.a. the crazy-competitive, crazy-good athlete who doesn’t seem to have an official position yet, only the more teams work him out and watch tape of him, the more they fall in love with him. I’m worried about Utah taking him fifth if they can’t trade up for Jabari.
Gordon has been projected to go in the 4th-8th range over the past couple of months. Nothing new here.
If you’re the Lakers, would you flip no. 7 and Nash’s expiring for Lopez and Lopez’s still-healing foot, then roll the dice that you just landed a top-five center for two years?
No, no I do not. I try not to overvalue draft picks, but Nash's expiring contract and the #7 pick have to get something better than Brook Lopez.
If you’re Charlotte, wouldn’t you shop that no. 9 straight-up for Al Jefferson’s old buddy Millsap, or maybe Monroe or Afflalo? I think two of those teams are making a move.
Maybe Monroe, but part of the reason the Jazz didn't keep Millsap around is because he and Jefferson seem to take up the same space on the court at times. Besides, Charlotte needs a guy who can shoot, not another guy taking up space on the inside. Well, every team can use another quality big man, but you get what I mean.
And what’s Rubio worth, for God’s sake? Would you give up any pick from no. 8 through no. 12 for him? What if Orlando traded no. 12 for Rubio, then drafted Exum and went with the Exum-Oladipo-Rubio backcourt?
Then they would have a true point guard, but have a skinny small forward who may or may not be able to play small forward at the NBA level. It very well could work but if the Magic want a true point guard they should just draft Tyler Ennis at #12.
Q: You were there for Game 2 in Indiana — was there any point when you said to yourself, “Holy shit, Miami’s three-peat might be going out the window?”
And because Bill was at the game he had a different perspective from those watching on television. It was a totally different game in person, as opposed to watching on television. In fact, when watching the game in person Bill noticed the Pacers weren't even playing in the game, it was in fact the Pistons who were playing the Heat, but you couldn't tell this from watching on television.
Still — Lance Stephenson missed an 8-footer that would have given Indy a five-point lead with under six minutes to play (and ignited the crowd, too). When it happened, I remember thinking, If Lance makes that shot, this is suddenly the most important 90 seconds of the season for Miami.
Bill remembers thinking, "I'm going to have a super-hyperbolic thought here in a second that will affirm my status as an ESPN talking head who makes overdramatic statements for effect."
Meanwhile, the Heat threw the kitchen sink at them, knowing they had three days’ rest before Saturday’s Game 3. And they barely won. I don’t mean for this to come up like an awkward SportsCenter integration, but would you go “GOOD SIGN!” or “BAD SIGN!” for that one? (That’s Good Sign/Bad Sign, Presented by Dick’s Sporting Goods!) I’m leaning toward “BAD SIGN!”
Bill may want to take off the Clairvoyant Bill hat until he actually earns it.
Q: So what did that just mean? Are you saying Miami is in trouble?
A: Not necessarily.
OF COURSE NOT! Bill is just wanting to make bold statements through the use of jokes in order to get attention, but not actually say anything in those bold statements. He thinks it was a bad sign the Heat barely won, but they aren't in trouble. Basically, Bill is saying the Heat may or may not have been in trouble. It could go either way. It's too early to tell, but either way Bill isn't going to say anything that could be seen as him being wrong.
If the role players come through one time, they’ll finish the series off in five or six.
But if not? They’re flirting with a dangerous Game 7 return to Naptown, against a team that feels exceedingly comfortable playing them, setting up a potentially frightening repeat of what happened in the 2002 Kings-Lakers series.
Just remember that Bill makes part of his living as a talking head on a pregame show for ABC/ESPN commenting on the NBA. So Bill tells us the Heat would be in trouble if the role players for the Heat come through one time, but if they don't then the Pacers could win the series. So basically, if Wade, Bosh, and LeBron have to score all of the points then the Heat could lose. No way! Isn't this kind of obvious? I don't know how much information Bill is really providing here. NBA titles are won by role players stepping up. A team's supporting cast playing well is crucial to winning a playoff series in the NBA. It just seems like Bill is riding the whole "Here's a bold statement...the Heat could have been in trouble...or may not" type of analysis. It sounds bold, but it's really not.
If Indy blows the Eastern finals, blame LeBron first because it’s always near-impossible to win a series when you don’t have the best player in the series.
And obviously if the Heat role players don't step up in one game then that means LeBron wasn't the best player in the series, right? Bill states the key to the Heat winning the series is if the role players come through one time, but then will blame LeBron if this doesn't happen? LeBron can still be the best player in the series and the Heat lose the series, especially if the role players for the Heat are so important.
But after that, blame last summer’s trade with Phoenix for Luis Scola — the Pacers gave up Gerald Green (who blossomed into a Sixth Man of the Year candidate), Miles Plumlee (suddenly a valuable big man) and their 2014 no. 1 pick (which could have been later packaged with Danny Granger’s expiring for someone better than Turner).
The Suns' offense better fit the talents of Plumlee and Green. I don't think there should be any doubt about that. Plus, packaging the #1 pick with Granger's expiring contract is complete hindsight. I don't know if anyone expected the Pacers to trade Granger last summer. So Bill is using hindsight to criticize the Pacers and ignoring Plumlee and Green fit better in the Suns offense than they did the Pacers offense. And no, the Pacers shouldn't have changed the offense to fit the talents of Plumlee and Green.
Q: Do you think Kevin Love will get traded before the draft? Who has the best chance to get Kevin Love right now?
If you think the Boston Celtics aren't on this list then you don't know Bill Simmons at all. Bill writes a short paragraph on all of the other teams and dedicates three paragraphs to the Celtics. He is the Boston Sports Guy after all.
A: Yes, he’s getting traded before the draft. That’s when they will get the biggest haul for him. The suitors, in descending order from “least likely” to “most likely”:
And the Celtics are the second most likely team to land Kevin Love prior to the draft. Don't question this conclusion like it's Bill's opinion. It's a fact.
L.A. Lakers: Could offer the no. 7 pick, the chance for Love to come home, and the chance for him to be reunited with his girlfriend (the actress Cody Horn).
Because it is very important to know who who Love's girlfriend is and that she lives in California. After all, this is 2014 and there are no such things as planes or any other modern technology/transportation that would allow Love to see his girlfriend while playing for an NBA team not in Los Angeles.
I don’t know how any of this helps Minnesota.
Why not just stay in Minnesota one more year, then sign with the Lakers in 2015?
Maybe for the same reason Bill thinks Love wouldn't just stay in Minnesota for one more year, then sign with any of the teams on this list in 2015. Is playing with Kelly Olynyk, Jared Sullinger, and Avery Bradley so attractive that Love wants to be traded to Boston NOW before they actually accumulate talent around him?
Phoenix Suns: They have a bunch of decent assets (the nos. 14, 21, 28 and 29 picks, Alex Len, the Morris twins, etc.) but no headliner. They’d have to package multiple picks to move up to no. 5 (Utah)
But I thought Utah wanted to move up to grab Jabari Parker? He is Mormon after all.
Houston Rockets: But they’d have to convince Chandler Parsons to agree to a sign-and-trade, something they couldn’t do until July (after the draft). No way Parsons wants to live in Minnesota — he wants to be famous too badly. He’d rather attend Hollywood red-carpet premieres and become the next Bachelor. (I’m not even kidding.)
Bill loves swinging insider information like this around. He doesn't even try to pretend he's not getting a hard-on handing out insider information like this. Bill wants his readers to know how tapped into the personality of the players in the NBA he truly is. He's very impressed with himself.
So what if they sign-and-trade Parsons to the Lakers for whomever they took with the no. 7 pick (not inconceivable), deal Omer Asik for another first-rounder, then package those picks with other assets (future picks, Terrence Jones, etc.) for Love? Unlikely … but not impossible, right?
I would love to see Dwight Howard and Kevin Love play together. I mean this. I can see them fighting over rebounds now. I can see Howard pouting if he doesn't put up a double-double every game because Love isn't letting him get rebounds. I just want to see what would happen.
But no, this isn't impossible, though it may make more sense just to trade Asik for a first round pick and keep Parsons or trade Parsons in another sign-and-trade that won't involve giving up so many assets and picks. Maybe I'm not over-thinking this enough.
Boston Celtics: They have a war chest of assets, including two 2014 picks (no. 6 and no. 17), two 2015 first-rounders (their own and an unprotected Clippers pick), two unprotected Brooklyn first-rounders (2016 and 2018), a pick swap from Brooklyn in 2017 (unprotected), a $10.3 million trade exception, Keith Bogans’s waivable-ASAP contract ($5.1 million, perfect for trade match), Brandon Bass’s deal (expires in 2015) and two decent young players (Jared Sullinger and Kelly Olynyk).
Except this doesn't necessarily explain why Kevin Love would agree to go to Boston prior to the draft rather than just keep his options open to sign with them once he becomes a free agent after the 2015 season. Other than Rondo, is there any real reason to choose the Celtics now? Especially since they will have to get rid of some of these picks to acquire Love and the Celtics haven't been shy about waving Rondo around in trade discussions. Why not see what the Celtics do with their two 2014 picks, then make the decision to go to Boston after the 2015 season? See, the same logic for why Love wouldn't go to Los Angeles to play with Kobe for two years applies in some ways to the Celtics. The Lakers have no assets, but the Celtics have potential assets but no Kobe, and Boston isn't Los Angeles. It seems to me if I were Kevin Love I would look at Boston as a frontrunner in free agency, but don't see why I should sign there before they have shown they are willing to use these assets to put another superstar (through the draft or through trade...though knowing the Celtics and the lack of patience the fans/team can show, it's more likely through a trade) on the roster so I don't end up on a decent playoff team that isn't a title contending team.
Oh, and they have Brad Stevens and one of the league’s most respected organizations, as well as the team that keeps celebrating its players and welcoming them home even after they retire. That too.
I mean this in the most polite of ways, but shut the hell up. Nobody wants to hear your Boston homer crap. Other NBA teams celebrate their players and welcome them home after they retire as well. And do we know Brad Stevens is a good NBA coach? He seems good, but after one year as the head coach with a crappy team I think it's really too early to tell.
The most logical offer: Both 2014 picks, both 2015 picks, Sullinger, Bogans and Bass’s expiring for Love. That’s four first-rounders (including the no. 6 pick).
Son of a fucking bitch. Four first round picks for a guy who isn't even the best player on a championship team? Seems like a bit much to me. I like Kevin Love, don't get me wrong, but four first round picks and a quality rotational guy for him? No thanks. A team of Rondo and Love with the Celtics current roster isn't going to compete for an NBA Title. I know Bill has no patience to go through a rebuilding process or else he would become a basketball widow (like he did with the Bruins when they were losing), but I feel like four first round picks is overpaying for Love.
You tell me: Could you compete in the East with a starting five of Love, Rajon Rondo, Asik, Jeff Green and Free Agent 2-Guard TBA? And could you make the Finals with a Big Three of James Harden, Dwight Howard and Carmelo Anthony? YES AND YES! Let’s do this!
Can the Celtics compete in the East by drafting players with their four first round picks and then having Kevin Love sign with the Celtics (after all, they are the only team who celebrates their players and welcomes them after they retire, so why wouldn't Love want to play anywhere but in Boston?) after the 2015 season? YES AND YES!
(And if all of this happens, followed by an unhappy Celtics season and Love and Rondo bolting in 2015 to sign with the Lakers and Knicks, respectively, then I’m moving to England and throwing myself into the Premier League. No farewell column, no good-bye party, nothing. I’m out. Nice knowing you.)
I take it back. Let's do this! YES AND YES!
Cleveland Cavs: It all depends on whatever Bat Signal LeBron is sending them. If they truly believe they can bring LeBron home this summer or next summer — remember, he can always opt back into his Miami contract for one more season, then leave after the 2015 Finals — then here’s what the Cavs SHOULD do:
Step No. 1: Trade the no. 1 overall pick, Anthony Bennett and an unprotected 2015 first-rounder to Minnesota for Kevin Love.
And then the Cavaliers will have traded two first round picks and Anthony Bennett for a one season rental of Kevin Love. Brilliant.
And by the way, ’Sota could flip that no. 1 pick to Philly for no. 3 and no. 10, take whomever’s left between Wiggins and Parker, then have the no. 10 and no. 13 picks as well, plus Bennett! That’s a RESET button and then some.
And the only thing standing in the way of this trade is Philly would have to decide to trade the #3 pick. And really, when they have the chance to land a franchise guy at #3, why wouldn't they trade up, ruin part of their rebuilding plan and get rid of the draft picks they have carefully acquired so that Bill's rosterbation becomes reality? Who says "no" to this?
Bill Simmons Paper GM of the Year. He seems to misunderstand the human element of his brilliant ideas.
Step No. 2: Pull Miami’s old Udonis Haslem trick — renounce Anderson Varejao’s rights (for more cap space), then re-sign him in July for a longer deal.
What if Varejao doesn't want to come back to the Cavs? It was easy to convince Haslem to come back and play for the Heat because they are a championship team, but once Varejao becomes a free agent what prevents him from deciding he would rather sign with another NBA team? Whoops, there goes the human element screwing Bill's ideas up again.
Step No. 3: Bring LeBron home.
Seems simple enough. It's not like Dan Gilbert kicked LeBron on the way out the door or anything.
Your 2014-15 Cavs (potentially): LeBron, Love, Kyrie, Varejao, Tristan Thompson, Jarrett Jack, Dion Waiters and their choice of three ring-chasing veterans who would commit murder to play on that team. A little more palatable than that 2014-15 Heat roster … right?
If rosterbation were a sport, Bill would be an All-Star. Unfortunately that which works on paper and in Bill's head doesn't work all the time in real life. The Cavs SHOULD convince the Sixers to trade up inexplicably to get one of the best three players in the draft when they could sit back at #3 and have their choice of Embiid, Wiggins and Parker, the Cavs should renounce Varejao's rights and brainwash him into wanting to re-sign with them, and then all they have to do is convince the best player in the NBA to come back and play for them again even though they burned his jersey in effigy when he left the first time. That's what the Cavs SHOULD do and the fact Bill seems astounded the Cavs could screw this plan up as if all these steps are only up to them tells you something about Bill Simmons.
(The good news for Celtics fans: Cleveland will probably screw this up. And somehow end up winning the 2015 lottery, of course. Enjoy the three-day weekend.)
You mean the Cavs would screw it up by not being able to unilaterally making these decisions and realizing other NBA teams have a choice whether to make a trade or not based on their own interests and the Cavs can't force Varejao and Lebron to sign with them? I don't believe it. Bill's ideas make sense when working under the assumption NBA teams can unilaterally make decisions without the human element being present.
Greetings from Miami, Florida, the gorgeous home of South Beach, LeBron and Wade, Pat Riley and the Miami Mafia, David Caruso’s sunglasses, the strongest coffee in America, Crockett and Tubbs (both semi-retired), my media nemesis Papi Le Batard (he calls me the “Great Houdini”),
Then Bill continues on with a long list of things in Miami including a mention of Jalen Rose and his friend/ex-teammate Juwan Howard, most likely discussing how they got a lot of hype at Michigan without actually having won an NCAA regular season Big 10 title or a title of any other kind during their two years there.
It’s an amazing city, one of those places that makes you feel like you’re walking around a 24-hour movie set.
And Bill has been on movie sets! He was an executive producer for "Million Dollar Arm," the movie that tanked at the box office because it looked shockingly uninteresting, AND he knows Jon Hamm. He also knows Jimmy Kimmel, and yes, he has his phone number.
It also has just about nothing in common with Indianapolis, a lovable city in its own right for an entirely different set of reasons. In fact, they barely have any direct flights between Indy and Miami, just a bunch of connections through Atlanta, Houston or wherever. It’s like the airlines decided, “Why the hell would anyone fly from Indianapolis to Miami unless it was for the NBA or the Indy 500?”
Or unless the Dolphins were playing the Colts, or unless someone from Miami wanted to attend the NCAA Tournament or unless a person from Indianapolis wanted to go to Miami.
I planned on writing off Game 2 and the NBA lottery for Wednesday, figuring I could bang the piece out on my two flights (Indy to Atlanta, then Atlanta to Miami). One problem: I forgot to charge my laptop. What a rookie mistake.
So this mailbag is going to feel even more rushed and half-assed than it usually does. Get excited! Bill was going to mail in a column about the NBA lottery, (as I predicted in a Tweet...I bring this up not to pat myself on the back, but to point out how predictable Bill's writing has become):
So the odds Bill Simmons will churn out a "The NBA Lottery is Broken" column in the next two days is 95%, right?
— Ben (@bengoodfella) May 21, 2014
but he was too lazy to plug in his computer to charge it to lazily write the column, so he had decided to mail in a mailbag where he writes the questions.
Because the Grantland email page that forwards me reader emails has been broken since last weekend. (As soon as we fix it, I’ll post something on my Facebook page.)
In the words of Bob Dylan, "everything is broken," but in the words of Bill Simmons, "WE forgot to charge the laptop" and WE broke the Internet and prevented him from getting his reader emails.
So I’m going to attempt to GUESS your questions. Unlike always, these are not actual emails from actual readers.
You sure it's "unlike always"?
Q: Cleveland just won the NBA lottery for the third time in four years. Does this mean that God doesn’t hate Cleveland anymore?
Bill was upset that the Cavs won the NBA lottery for the third time in four years and expressed his displeasure on "NBA Countdown" immediately after the lottery. Bill even had the Cavs last in his "Lottery Karma Rankings," which didn't really make sense to me. Few teams in the lottery actually deserve to get the #1 overall pick. The Sixers tanked so they could get the first pick, the Kings are always in the lottery, and neither the Lakers/Celtics deserved a top-3 pick. The idea one team "deserves" the #1 overall pick is silly.
A: Or, you could say that He hates Cleveland so much that He gets bored just having them flounder or lose in agonizing ways, so occasionally, He sprinkles in a little extra hope just so He can squash it later. I would keep my guard up, Cleveland.
I'm not ready to give up on Anthony Bennett, but the Cavs have won the lottery two prior times when there wasn't considered a real franchise player available. Last year there were a few good players available and in 2011 Kyrie Irving was the clear best player in the draft. Compare that to the drafts over the past five years when the Cavs haven't had the #1 overall pick where Anthony Davis, John Wall (he is on par with Irving in my mind), Blake Griffin, Derrick Rose, Kevin Durant were available. This is the first time the Cavs have won the lottery in a fairly strong draft. The 2011 and 2013 drafts weren't bad, they just didn't have the quality and depth of other recent drafts.
Q: You mentioned on TV that “we need new rules” after Cleveland won the lottery again. What are those new rules?
A: I barely remember this because I was trying so diligently to avoid becoming the first ESPN talking head to say “motherf—er” on live TV. No offense, Cleveland fans. I’m happy for you.
Talk out of both sides of your mouth much, Bill? Bill listed the Cavs as last on the "Lottery Karma Rankings" and admittedly almost had a meltdown when the Cavs got the #1 overall pick. Does it sound like Bill is happy for them?
Lord knows you suffered enough over the past 50 years, and you certainly deserved some extended Ping-Pong luck after getting shanked by LeBron four summers ago.
On "NBA Countdown" immediately after the lottery Bill specifically made reference to the Cavs losing LeBron and said that doesn't mean they get permission to be an incompetent franchise. He said something like those words. But yeah, Bill is happy for you Cavs fans.
I ranked the Cavs last in Tuesday’s Lottery Karma Rankings for basketball reasons only. They wasted seven LeBron years and never found him the right help (or came up with a smart long-term plan to build around him). They went through three coaches and two GMs since 2009 … including the same coach twice (one year into a five-year deal, no less). They had four top-four picks in three years and thought Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters could coexist. They vowed to make the playoffs 12 months ago, then proceeded to unleash the strangest collection of front-office moves in recent league history — here’s a team that spent five picks renting Luol Deng and Spencer Hawes so they could get swept in Round 1, and they couldn’t even make the playoffs.
Regardless of whether it was personal or not, and it's weird for Bill to try and indicate he ranked the Cavs last "for basketball reasons only" as if anyone cares who Bill personally likes or doesn't like, it certainly doesn't sound like Bill is happy for Cavs fans. He's got a laundry list of why the Cavs should not have gotten the #1 overall pick.
The NBA treats franchises like Cleveland the same way absentee billionaire fathers treat their screwup sons — just keep buying them stuff and throwing money into their accounts and everything will be fine, right?
The NBA doesn't treat them any sort of way. It's a lottery. The NBA (supposedly) has no control over the lottery results, so they aren't doing anything to help the Cavs.
I just hate the mentality of repeatedly enabling poorly run franchises with the league’s best incoming talent.
Here you go, Cleveland — I bought you another Ferrari, try not to crash this one!
Bill wanted his Celtics to get the #1 overall pick. Reward the good, smart teams with the best players, that's what he wants. As I have stated before while recognizing the difference in the NBA/NFL/MLB in terms of the impact one player can have, the NBA is the only major sports league that attempts to punish teams for being terrible by not guaranteeing them the #1 overall pick. So I don't know what Bill expects the NBA to do about poorly run franchises. Adam Silver just can't decide the Kings don't get a draft pick this year.
And by the way, it’s not just the Cavs. Minnesota just made its 10th-straight lottery. Sacramento just landed its sixth-straight top-seven pick. Washington made the 2014 playoffs only after landing the no. 5, no. 1, no. 6, no. 3 and no. 3 picks from 2009 through 2013. I can’t accept that we created a professional basketball league in which …
A. The same incompetent teams get rewarded — repeatedly, over and over again — for being incompetent.
The Wizards made the playoffs this year and appear to be on the up-tick. Granted, they blew some of these first round picks but I don't know if they can be considered an incompetent franchise at this point. Doesn't it mean the Wizards did something right by landing those picks and then eventually making the playoffs? Isn't that the intended point of the NBA lottery?
B. The same team in a 30-team league can win the no. 1 overall pick three times in four years.
C. We refuse to put any rules in place to temper A and B.
"We"? How is it "we" won't put rules in place? Don't worry, Bill has the rules already in place. At this point it seems like he is suggesting the NBA rig the lottery so one team can't win the #1 overall pick three times in four years...or at least so the Celtics get the #1 overall pick.
Q: Is this response ever going to end? Can you tell us what those “new rules” would be?
A: Sure …
Rule No. 1: Once you win the no. 1 overall pick, you can’t win it again for four years.
If four years is good enough for an Olympic cycle or a presidential term, it’s good enough for the same team getting the no. 1 pick.
In today's episode of "Spot the False Equivalency..."
I'm not sure how Bill proposes this happen with the current lottery system. If the Cavs have their ping-pong balls removed from the discussion then this increases the chances every other team would get the #1 overall pick or does the NBA just remove the Cavs ping-pong ball if it's selected for the #1 overall pick? We don't learn the specifics because Bill is an idea man who can't be bothered with exactly how to prevent the same team from getting the #1 overall pick more than every four years.
Rule No. 2: No team can get two top-three picks in a three-year span.
In other words, anyone who landed a top-three lottery pick in 2012 or 2013 would have been ineligible for 2014’s lottery drawing. We’d toss their Ping-Pong balls out and everything. So on Wednesday, the Cavs would have been stuck at no. 9, Orlando would have been relegated to third or lower, and everyone else would have had better chances.
Bill better hope the same teams don't end up in the lottery over a two year span or else there is going to be a shit-show in the third year where six of the 14 teams can't get a top-3 pick. Much like Bill's other ideas, this seems really overcomplicated.
Rule No. 3: You can trade future Ping-Pong ball combinations to any other potential lottery team.
I’m suggesting this one for three reasons: It’s easier than it sounds, it would be an incredibly fun wrinkle for the Trade Machine, and the Cavaliers absolutely would have been dumb enough to do it last February (saving us from the stupidity of them winning another no. 1 pick).
Because the one thing that should occur is NBA trades need to be MORE complicated so the average fan can't understand at all what was given up and what was received. Great move. I'm not going to acknowledge this rule because it just seems too complicated.
But if those three rules get voted down, then let’s at least add this one …
Rule No. 4: If any NBA team wins the lottery for the third time in four years, the team’s representative isn’t allowed to celebrate in any way.
What are they allowed to do? Nothing. They just have to stand there stoically and soak in their own shame. No fist-pumping, no smiling, nothing.
It's not much of a punishment. The team still gets the #1 overall pick, and really, how often does the same team get the #1 pick three years in a row?
Q: When Ibaka got knocked out for the playoffs two days after you wrote that “What if this is OKC’s last shot?” column, did any OKC fans blame you for jinxing the team?
A: Of course! They sent me hundreds and hundreds of emails about it!
Hundreds and hundreds? I feel like this is a bit of an exaggeration.
Who knew I had the powers to tear Ibaka’s calf muscle? Could I just keep doing that to people? Am I like the Carrie of sports columnists? Miami fans — I would definitely NOT dump a bucket of pig’s blood on my head during Game 3 or Game 4 of the Eastern finals.
Yeah, who knew? It's not like Bill has referenced him jinxing a team in his columns for the last decade and it's not like he recently reminded his readers that he believes he jinxed the Patriots by taking a picture with his dad at the Super Bowl commemorating the Patriots perfect season? It's silly to suggest Bill can affect the outcome of a game, just not silly when he does it.
Q: Are you disappointed that Milwaukee didn’t win the lottery, followed by Arn Tellem refusing to show them Joel Embiid’s medical records and bullying them into taking someone else?
A: I was really looking forward to that! I love when Arn Tellem goes Frank Underwood on us. No way Milwaukee could have taken Embiid without knowing if the stress fracture in his back totally healed.
Now remember that Bill is writing these questions himself, so...well, you will see.
Anyone who could pull off this Embiid/medical records thing just 10 months after getting New Orleans to spend $44 million on Tyreke Evans probably just needs to run our country. By the way, Embiid’s back is fine. I watched him work out last week.
There we go. Bill writes a fake question just so he can brag to his readers that he saw Embiid work out last week. Bill is very impressed with himself and as a veteran of watching tall men walk to determine whether they have a back problem or not (like he did with Greg Oden), Bill pronounces Joel Embiid medically cleared. So, no need to do a physical and Bill just had to brag to his readers he saw Embiid work. And guess what? That's not all the bragging Bill is going to do to show how impressed with himself he is.
Q: Wait … what? You watched Joel Embiid work out last week?
A: Yes — at a secret location in Santa Monica.
It was a secret location that Bill was invited to and you WERE NOT invited to. It was a super-secret location where Embiid played basketball by himself. Be jealous. After all, Bill wants his readers to be jealous and that's why he brought this up in the first place.
He wasn’t playing against anyone, just going through a two-hour workout with Will Perdue. Here’s what I can tell you: He moves around as effortlessly as a 7-foot Serge Ibaka; he’s such an athletic freak that he’s one of those “still going up as he’s finishing the dunk” guys; his freakish wingspan might make Jay Bilas pass out; he has been playing basketball for only four years (which seems impossible); he gave up a world-class volleyball career; he has 3-point range; he can shoot jump-hooks with both hands already; he couldn’t have seemed more coachable/agreeable/likable; he’s a hard worker with a goofy sense of humor; his voice is just a touch Mutombo-y (deep with a heavy African accent); and his friends call him “Jo-Jo.” And again — his back seemed totally fine.
If this were Peter King then I would be wondering if his agent was also Embiid's agent, but I don't think Bill's agent is Arn Tellem. This is quite the review of Embiid's abilities, as well as some background on Embiid that most people who follow college basketball already know.
News flash: As I said on TV before the lottery, Embiid was always going first. None of these teams was passing on him. Repeat: none of them. The amount of smokescreening going on in April and May was high comedy. We keep hearing his back is really screwed up, this could be another Oden situation … Just stop it.
The truth is, Wiggins and Parker never separated themselves enough this season to warrant anyone saying, “We’re passing on a potential franchise center with a good chance of becoming the 7-foot Serge Ibaka.”
I will remember this. I really hope "we" aren't wrong that Embiid is going to be the first pick in the draft.
Q: What could have happened at the 2014 NBA draft lottery that would have inspired the worst rom-com of the last 20 years?
If Bill is going to make up questions then shouldn't he at least do a better job than this of making up the questions? Oh, a question about a romantic comedy involving the NBA! Great, everyone loves bad romantic comedy jokes.
If Embiid and Mallory fell for each other on lottery night, followed by Embiid demanding that only Milwaukee could see his medical records (so they’d take him second), then Tellem turning evil and trying to break them up, followed by some sort of Romeo and Juliet scenario developing and Embiid and Mallory going on the run. They’d definitely call this rom-com either The Love Lottery or Drafting My Heart, and it would definitely star Jennifer Lawrence as Mallory and Michael B. Jordan as Embiid.
I don't know if this is supposed to be funny, creative or what. It fails on all counts and I don't see the purpose of this question and answer.
Q: Can you give us four more predictions for the 2014 lottery?
Sure! I’ll even throw on my Clairvoyant Bill hat for you …
Because that hat has worked out so well for Bill in the past...
Prediction No. 1: Utah tries like hell to trade up for Jabari Parker.
Because Jabari Parker is Mormon and a lot of people in Utah are of the Mormon faith. This is analysis!
I’m almost positive that Jabari is the first Mormon who can be described like this: “A little bit of Paul Pierce and a little Carmelo offensively, only if they were more fun to play with, and they were trapped in Rudy Gay’s body if Rudy needed to go gluten-free and hire a personal trainer.”
There have only been rumors of Parker being out of shape and no verification I have seen. I also enjoy how scouts nitpick prospects like Durant when he was coming into the NBA saying, "I'm not sure how much more muscle mass he could add to have an NBA body," but kid with a bit too much fat but an NBA body and a strong work ethic has a knock against him too. They are never happy.
Prediction No. 2: Orlando happily jumps on Dante Exum.
And not just because he might be really good, but because that could ignite Victor Oladipo’s career. He’s not a point guard and he’s too small to defend certain 2-guards … but if he could defend point guards and play 2-guard offensively? Boom! I love the Exum-‘Dipo backcourt.
Me too. Because the one thing many NBA teams look for is a backcourt combo where neither player is a true point guard and both want to score. What could go wrong?
(Important note: I’m making all Exum judgments so far based on 3 a.m. viewings of him on YouTube as well as the ravings of the Grantland office’s international basketball expert, Danny Chau, who loves Exum as much as I love both of my children combined.)
And really, based on Bill's stories about taunting his daughter after the Kings lose, I wouldn't be surprised to hear Danny Chau only sort of likes Exum. Also, 3 a.m. viewings of Exum on YouTube is almost as good as Bill making his usual judgments on American players after having seen two weeks of the NCAA Tournament.
Prediction No. 3: If the Celtics don’t trade their pick, they’re taking Shawn Marion 2.0 (a.k.a. Aaron Gordon).
Of course there is going to be a Celtics draft prediction. Of course.
I believe that Gordon is destined to become this year’s Russell Westbrook — a.k.a. the crazy-competitive, crazy-good athlete who doesn’t seem to have an official position yet, only the more teams work him out and watch tape of him, the more they fall in love with him. I’m worried about Utah taking him fifth if they can’t trade up for Jabari.
Gordon has been projected to go in the 4th-8th range over the past couple of months. Nothing new here.
If you’re the Lakers, would you flip no. 7 and Nash’s expiring for Lopez and Lopez’s still-healing foot, then roll the dice that you just landed a top-five center for two years?
No, no I do not. I try not to overvalue draft picks, but Nash's expiring contract and the #7 pick have to get something better than Brook Lopez.
If you’re Charlotte, wouldn’t you shop that no. 9 straight-up for Al Jefferson’s old buddy Millsap, or maybe Monroe or Afflalo? I think two of those teams are making a move.
Maybe Monroe, but part of the reason the Jazz didn't keep Millsap around is because he and Jefferson seem to take up the same space on the court at times. Besides, Charlotte needs a guy who can shoot, not another guy taking up space on the inside. Well, every team can use another quality big man, but you get what I mean.
And what’s Rubio worth, for God’s sake? Would you give up any pick from no. 8 through no. 12 for him? What if Orlando traded no. 12 for Rubio, then drafted Exum and went with the Exum-Oladipo-Rubio backcourt?
Then they would have a true point guard, but have a skinny small forward who may or may not be able to play small forward at the NBA level. It very well could work but if the Magic want a true point guard they should just draft Tyler Ennis at #12.
Q: You were there for Game 2 in Indiana — was there any point when you said to yourself, “Holy shit, Miami’s three-peat might be going out the window?”
And because Bill was at the game he had a different perspective from those watching on television. It was a totally different game in person, as opposed to watching on television. In fact, when watching the game in person Bill noticed the Pacers weren't even playing in the game, it was in fact the Pistons who were playing the Heat, but you couldn't tell this from watching on television.
Still — Lance Stephenson missed an 8-footer that would have given Indy a five-point lead with under six minutes to play (and ignited the crowd, too). When it happened, I remember thinking, If Lance makes that shot, this is suddenly the most important 90 seconds of the season for Miami.
Bill remembers thinking, "I'm going to have a super-hyperbolic thought here in a second that will affirm my status as an ESPN talking head who makes overdramatic statements for effect."
Meanwhile, the Heat threw the kitchen sink at them, knowing they had three days’ rest before Saturday’s Game 3. And they barely won. I don’t mean for this to come up like an awkward SportsCenter integration, but would you go “GOOD SIGN!” or “BAD SIGN!” for that one? (That’s Good Sign/Bad Sign, Presented by Dick’s Sporting Goods!) I’m leaning toward “BAD SIGN!”
Bill may want to take off the Clairvoyant Bill hat until he actually earns it.
Q: So what did that just mean? Are you saying Miami is in trouble?
A: Not necessarily.
OF COURSE NOT! Bill is just wanting to make bold statements through the use of jokes in order to get attention, but not actually say anything in those bold statements. He thinks it was a bad sign the Heat barely won, but they aren't in trouble. Basically, Bill is saying the Heat may or may not have been in trouble. It could go either way. It's too early to tell, but either way Bill isn't going to say anything that could be seen as him being wrong.
If the role players come through one time, they’ll finish the series off in five or six.
But if not? They’re flirting with a dangerous Game 7 return to Naptown, against a team that feels exceedingly comfortable playing them, setting up a potentially frightening repeat of what happened in the 2002 Kings-Lakers series.
Just remember that Bill makes part of his living as a talking head on a pregame show for ABC/ESPN commenting on the NBA. So Bill tells us the Heat would be in trouble if the role players for the Heat come through one time, but if they don't then the Pacers could win the series. So basically, if Wade, Bosh, and LeBron have to score all of the points then the Heat could lose. No way! Isn't this kind of obvious? I don't know how much information Bill is really providing here. NBA titles are won by role players stepping up. A team's supporting cast playing well is crucial to winning a playoff series in the NBA. It just seems like Bill is riding the whole "Here's a bold statement...the Heat could have been in trouble...or may not" type of analysis. It sounds bold, but it's really not.
If Indy blows the Eastern finals, blame LeBron first because it’s always near-impossible to win a series when you don’t have the best player in the series.
And obviously if the Heat role players don't step up in one game then that means LeBron wasn't the best player in the series, right? Bill states the key to the Heat winning the series is if the role players come through one time, but then will blame LeBron if this doesn't happen? LeBron can still be the best player in the series and the Heat lose the series, especially if the role players for the Heat are so important.
But after that, blame last summer’s trade with Phoenix for Luis Scola — the Pacers gave up Gerald Green (who blossomed into a Sixth Man of the Year candidate), Miles Plumlee (suddenly a valuable big man) and their 2014 no. 1 pick (which could have been later packaged with Danny Granger’s expiring for someone better than Turner).
The Suns' offense better fit the talents of Plumlee and Green. I don't think there should be any doubt about that. Plus, packaging the #1 pick with Granger's expiring contract is complete hindsight. I don't know if anyone expected the Pacers to trade Granger last summer. So Bill is using hindsight to criticize the Pacers and ignoring Plumlee and Green fit better in the Suns offense than they did the Pacers offense. And no, the Pacers shouldn't have changed the offense to fit the talents of Plumlee and Green.
Q: Do you think Kevin Love will get traded before the draft? Who has the best chance to get Kevin Love right now?
If you think the Boston Celtics aren't on this list then you don't know Bill Simmons at all. Bill writes a short paragraph on all of the other teams and dedicates three paragraphs to the Celtics. He is the Boston Sports Guy after all.
A: Yes, he’s getting traded before the draft. That’s when they will get the biggest haul for him. The suitors, in descending order from “least likely” to “most likely”:
And the Celtics are the second most likely team to land Kevin Love prior to the draft. Don't question this conclusion like it's Bill's opinion. It's a fact.
L.A. Lakers: Could offer the no. 7 pick, the chance for Love to come home, and the chance for him to be reunited with his girlfriend (the actress Cody Horn).
Because it is very important to know who who Love's girlfriend is and that she lives in California. After all, this is 2014 and there are no such things as planes or any other modern technology/transportation that would allow Love to see his girlfriend while playing for an NBA team not in Los Angeles.
I don’t know how any of this helps Minnesota.
Why not just stay in Minnesota one more year, then sign with the Lakers in 2015?
Maybe for the same reason Bill thinks Love wouldn't just stay in Minnesota for one more year, then sign with any of the teams on this list in 2015. Is playing with Kelly Olynyk, Jared Sullinger, and Avery Bradley so attractive that Love wants to be traded to Boston NOW before they actually accumulate talent around him?
Phoenix Suns: They have a bunch of decent assets (the nos. 14, 21, 28 and 29 picks, Alex Len, the Morris twins, etc.) but no headliner. They’d have to package multiple picks to move up to no. 5 (Utah)
But I thought Utah wanted to move up to grab Jabari Parker? He is Mormon after all.
Houston Rockets: But they’d have to convince Chandler Parsons to agree to a sign-and-trade, something they couldn’t do until July (after the draft). No way Parsons wants to live in Minnesota — he wants to be famous too badly. He’d rather attend Hollywood red-carpet premieres and become the next Bachelor. (I’m not even kidding.)
Bill loves swinging insider information like this around. He doesn't even try to pretend he's not getting a hard-on handing out insider information like this. Bill wants his readers to know how tapped into the personality of the players in the NBA he truly is. He's very impressed with himself.
So what if they sign-and-trade Parsons to the Lakers for whomever they took with the no. 7 pick (not inconceivable), deal Omer Asik for another first-rounder, then package those picks with other assets (future picks, Terrence Jones, etc.) for Love? Unlikely … but not impossible, right?
I would love to see Dwight Howard and Kevin Love play together. I mean this. I can see them fighting over rebounds now. I can see Howard pouting if he doesn't put up a double-double every game because Love isn't letting him get rebounds. I just want to see what would happen.
But no, this isn't impossible, though it may make more sense just to trade Asik for a first round pick and keep Parsons or trade Parsons in another sign-and-trade that won't involve giving up so many assets and picks. Maybe I'm not over-thinking this enough.
Boston Celtics: They have a war chest of assets, including two 2014 picks (no. 6 and no. 17), two 2015 first-rounders (their own and an unprotected Clippers pick), two unprotected Brooklyn first-rounders (2016 and 2018), a pick swap from Brooklyn in 2017 (unprotected), a $10.3 million trade exception, Keith Bogans’s waivable-ASAP contract ($5.1 million, perfect for trade match), Brandon Bass’s deal (expires in 2015) and two decent young players (Jared Sullinger and Kelly Olynyk).
Except this doesn't necessarily explain why Kevin Love would agree to go to Boston prior to the draft rather than just keep his options open to sign with them once he becomes a free agent after the 2015 season. Other than Rondo, is there any real reason to choose the Celtics now? Especially since they will have to get rid of some of these picks to acquire Love and the Celtics haven't been shy about waving Rondo around in trade discussions. Why not see what the Celtics do with their two 2014 picks, then make the decision to go to Boston after the 2015 season? See, the same logic for why Love wouldn't go to Los Angeles to play with Kobe for two years applies in some ways to the Celtics. The Lakers have no assets, but the Celtics have potential assets but no Kobe, and Boston isn't Los Angeles. It seems to me if I were Kevin Love I would look at Boston as a frontrunner in free agency, but don't see why I should sign there before they have shown they are willing to use these assets to put another superstar (through the draft or through trade...though knowing the Celtics and the lack of patience the fans/team can show, it's more likely through a trade) on the roster so I don't end up on a decent playoff team that isn't a title contending team.
Oh, and they have Brad Stevens and one of the league’s most respected organizations, as well as the team that keeps celebrating its players and welcoming them home even after they retire. That too.
I mean this in the most polite of ways, but shut the hell up. Nobody wants to hear your Boston homer crap. Other NBA teams celebrate their players and welcome them home after they retire as well. And do we know Brad Stevens is a good NBA coach? He seems good, but after one year as the head coach with a crappy team I think it's really too early to tell.
The most logical offer: Both 2014 picks, both 2015 picks, Sullinger, Bogans and Bass’s expiring for Love. That’s four first-rounders (including the no. 6 pick).
Son of a fucking bitch. Four first round picks for a guy who isn't even the best player on a championship team? Seems like a bit much to me. I like Kevin Love, don't get me wrong, but four first round picks and a quality rotational guy for him? No thanks. A team of Rondo and Love with the Celtics current roster isn't going to compete for an NBA Title. I know Bill has no patience to go through a rebuilding process or else he would become a basketball widow (like he did with the Bruins when they were losing), but I feel like four first round picks is overpaying for Love.
You tell me: Could you compete in the East with a starting five of Love, Rajon Rondo, Asik, Jeff Green and Free Agent 2-Guard TBA? And could you make the Finals with a Big Three of James Harden, Dwight Howard and Carmelo Anthony? YES AND YES! Let’s do this!
Can the Celtics compete in the East by drafting players with their four first round picks and then having Kevin Love sign with the Celtics (after all, they are the only team who celebrates their players and welcomes them after they retire, so why wouldn't Love want to play anywhere but in Boston?) after the 2015 season? YES AND YES!
(And if all of this happens, followed by an unhappy Celtics season and Love and Rondo bolting in 2015 to sign with the Lakers and Knicks, respectively, then I’m moving to England and throwing myself into the Premier League. No farewell column, no good-bye party, nothing. I’m out. Nice knowing you.)
I take it back. Let's do this! YES AND YES!
Cleveland Cavs: It all depends on whatever Bat Signal LeBron is sending them. If they truly believe they can bring LeBron home this summer or next summer — remember, he can always opt back into his Miami contract for one more season, then leave after the 2015 Finals — then here’s what the Cavs SHOULD do:
Step No. 1: Trade the no. 1 overall pick, Anthony Bennett and an unprotected 2015 first-rounder to Minnesota for Kevin Love.
And then the Cavaliers will have traded two first round picks and Anthony Bennett for a one season rental of Kevin Love. Brilliant.
And by the way, ’Sota could flip that no. 1 pick to Philly for no. 3 and no. 10, take whomever’s left between Wiggins and Parker, then have the no. 10 and no. 13 picks as well, plus Bennett! That’s a RESET button and then some.
And the only thing standing in the way of this trade is Philly would have to decide to trade the #3 pick. And really, when they have the chance to land a franchise guy at #3, why wouldn't they trade up, ruin part of their rebuilding plan and get rid of the draft picks they have carefully acquired so that Bill's rosterbation becomes reality? Who says "no" to this?
Bill Simmons Paper GM of the Year. He seems to misunderstand the human element of his brilliant ideas.
Step No. 2: Pull Miami’s old Udonis Haslem trick — renounce Anderson Varejao’s rights (for more cap space), then re-sign him in July for a longer deal.
What if Varejao doesn't want to come back to the Cavs? It was easy to convince Haslem to come back and play for the Heat because they are a championship team, but once Varejao becomes a free agent what prevents him from deciding he would rather sign with another NBA team? Whoops, there goes the human element screwing Bill's ideas up again.
Step No. 3: Bring LeBron home.
Seems simple enough. It's not like Dan Gilbert kicked LeBron on the way out the door or anything.
Your 2014-15 Cavs (potentially): LeBron, Love, Kyrie, Varejao, Tristan Thompson, Jarrett Jack, Dion Waiters and their choice of three ring-chasing veterans who would commit murder to play on that team. A little more palatable than that 2014-15 Heat roster … right?
If rosterbation were a sport, Bill would be an All-Star. Unfortunately that which works on paper and in Bill's head doesn't work all the time in real life. The Cavs SHOULD convince the Sixers to trade up inexplicably to get one of the best three players in the draft when they could sit back at #3 and have their choice of Embiid, Wiggins and Parker, the Cavs should renounce Varejao's rights and brainwash him into wanting to re-sign with them, and then all they have to do is convince the best player in the NBA to come back and play for them again even though they burned his jersey in effigy when he left the first time. That's what the Cavs SHOULD do and the fact Bill seems astounded the Cavs could screw this plan up as if all these steps are only up to them tells you something about Bill Simmons.
(The good news for Celtics fans: Cleveland will probably screw this up. And somehow end up winning the 2015 lottery, of course. Enjoy the three-day weekend.)
You mean the Cavs would screw it up by not being able to unilaterally making these decisions and realizing other NBA teams have a choice whether to make a trade or not based on their own interests and the Cavs can't force Varejao and Lebron to sign with them? I don't believe it. Bill's ideas make sense when working under the assumption NBA teams can unilaterally make decisions without the human element being present.
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