LEBRON JAMES
TERRY MOSHER
I know that LeBron James is considered by most, especially the young crowd, as the greatest basketball player to ever play on the planet. No doubt, he is great. There’s no argument from me on that. He has size (6-8, 250 or thereabouts), speed, quickness, intelligence, good court awareness, and has so far carried the Cavaliers into a game lead (2-1) in the NBA Championship series.
I’m not going to jump on his bandwagon, however. It’s easy to be a frontrunner when you see a great player and slobber all over yourself in admiration. Good. Go for it. But I’m not joining in.
There are several reasons for that. First, and most important, you can’t compare today’s athletes to another era. You can if you want, but I would suggest that it’s not possible to put them in any order because different eras are, well, different.
For example, I have always considered Wilt Chamberlain the best player I have seen. My reason is simple. Wilt did whatever Wilt wanted to do – score, check, assist, check, rebound, check.
But to make my case on Wilt and then put a qualitative number on it is impossible. There have been a large number of great NBA players and James is simply another one. I can’t stop you from believing he is better than Wilt, MJ, Bird, Magic, Elgin, Dr. J., Jerry West, Big O, Oscar Robertson, Kobe Bryant, Bill Russell, Bob Cousey, Bob Pettit, Pistol Pete and many others. And you can argue your case from dawn to sunset and while you may get a consensus you can’t put it on paper and compare it to others and with good sense make a case that will stand up on close inspection.
It’s better to just say LeBron is a great player, and leave it at that.
A good recent example of what I’m saying is on Facebook somebody posted the 1973 Belmont that was won by 31lengths by Secretariat opposite the Belmont that was won Saturday by American Pharoah, to prove that Secretarial was the much better horse.
That is a lot of rot crap. They are two different horses separated by 42 years and you can’t compare them on any level and be convincing of one being better than the other, regardless of the time difference (which would make Secretariat the winner) over the 1.5-mile course.
I will tell you that I think Secretariat is the best horse I have seen, but that does not make him the best. Seabiscuit was pretty good, so was Man O’ War, Ruffian, Citation, Affirmed, Sham and countless others too many to list here. You can’t compare them and make sense of it because they ran in different eras.
I do have one negative view of James. I believe he is a front-runner, and to me that is a negative. When things are going good, and he’s going good, he’s all smiles and puffs his chest out with extreme pride. As well as he should.
But when things are going wrong, as we all know happens not just on the basketball court but in real life, he melts. In the first game of this championship series, which the Warriors won, James was simply bad in the last couple minutes of regulation and in overtime. A great player is entitled to have a bad streak, but I have seen it too often from him. When the going gets real tough and the breaks go against him, he seems to sulk and then melt. Great players, I will insist, must prove it all the time, not just when things are going great.
My third point has to do with me, and my personality. I’m an extreme-extreme competitor. I don’t outwardly show it. I appear to be calm and in some cases appear to be disinterested. I warn you, that is not the case. I want to win all the time, and when I don’t it hurts.
So I’m always looking for weakness from others. Which means, in LeBron’s case I’m always searching for the clink, the weak link that I believe we all have. To me, LeBron is a front-runner who can be mentally beaten if you can get up on him and his team early and then apply the gas pedal. He often, to me, does something stupid, and, again, maybe I’m just busy looking for that weak link.
I also don’t think he likes to be bullied. Not that many people can do that to him. Maybe nobody can. But I believe if you can be physically with him, he will eventually lose it.
Does this make LeBron less than a great player? No, but it does make him human. And we humans all have weakness; you just have to find his and then use it against him. Wilt, for example, could not handle the ball or shoot it from anywhere beyond 10 feet, or make free throws, but what he could do was devastating. James is the same way, and his weakness is more likely emotionally and if you can play on his emotions you have a chance to disrupt that greatness.
OK, that is enough for today.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.