MJ: "I would never have called up Larry, Magic & say lets get together."

welcome to the NBA...you're not going to overwhelm the league's best teams. no one is saying this is the greatest team of all time.

remember...if they went 7-7 against the East's best teams....the East's best teams went 7-7 against them, too.

if you breakeven against the best, you're among the best, provided you're taking care of business against the weaker teams, too.

honest to God, I can't believe we're even having this discussion. how in the world did we get to the point where you guys remember the Cavs as being anything less than a true championship contender over the last few seasons?? the NBA Finals appearance wasn't enough? Winning 66 games wasn't enough? having the best record over the last 2 seasons wasn't enough?

 

what revisionist history, you are setting the standard that because they are a good regular season team they should be a dominant playoff team. no one disputes they are a good regular season team

do you dispute that Lebron has worse teamates individually than Howard, kobe, or pierce?

do you think mo williams is as good as ray allen, that jamison is as good as gasol, is that your argument?

 

where did i say they should be a dominant playoff team, pgabriel?

 

what's your point on harping on their reg season record, madmax?

 

To start with, how is it not harder? In one case a player is putting faith in himself and the ability of a GM to build a team around him. It's a completely uncertain future. The other case is joining two all-stars and making you an instant ready-made favorite to win the championship. Besides, you don't think Jordan influenced every player he played during his time with the Bulls and helped them to elevate/shape their game? Dude was such a fierce competitor they were probably terrified of disappointing him.

Lebron had the opportunity to do that with the Cavaliers, but he chose an easier and more direct path of just joining two all stars. I don't see how that can be argued. I'm not bashing Lebron for making this decision. Heck, MJ may have done the same thing if he had the opportunity early in his career...we'll never know for sure. My personal opinion is Jordan would have stayed if he were in Lebron's shoes. I just think that's the way he was built. Lebron doesn't seem to have the same freaky competitiveness that Jordan had.

With how it all went down, it's just going to be extremely tough for Lebron to ever equal Jordan's legacy. I thought maybe that was something that was important to Lebron, but it's not really looking that way anymore.

 

Cool story Michael, we get it you're the greatest.

Essentially by just signing with the Heat, Lebron told the whole world that he doesn't care about living up to you or Kobe's legacy. He just wants to win. Is that really so wrong?

Magic Johnson had James Worthy and Kareem Abdul Jabbar...Bird had guys like McHale and Parish. How come their legacies weren't tarnished like Lebron's supposedly is?

 

I don't see any value add for MJ to say these sort of things. Lebron has every right to make his own decision. Seems a bit insecure for MJ to say something like that.

Funny how MJ has never made a comment about Kobe. I think the Lebron/MJ debate may have died but a Kobe/MJ debate will always rage on.

 

NO im not trying to see which supporting cast is better haha. I'm just trying to prove that lebron did have help in cleveland because i was replying to an original post to someone that said lebron had no help in cleveland and jordan had tremendous help in chicago. Go drink your coffee and wake up sir. :grin:

 

I think it's partly because they were both drafted by those teams. You can't really say either of them tried to take the easy path. That's just the way it happened.

However, I think the main part is also just the Lakers-Celtics aura and the whole mystique surrounding it that significantly adds to their legacy. Their is nothing even comparable to that in today's NBA.

 

what i'm saying is that their win total can end up looking better than it appears because they just never take a night off against a bad team and thus squeeze out every win they can from their schedule, whereas i'm sure boston lost to a bunch of teams no one would say was better than boston because they treated the regular season like it didn't mean anything (which it didn't). that was kind of the same thing for that 67 win mav team i brought up earlier. they just never took a night off, so they ended up with one of the best records of all time while definitely not being one of the best teams of all time.

they were obviously quite legit last year. even beating up on weak teams, 66 wins is very impressive. but they were 1-2 against orlando and had some big time mismatch problems against them and that's the team they lost to, even with lebron having a playoff series as impressive as any we've ever seen. lebron could not have played better than they lost, so however legit they were or weren't and no matter how much they won against everyone else, the supporting cast clearly couldn't hang with orlando's supporting cast.

since kobe is brought up all the time, look at how dwight howard did against cleveland and LA. against cleveland he put up 25 points on 65% shooting. against LA it was 16 points on 49% shooting. since i'm almost sure lebron and kobe weren't guarding him, it had to come down to their help. think lebron wouldn't enjoy having the best frontline in the league shutting howard down versus watching howard go wild against his frontline? so at the end of the day, cleveland can play as well as it wants to in the regular season, but turning around and blaming lebron for not getting it done with a "good enough" supporting cast when that supporting cast is handily outplayed by elite team's supporting casts in the playoffs isn't a fair situation.

it's like pointing out that luther head was one of the better 3 point shooters in the league and then wondering why tmac couldn't use that to his advantage in the playoffs while ignoring the fact that luther was peeing himself the entire time he was playing the jazz.

 

i'm not harping...i was responding. someone said their regular season record was misleading because they just beat a bunch of bad teams....i pointed out how that wasn't so.

this team was absolutely a legit championship contender.

 

if wade and bron saw this picture... they'd be like "sorry chris, you can't join us".

 

ok...so there was one team in the East who might have been better than them, ultimately.

what's the discussion again? what are we arguing about?

my point is simply that 66 wins is freaking impressive...they were on the heels of a Finals appearance...and they had the best record in the league over 164 games. they were nothing less than a legit championship contender. my posts regarding this were only in response to posts that were suggesting otherwise.

 

because of exactly what i said in the part of my post that you quoted and because of the last part of what you just said. it's about the GM. how can something be hard or easy if you have no control over it? it wasn't hard for jordan to get pippen on the team to make them better because he had nothing to do with it. if krause is wrong and pippen is just some chump from a small college who averages 10/5/3 for his career, then jordan probably doesn't win any titles without their being any change to how good or how competitive jordan was. it would have simply been because somebody else's performance (in this case the GM) wasn't up to the challenge.

that's great story to tell that we have no real way of proving. unless the bulls had a bunch of lazy players, i'm guessing they were trying to be as good as they could be already. unless jordan was teaching kerr proper shooting form and pippen how to pass and play defense and rodman how to rebound, i'm not sure why i should think they would have been worse without jordan. would mo williams have good lateral movement on defense if lebron got on him about it?

 

Who said anything about overwhelming? They had a .500 record against them, just having a winning record would have been nice. They dont have to go 12-2.

The cavs are suppose to be the BEST team in the league...at least that's what people say the best record is, so going 7-7 against teams, who are good, but are supposed to be worse than you isnt that great. It's a greater feat for them than the cavs.

They made it to the finals when the east was extremely week. They had SECOND best record in the east that year with only 50 wins. Even the rockets had 52 as the 5th seed in the west. ......as the east got stronger they actually regressed over the years in the playoffs, but their confidence was sky high during the season because they believed they belonged after reaching the finals, but it was fool's gold. The spurs swept them. Orlando beat them 4-2. Boston beat them 4-2. How does that not show that they can't handle the tough and scrappy teams. The teams that fight until the end? What happened when Lebron couldnt carry them anymore? The supporting cast gave up, stood around. What happened when Lebron saw them do that? He quit too. That team was never a true contender...

You're picking out possible the worst NBA finals appearance by a team and then regular season records...since when are those signs of a true contender? Imagine of the suns were in the east during that time...they would have easily racked up multiple 60 win seasons and a trip or two to the finals as well, only to lose. It doesnt mean much unless you make legitimate noise in the playoffs. It's the reason why the current jazz are hardly ever picked by anyone credible to win the championship. They havent done anything besides win in the regular season and then advance to the conf finals after beating a fluke GS team, only to get clobbered by SA. They always lost 4-1, 4-0, or 4-2, again no signs of being a legit contender by stretching it 7 games or getting far consistently or getting ahead by beating quality competition.

2010 - beat a Bulls team who lost their leading scorer
2009- beat a pistons team who only won 39 games , A hawks team who won 47
2008 - beat the wizards who won 43 games
2007 - beat a wizards team who won 41 games, and a nets team who won 41, beat pistons who won 53 games


Once again, they can only beat who they are supposed to....no one on that list stands out. None of those teams are close to being contenders are only playoffs teams in weak conference. The only meaningful playoff victory has been against Detroit. Detroit has been the only true playoff team they've beaten and even then they were at best a true middle seed that year, as they were no longer the same team who won a ring after losing their defensive ace in the middle, Wallace. They never had a superstar and their team d, anchored by wallace was what made them contenders and that was gone, so of course Lebron could carry the cavs over them.

Despite dominating the regular season in the past few years the only meaningful win was against a 53 team win in a weak east. Contenders? Never truly have been...

 

sorry, but i think is completely ridiculous and absolute revisionist history.

 

that's the problem, though. people just want players to accept whatever happens because of some ping pong balls (or before the lottery, records from the prior season). if you happen, through no skill of your own, to get drafted #1 by a team that has kareem abdul-jabbar in his prime and then adds #1 overall pick james worthy a few years later, you get a great legacy. if you get drafted #1 overall by a team that puts mo williams next to you and that because of their cap flexibility and aging roster may never put anyone much better than mo williams next to you, you should just accept the situation and be loyal and float along with the breeze of destiny. why should being part of all-time great teams and winning and having a great legacy come largely down to luck and why should anyone avoid changing their luck if they can?

am i saying lebron had to leave cleveland? no. he could have stuck around. and maybe they even find him a sidekick to win it all. but if they don't and he gets stuck with a "can't win it all label" because they never get their act together, what does that prove? why is that a better path to take? it's always easier to stick it out when everything is working out perfectly.

 

Do you know what the free agency rules were when he resigned?

 

madmax or any other posters, i have posed this question numerous times but never got an answer.

what do you think the cavs' record will be NEXT YEAR sans lebron james?

a championship contender shouldn't fall off the map and become a bottom 3 team due to just losing one player.

lakers wouldn't be a bottom 3-5 team w/o kobe. nor magic. nor spurs. nor mavs. nor any other title contender.

i'm predicting the cavs will at most a bottom 5 record in the L.

 

i don't completely know at this point. the argument seemed to be that in light of cleveland's superb regular season records the last 2 years, that their supporting class was clearly good enough to win a title and that it must somehow be a mark against lebron that he couldn't get that supporting cast a title. my counterpoint was simply that the supporting cast was getting outplayed by a significant margin in the playoff series that cleveland lost while lebron was a having a good (boston) and friggin' ridiculous (orlando) series and thus there's no point in bringing up the regular season records if they're going to get killed when it matters.

kobe's team has beaten both teams lebron's team has lost to in the last 2 years. and yet it would be very hard to argue kobe played better against boston and impossible to argue that he played better against orlando. so it certainly seems ridiculous to argue that kobe isn't playing with a much better team and that everything is equal and lebron just can't get it done like a winner like kobe.