The Heat

Kind of like the Yankees, spend all that money and no results.

 

No wonder I will admit the Heat has such an ego.

Hope everytime they play Cleveland, they will boo them in particular, Le Bron!
After the way he just thumb his now at the Cavilier fans! :BangHead:

 

As a Clevelander and Cavs fan, I'm loving it! :love2:

 

Except the Yankees have gotten results, but yeah, the team people love to loathe.

 

Uhhh, LeBron is not even in the top 10 in salaries. Kobe is the highest at $25m. Here are some of the others that are paid more --- Elton Brand (go figure), Dirk, Garnett, Rashard Lewis (???), Gasol (really??), Tim Duncan, Carmelo Anthony, Stoudemire, Chris Paul, Joe Johnson, etc.

 

I think he meant the team, not LBJ.

 

Again, the Heat don't have the highest payroll. The Lakers do at over $90m -- not hard to imagine when combined Kobe & Gasol are over $40 million. The Heat are at #5 -- behind the Lakers, Celtics and a few others.

 

We are a nation divided, and there is only one group of people who can unite us as Americans. Thank you, Miami Heat. You are our last hope for national unanimity. The Heat is to choking what Tiger Woods is to self-destruction. The Heat is the NBA version of the Kardashian family -- a group of people who are famous not because of accomplishment but because of the shallow nature of modern American fame.

http://www.startribune.com/sports/wolves/152121195.html

 

Sad that we need to united by this. As kids would say -- "don't be a hater."

Here's another view - http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/michael_rosenberg/05/21/lebron/index.html?xid=cnnbin

I understand why people from Cleveland hate LBJ (but then again, most people I know from Cleveland don't live in Cleveland anymore either).

 

Sorry....I was a Miami Heat fan until Lebron arrived...his arrogance is too much for me to handle!

 

A few responses to the linked SI piece.

This is important and shouldn't be put in a parenthetical statement to lessen its impact. Lebron James is the one who said, "Not one, not two, not three, etc." Nobody likes arrogance and that statement was sheer arrogance. If NBA fans assigned them favorites, it's because they have 2 of the best players in the league on their team. Lebron James painted the target on the backs of the Miami Heat and Lebron James apologist's don't get to say that everybody's being so unfair to him.

That's a pretty simplistic explanation of what Lebron gets criticized for. The passing isn't what he gets criticized for. Shrinking and becoming invisible in the deciding moments of games is what he gets criticized for. You can't look at what happened in the Finals against Dallas last year and say anything except Lebron James disappeared in the 4th quarter of every game.

Not exactly. In Game 6 of both the 1993 and 1997 NBA Finals, Jordan didn't take the game winning shot. In both games, he passed to either John Paxson (1993), or Steve Kerr (1997), and they made the game winning shots. Jordan's legacy isn't just making shots, but it's the fact that he never disappeared at the end of games.

As great as Lebron has been in the regular season, and as great as he has been in select playoff games, he's going to hear the criticism until he stops disappearing at the end of games and wins a championship. No value judgment, simply stating a fact. NBA Greatness is measured in championships.

 

Here's a good piece on Lebron James and how he's grown up since the 2011 NBA Finals.

Brian Windhorst has been following Lebron for years, starting with his years in Cleveland and he is not a writer who sugarcoats. In this piece, Windhorst does not describe the same arrogant guy who said, "Not one, not two, not three..." He's describing a guy who's growing up. The collective national media loves to build up and then tear down and they are magnificent in slicing somebody to shreds. And I love how they debate the whys of why he's not liked when the answer is simple. The collective sports fandom doesn't like arrogance and the arrogance on display at the party the Heat threw for themselves before they had accomplished a single thing was nauseating.

But, one of the great things that happens in sports is that players grow up. If this piece is accurate, and this really is what Lebron James is about now, then James is winning over one of the NBA fans that detested that display by the Heat after The Decision.

 

OKC in 6. Would like to see them win in 7 as it would drive the dagger in further, but I'll take 6

 

I would like to see Ok City win as well. We shall see.

 

Nice article. See attached as well --http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/truehoop/miamiheat/news/story?id=6175574

I know he caught a lot of grief for airing his decision on ESPN, but bottom line, that show raised over $3 million for the Boys & Girls Clubs.

 

Or The Phillies

 

Miami took OKC's best shot early and they're going to close out OKC in Game 5. LBJ has consistently been the best player on the floor, which includes Russell Westbrook's sensational Game 4. Even though the series is going to end in 5 games, this is probably the best 5 game series we've ever seen, if only because of the sheer athleticism. This NBA Finals has been NBAPorn.

Miami is the tougher team. OKC might be better from top to bottom, but the margin is smaller than we thought, and Miami's 4 through 10 players are coming up bigger than OKC's 4 through 10. Durant and Westbrook have been terrific, but OKC's #3 guy, Harden, hasn't played as well in this series as he did in the Western Conference playoffs.

I'm not sure this Miami team is going to win more than 1, but they are going to get 1. OKC, on the other hand, is learning the hard way about what it takes to win Finals games. They've consistently had a number of bad possessions, bad shots, bad fouls at the end of the game. If you saw Durant last night, you saw how much this hurts him. Losing games and a series like this is going to make that entire team tougher and better.