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Call Me, So I Can Make It Juicy For Ya

On Tuesday, I sent an email to the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Terry Pluto about this piece that he wrote on Monday before Game 4.

Pluto spent a lot of time explaining the way contracts work in the NBA and how it would be very difficult for a team other than the Cavaliers to lure LeBron James after 2010. Honestly, I thought we were past this point - yes, I know that a lot of you are going to throw my own LeBron-is-leaving-Cleveland pieces right back at my face and call me a hypocrite, but the sense of entitlement from the city of New York and the ridiculous notion that LeBron James has to play in New York is now approaching the point of being childish.

I asked Pluto not to spend so much time with this nonsense, but the object of Pluto’s ire was this sack of crap published in Monday morning’s edition of the New York Newsday. Apparently, hiring Mike D’Antoni in the Big Apple is part of new team president Donnie Walsh’s master plan to bring LeBron to New York in 2010. Yeah, just like bringing in Larry Brown in 2006 was supposed to bring LeBron to New York in 2008.

My God, the amount of stupidity that media outlets require in their hiring process for writers is just alarming. Absolutely alarming.

“Walsh is banking on this to be just another reason for LeBron James to seriously consider making the Garden his home if he declines a player option and becomes a free agent in 2010…It would take a lot of payroll maneuvering in the meantime and, perhaps, some tough decisions. As the roster stands, the Knicks will have just $28 million against the cap going into the 2010-11 season. It’s the perfect storm; the best player on the planet is available and the richest team in the league has cap space.”

(Throws up in mouth) RICHEST TEAM IN THE LEAGUE? You piece of sh—t New Yorker! Your basketball team doesn’t have jack! In fact, the richest owner in the league resides in Portland, Oregon, not New York! Paul Allen, the owner of the Trail Blazers, is one of the 10 richest men in the world!

The Knicks? Rich? The only thing rich about the Knicks is their rich history of being the beating post for the rest of the league. And Charles Smith in Game 5 of the ‘93 Eastern Conference Finals. And Reggie Miller’s eight points in 18 seconds in Game 1 of the 1995 Eastern Conference Semifinals. And P.J. Brown flipping Charlie Ward in the 1997 East semis as Pat Riley tormented his old team to lead the Heat past the Knicks in seven games. And John Starks going two-for-18 in Game 7 of the 1994 NBA Finals.

And you’re going to steal LeBron freaking James from the Cleveland Cavaliers. What a freaking joke.

That’s not all. This clown actually believes in his mind that the Knicks and D’Antoni have this all planned out. Based on the way he’s thinking (and what his “sources” are saying - gotta love quoting those “sources”), D’Antoni actually has an offense planned out for LeBron:

“One person with knowledge of D’Antoni’s thinking suggested he ‘would probably use [James] at the four spot [power forward]…He would fit in anywhere…James is the mold of the ideal player for the D’Antoni system. ‘Ideally,’ the person said, ‘you would have a bunch of 6-9 guys who can handle the ball and shoot threes.”

Who was this “one person with knowledge of D’Antoni’s thinking?” Krusty the Klown? Peter Griffin? Eric Cartman?

And of course, we can’t have random “LeBron is going to New York” rumors without the four-lettered network.

But before moving on, I’m going to have to take this opportunity to call out the four-lettered network’s Chad Fraud and John Hollinger. You know, the latter really confuses me, as I thought that Hollinger was one of the few guys who knew what he was talking about. But Fraud is the same guy who spearheaded the Darko Machine back in 2003 and has gone way out of control in hyping up European players.

Both guys, however, picked the Celtics to beat the Cavs in five games. Obviously, that’s not going to happen, but I can’t help but question the stupidity behind this logic. The Celtics needed seven games to beat the Hawks, couldn’t win a game at Atlanta, yet they were going to cream the defending Eastern Conference champions in five?

Next up: Tim Legler and Jalen Rose, two former players who picked the C’s in six. And then there’s Chris Sheridan, who picked the Celtics in seven.

But that’s not why Chris Sheridan should be wearing a rainbow-colored wig and big red nose today. It’s because Sheridan echoed the Newday’s crap about D’Antoni being used to lure LeBron.

Come on, Chris: that is soooooo 2005. Get with the program.

“D’Antoni wouldn’t touch a question about how much James, Wade and the other 2010 free agents had come up in his discussions with Walsh — ‘No, you’re not going to get me to go there’ — and he discounted the notion that he had formed any sort of special bond with James during their extensive time together the past two summers with Team USA. (They’ll be together again this summer in Beijing, when D’Antoni can whisper in James’ ear that it might serve everyone best if he waits until 2011 to decide between the Cavs, Knicks and Jay Z’s Brooklyn Nets, whose new arena probably won’t be built until then anyway.)

“‘I learned that [James] wants to learn to speak Mandarin and conquer the world of Chinese business. Like with Kobe, I learned how focused he can get, and I learned that he wants to be the best player — just like Kobe,’ D’Antoni said.”

Learning to speak Mandarin + conquer the world of Chinese business + wanting to be the best player = Wanting to play for the New York Knicks! See how easy it is? It’s one of the basic algebraic formulas they teach kids in middle school these days. How silly of us to think that the laws of the universe would want to have it any other way!

Unless you’re from Cleveland and have a deep, vested interest in the success of the city’s star-crossed sports teams, you just don’t get it. Sheridan surely doesn’t get it (or much of anything else, for that matter), and the goof at New York Newsday doesn’t know it.

I’m not going to be naive here: I will stick by my previous statements that there is a chance that LeBron James will leave Cleveland in 2010. But it won’t have anything to do with market size, endorsement opportunities, Jay-Z, or Mike D’Antoni. I’ll bet you the mortgage on this one (I mean it). What keeps LeBron in Cleveland are those things that we seem to forget about when massaging this out-of-control rumor mill: the things that happen between the lines.

Here we are, on the cusp of a monumental playoff upset and a return trip to the Eastern Conference Finals, and we have to deal with this. But the truth is that the Cavs are a scrappy bunch that has to keep fighting as the underdogs to get to where they should be at this point of LeBron’s career. It should be the Cavs - and not the Celtics - winning over 60 games a year with a solid supporting cast that fits around LeBron like a glove. They should be the favorites in the East every year considering that the conference’s best player wears their colors.

Keep giving him a subpar supporting cast, and you’re playing with fire.

So keep your focus on GM Danny Ferry and how this team is built around LeBron in the next few years. Don’t focus on Jay-Z, don’t focus on Mike D’Antoni, and certainly don’t focus on the New York Newsday and the four-lettered network.

If the four-lettered network’s opinions translated to anything, then the media creation known as the 2007-08 Boston Celtics would be raising their 17th banner into the rafters by now. But as we all know, there are still at least two more games to be played against a certain team from Northeast Ohio before we can get that far.

Game 5 is tonight (Wednesday) at 8 p.m. Eastern on TNT.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Chris Sheridan, Terry Pluto, Pat Riley, Charles Smith, Donnie Walsh, Paul Allen, John Starks, Danny Ferry, Charlie Ward, New York Knicks, Cleveland Cavaliers, Portland Trail Blazers, P.J. Brown, Mike D'Antoni, Reggie Miller, Boston Celtics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.