Coming around on LeBron

Congrats to the Heat for winning their first championship last night as “the big 3”.  Like many, I was completely put off by The Decision and the fact that the Heat players celebrated this championship 2 years early.

However, I’ve come around. I think that at this point LeBron realizes that he invited a lot of the vitriol by those actions and is looking to move past this.  I’m more than happy to, and am grateful that both the Heat and Thunder gave us some exciting playoff basketball.  LeBron played out of his mind this year, demonstrating just how bad he wanted to get the “no championship” monkey off his back.

Since my sports hate against LeBron is dissipating, I’m glad that other members of the Heat are stepping up in their “give us reasons to hate us” efforts.

First off, Pat Riley’s puppet – Erik Spoelstra – after spending all of the post season with the players ignoring him, decided to wear his new champion ship hat backwards.

spoelstra

I’m sorry, but just like there comes a time in every man’s life when he realizes he’s not going to play professional sports, there also comes a time where a guy looks like a complete dufus when he wears his hat backwards.  For most guys this happens at 25 – and while some can stave it off until for another year or two – 27 is the absolute cut-off date. At that point, the hat either goes forward or comes off.  Just like Tony Romo, it looks like Erik missed the memo.

You would think your coach looking like a 12-year-old would be enough, but Chris Bosh had to put it over the top by treating the world to the most awkward champagne shower of all time.

likeabosh

And now with the marvels of technology, it’s now an animated gif:

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At least now we know what it means to celebrate like a Bosh.

LeBron-pocalypse

We knew it was bound to happen. While the romantic in me was hoping that LeBron would stay with Cleveland, the team didn’t do him any favors by not getting him the right help to win a championship. I’m not quite sure I see the appeal in going to Miami.  There is the innocent “I’m going to play with my friends” aspect which I can definitely understand.  However, LeBron has always been very self-aware of his image and understands his potential legacy – and it baffles me that the part of him didn’t consider that now he’ll be looked on as a glorified Scottie Pippen to Dwayne Wade’s MJ.  Wade is now always going to have one more ring than LeBron, and it doesn’t help add to LeBron’s legacy of not being able to win one on his own – that stigma followed Kobe around until last year. Now LeBron’s just prolonged his tarnished branding.

It’s still funny to see this build-up reprehension against LeBron. Not longer than a few hours after the announcement, owner Dan Gilbert tarred LeBron in a letter on the front page of their web site – using the  Comic Sans font! For those without a designer’s eye, Comic Sans is the web equivalent of crayon.

lebron1

Crayon-writing aside, the letter is definitely worth a read. Gilbert likes to put words like “King” and “motivation” in quotations, many of them very unnecessarily so.

However nothing tops the front page of The Plain Dealer out of Cleveland.  The best part is the little arrows pointing to his ring-less hand.

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p align=”left”>So we’ll see where all of this goes. It seems like overnight three superstars 2 superstars and 1 gravy-train have seemingly changed the landscape of professional basketball, forming a Yankee-like evil empire.  We’ll see how long it’ll be before they win any championships.  Any predictions?