I don't know if I agree with that. I think some guys would have jumped ship back in the day to team up with MJ, Hakeem, etc..., but I also think that basketball culture has absolutely changed due to AAU. These guys are used to teaming up with other badass players starting in middle school. That continues through high school and college, where a lot of the truly elite guys go to Kentucky or Duke. Anyway, like I said, I don't "blame" KD or the Warriors for the current scenario - they only acted in their self-interest. I only blame the NBA.
I don't see much to criticize in LeBron's choice to go to Miami (a team that hadn't gotten out of the first round in 4 years) or him returning home to a bottom feeder like the Cavs were. If people feel he was wrong to abandon the Cavs the first time around (I didn't -- though the way he handled it with the media wasn't great), he made up for it by returning and making them a champion. The case against Durant is clearer. He joined a team that just won 73 games, had a 2-time MVP, and would have been a title contender (possibly favorite) even without him.
Agreed, even Duncan almost left San Antonio because he thought he could play with superstar talent in Orlando. Kobe was begging to leave the Lakers. Shaq left. Kareem left. Barkley left. KG left and said he kind of regretted not leaving earlier because he wasted his prime. I genuinely think that if Garnett and Duncan switched teams from the start, KG is a top 10 player ever and Duncan is top 25. Basically players who were on stacked teams generally stayed.
but no we wouldn't have. if you were kevin durant, would you have really signed with the 73 win team to make winning as easy as possible? I wouldn't have. because if i was as good as kevin durant, I would want to prove to everyone how great i was. that i might be the best player in the nba. that i could lead a team to a championship. that if it wasn't for injuries, i would have won a few titles already. maybe I wouldn't want to do it with russell westbrook, but with a 73 win team that doesn't need me? no thanks. I couldn't imagine being as good at anything as kevin durant is at basketball and choosing that much of an anti-competitive route. and it's not like I'm just making this idea up. all we ever hear from athletes is how they are being disrespected, how they are better than everyone else, how "no one believed in us." how so and so shouldn't be making more money than them. they clearly care about this stuff and have egos (who wouldn't and who doesn't?) and want that adulation. is kevin durant going to get any of that? if he didn't care about these things, he wouldn't have listened to the "ringz" criticism so much that he made this stupid decision. I get it, you get tired of getting criticized constantly. LeBron went through the same thing (although about 10x worse) when he made "the Decision." i have liked and supported kevin durant the whole time. I can't stand the rings argument, that someone sucks because they are great but their team isn't good enough. if he had overcome and won (hell, even in san antonio) I would have been happy for him. but this? going to a team that only theoretically "needs" you because they choked even worse than your team did? it just can't get any weaker. he took an understandable problem (being criticized for no good reason) and came up with a terrible solution. were there any perfect solutions? maybe not. san antonio is not as fun as golden state. no other team maybe makes it as likely that you will overcome golden state as the okc team. okc has russell westbrook who he maybe hated playing with. but hey, life being the 2nd best player who makes tens of millions of dollars might not be perfect. there were two places he couldn't go - cleveland and golden state. and he somehow picked one of them. at this point I'm just disappointed. the nba playoffs are my favorite time of the year. and kevin Durant just took a knife and stabbed them in the heart for the foreseeable future. he has made them boring and pointless. has any fun discussion been generated by these finals? or this playoffs? as much as I don't like golden state, I'm not even worried about them winning a lot of rings. who is going to praise them for it? they have about as much meaning as Carmelo Anthony's 3 gold medals. no one's moving him up the all-time ranks for those. so go ahead and get those rings, but all you're doing is making the nba product more boring for any serious fans. and on a side note, there just is no comparison to our jobs. I, you, we are not elite employees who are possibly the second best person in our field, capable of turning the tide for our company to enable it to dominate the industry. we work because we like having food and shelter and income from a job is the way to obtain those things. we choose jobs primarily to maximize money, time (commute), and responsibility (depending on if you would rather do absolutely nothing or would rather have lots of responsibility and respect). we're not out there for the respect of our peers and the media and the world. of course if some company offered me more money, a shorter commute, and the role I wanted I would take it. because that's exactly what I'm looking for. but if my job was essentially competition, I would be looking to maximize that. am I basically saying you need to find a way to be better than everybody without being too much better than everybody? yeah, and that's tough. I don't know where the line is. I just know durant jumped way, way over it. I completely agree. honestly, even if they wanted to join, do you think Michael would want them to? I think he'd be so competitive he would tell them to gtfo, I got this. if the '96 bulls just happened to have maximum cap room, I can't imagine shaq joining them or mj recruiting shaq.
LeBron made two losers (K-Love and Irving) look like winners. KD joined a team that has already made the finals 2 years in a row and got eliminated by them last year. KD is the real punk here
ohhhh this is too hard, we were up 3-1 on the warriors but it got too hard I missed too many shots! he wasn't that far off from winning the ultimate prize for OKC. A true old school competitor does what any man would have done, you go to management and get Raphael and his romper out of there. I criticized lebron for the same thing. No one should go ring chase before they're 32, let alone 27 like these guys were. Durant's move killed 3 birds with one stone. I don't know what kindo psycho came up with that saying but instead of having GS, OKC, San Antonio and the H, 4 enjoyable teams competing to get to the finals, it's just now 1 for the foreseeable future. Not 1, not 2, not3, not 4, not 5, not 6 is truly applicable here.
If it's like that, where are the Moses/Dr. J/ caliber super team? Where is the Pistons super team? Where is the 3 all star Bucks? The Hawks were contenders as well. The Blazers. There's literally zero chance for anyone to compete with GS or CAVS outside of a small chance for San Antonio. Maybe this offseason will see the beginning of a future superteam(sixers? Pelicans?), or Westbrook/Harden/PH13/Butler/CP3/Melo combination of players decide they want to play with each other as well?
It's mind blowing that a team that wins 73 games and a team that didn't make then playoffs are exactly the same, since neither won the finals
LeBron didn't join a team that didn't make the playoffs the year before by himself. He knew Kevin Love would join him plus a bunch of ring chasing veterans. When he joined the Heat, he knew that Chris Bosh would join him and Wade pluse more ring chasing veterans. If the salary cap had allowed it, don't you think he would have invited another max player to join him on both of those teams?
uh, no they're not... "The first two games of the NBA Finals are the most-watched since Michael Jordan's final championship in 1998. Despite two lopsided outcomes, Golden State's two home wins over Cleveland averaged 19.6 million viewers, according to numbers released Monday by the Nielsen company. That's an increase of 5 percent from the 18.6 million average in 2016."
if it were not for the golden state warriors the Rockets would've been first seed in 2015 in dwights second year as a rocket. but no, the Warriors had to come out of nowhere and make the gap between number one and number two so big that it doesn't mean anything to be second and the NBA.
