Thoughts on "The Decision"

(Note: This was originally posted somewhere else on July 14)

I haven't commented anywhere on LeBron James' decision about where to play next year (except to register my correct guess on Facebook the day before). A lot has been written, pro and con, since then. A lot of it has been hilariously ill-informed (sports columnists are often worse than political pundits). For example, there's this gem from Sports Illustrated's Michael Rosenberg. Suddenly it's an incredible betrayal to want to play with your friends and win championships, and Michael Jordan's career decisions bind every other free agent until the end of time. In case  you can't tell, I have no problem with James' decision to sign with Miami. I do have a problem with the primetime special used for something that should have been a press release or, in this day and age, a tweet on Twitter. It's possible that "The Decision" was ESPN's idea, and that James only went along with it for the charity money, but there's no definitive evidence that this was the case.

The thing that actually prompted me to write about this whole situation is the news I just saw on the ESPN screen crawl. Apparently, Zydrunas Ilgauskas is signing with Miami now. Z has been with the Cavs forever and is the only current Cavs player who predates the LeBron James era. Because of his longevity, and his pre-LeBron years as the best player on a string of mediocre Cavs teams, he's beloved by Cavs fans. This signing is probably not going to improve Dan Gilbert's mood.

So now the question is, how much is Miami going to raid the Cavs' roster? After all, Miami's still got about 4 roster spots to fill just to get to the minimum of 10, and the Cavs have a lot of relatively cheap talent. Is Anderson Varejao next? Well, okay, that's not likely because Miami's front court is pretty crowded at the moment. But what about one of the young three-point shooters, like Jamario Moon? I can see this getting ugly pretty quickly. Last year, I figured that the Cavs had about a 4th-5th seed playoff team without James, just because of the number of talented players they signed before and during the season. But this off-season, the East looks to be getting stronger, and if the Cavs lose too many players off their roster, their place in the pecking order could suffer even farther. To the extent that LeBron James talks Cavs players into coming down to Miami with him, the hatred in Cleveland could only get worse.

LeBron Watch

According to ESPN, Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert held a press conference to announce that he is not firing coach Mike Brown after the debacle of a series against the Celtics. I find that somewhat surprising, because when I was watching ESPN on TV at Wright State, killing time before an appointment, I assumed that the announcement of a press conference at 2:30 meant somebody was getting fired. Either that or Gilbert was going to do something really unexpected like move the team to Seattle. It'll be interesting to see what happens now, since somebody's got to take the fall when a team with this much talent loses in the second round.

Of course, the big question now is where LeBron James will play next season. For some reason everybody thinks the Knicks are a top contender. I don't see why. They sucked this season only marginally less than they did last year. Bottom line, they didn't make the playoffs. The way I see it, James doesn't need the money, and he doesn't need more media exposure in the U.S., so he will want to go somewhere that offers him a chance to contend for a championship in the near future. I don't follow the NBA closely enough to know which decent teams have the cap space to sign LeBron, but I'm pretty sure New York is out of the picture unless they trade for  Tony Parker and win the lottery to get the #1 draft pick.

But since I've written this prediction on the internet in a public place, we can probably assume that the Knicks will sign Lebron on July 2 without either of those two events happening.