Transcription
Well, for those of you who didn't catch it, Channing Fry recently went on an unhinged, delusional rant about how, essentially, Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan's legacies are overrated, and that it is the memory of those players that is destroying the NBA. Nostalgia is killing the NBA. The '90s basketball, Michael Jordan, and Kobe was not as clean as y'all think it was.
Now, as preposterous as that premise was, LeBron James went on record to resoundingly co-sign this idiocy in perhaps one of the most tone-deaf and pathetic moments of his entire career, which is really saying something. But Chan, he, he said it. He said it perfectly. He couldn't have said it no better. But, and for a guy who has been running around calling himself the GOAT for about a full decade now, that one right there made me the greatest player of all time, who declared he would win eight championships with the Heat, not five, not six, not seven, before dragging his bum ass out of town after winning just two, this really does take the cake. LeBron, of all people, is whining about the responsibilities of being the face of the NBA? I've always taken that seriously and understand and understood from the beginning what, what being a professional was all about, and being a role model was all about. So LeBron says he didn't even want, want to be the face of the NBA and said he don't want it. I didn't, I mean, obviously I didn't ask for it. Um, but, and sure, a guy who tattooed "Chosen One" on his back while he was still in high school, who has been crowning himself and calling himself King for the better part of the last two decades, and annoyingly going out of his way to repeatedly call himself the GOAT, yeah, he never wanted it. I didn't, I mean, obviously I didn't ask for it.
Um, but perhaps most hilariously, though, LeBron seems to take some kind of exception with the way the media is treating these players today. So much so, me thinks the gentleman doth protest too much. LeBron is concerned with media coverage? I don't know. We, yeah, why do you want to be the face of a league when all the, all the, all the people that, you know, that cover our game and talk about our game on a day-to-day basis, on everybody? Me, that responsibility, that's, it's just weird. It's weird. Energize a guy who has given everything at every stage of his career, who has been coddled and protected unlike any athlete of this century, whose every misstep and failure is covered up, glossed over, or totally ignored. Yes, make no mistake, the media did play a very large role in getting us to where we are today, and most certainly not in a good way.
Speaking of which, please make sure to subscribe to me now if you haven't already, and turn those notifications on. But yes, if the mass media actually did give Kobe Bryant more attention, respect, and praise when he was doing things that no one in today's league can even come close to, rather than celebrating a mercenary, ring-chasing loser, perhaps taking the easy way out to eschew all levels of competition in every facet of the game, wouldn't have become so fashionable among star players today. Yes, LeBron was already winning MVPs back in 2009 and 2010, while Kobe Bryant was dominating the NBA with a fringe one-time All-Star as his running mate, going to three straight Finals and winning back-to-back titles against the very teams that eliminated MVP LeBron, who was favored in those series. Yet, it was LeBron who was already seizing the mantle of best player in the NBA at the time, while taking those league MVPs. And yet, LeBron continued to fail when it really mattered. And those failures, whereas they forged all of his predecessors into the all-time greats, they were made. LeBron snap out of the desperation to the realization he could never live up to Kobe. And that isn't my words, it isn't my assumption or my take. That is directly from Dwyane Wade's own mouth, on the record, on on camera, on the Underground Lounge podcast. That's where Wade admitted that Kobe was just too dominant for himself and LeBron to compete with under ordinary standards. "How we going to compete with that? So we got to do our thing, 'cause now Kobe has five championships, I got one, Bron ain't got none. He is leaving us in a pack, and we competitive." So I'm sitting there like, "No, this this summer got to be different."
Wade admitted that he felt he just didn't have enough help at the time, and that he would be either looking to bring in one other superstar that summer, or that he would be leaving to team up with Derrick Rose and Company in Chicago. "I didn't, I didn't think I, I in my mind, I was like, 'Alright, I'm going to go play with one more superstar, or I'm going to go to Chicago and fit in with Derrick Rose and and Lou and and and, you know, them.' That's was my mindset. I'm like, 'Either we got to get a superstar here, or I'm going to go play with Chicago Bulls.'" But that when LeBron called, everything changed. The conversation happened. It had changed everything. When I got the call from Bron, and that decision Miami made to then bring in three superstars, broke the NBA. They, he, the game up. When they did whatever they did to get three stars, it sure did. And it was that decision, the resultant ramification stemming from it, that still resonates throughout the dreadful Earth product the league has deteriorated into today. So thank you, LeBron James, for what you're bringing to our league.
And yet, the true shame of it all is that LeBron hasn't been criticized by any of the high-profile media personalities, the mass media outlets, the vast NBA's sycophantic mouthpiece that covers the league. LeBron is only celebrated by all of them, while still plugging him, to some degree, as its de facto face. LeBron, who knew he wouldn't be able to place himself in GOAT conversations if he stayed put in his career, instead opting to cheat the game and take the easy way out by surrounding himself with as many great players as he could in various stops along the way. Kobe, on the other hand, took the criticism that he couldn't win without Shaq. He took it to heart, swapping Shaq out for a one-time All-Star at the time in Pau Gasol, and becoming more dominant. The season prior to joining with Kobe, Pau Gasol wasn't even an All-Star, let alone All-NBA. He was 37th in Value Over Replacement, 28th in Box Plus-Minus, and 44th in Win Shares. That was the guy that Kobe went to three Finals with and won back-to-back championships with against a field of opponents who all won 50-plus games at every playoff stage. In stark contrast, LeBron always ran towards the help. At about the same age and stage of his career as Kobe was going alone, LeBron was salsa dancing his overrated ass off over to South Beach to join Wade. And look at what all of these players, LeBron's marquee teammates since his aged 26 season in the league, did the year prior to teaming with the self-proclaimed King. Wade in the 2009-2010 NBA season was first-team All-NBA, second-team All-NBA defense, 10th in Defensive Player of the Year, fifth in MVP voting, and this is while he finished fourth in Win Shares, second in Box Plus-Minus, and second in Value Over Replacement. So while Kobe was owning the league with a guy who, prior to teaming with him, wasn't even top 30 league-wide, LeBron, in the exact same timeframe, went to a top-three player in the league to snatch those cheap garbage rings with. And four years after that, he jumped ship again after not having the guts to stay in town for a second time now in his career. This stuff is hard, and you got to stay together if you got the guts, and you don't find the first door and run out of it. He instead joined an ascending third-year guard at the time in Kyrie Irving, coming off a season where he averaged 20 points and six assists per game while making his second consecutive All-Star appearance. And check out what Kevin Love did that season, the year just before he would team with LeBron and Kyrie in Cleveland. Love was not only an All-Star and second-team All-NBA selection that season, he finished third that year in Win Shares, third in Value Over Replacement, and second in Box Plus-Minus, second above LeBron and below only league MVP. That season, Kevin Durant, Love was second or third in most of those categories, below only Durant and LeBron, which were the same positional designation as Love at the time. And the only reason that Kevin Love was second-team All-NBA that season and not first-team, and people actually say that that Cleveland team wasn't a super team then.
Four years after that, LeBron crawls out of town yet again, again after a humiliating defeat, which more on that in case you were wondering. Prior to taking his talents to South Beach in the summer of 2010, he collapsed in the Eastern Conference Semifinals, choked away a 2-1 series lead to lose three straight games as the league MVP with the best record in the league, all because, allegedly, his teammate Delonte West was tapping his mom. A month later, gone. Then, in the 2014 Finals, his Heat were humiliated by the Spurs in the biggest beating in NBA Finals history, losing the series by 70 total points, points which is still the all-time record. Weeks later, gone. In the 2018 Finals, swept again in the NBA Finals, and after absolutely no indication he was dealing with any kind of an injury, showed up in the press conference following the elimination game four in a cast, hilariously claiming he had broken his hand after game one. Yeah, this is also him dapping his kids up like 45 minutes earlier from when that presser occurred with the hand he was claiming to be broken. A few weeks later, gone to LA, of course, where he couldn't even make the playoffs. No worries though, because Anthony Davis would soon be on the way. Tell him on the way, thanks entirely to an insane collusion process with his best friend and agent, Rich Paul, who was also representing Anthony Davis at the time. And now, the season prior to teaming with LeBron, AD appeared in only 56 games and therefore wasn't designated to All-League distinctions. However, if you go to the year before that, when AD played in 75 games, uh, yeah, he was first-team All-NBA, first-team All-NBA defense, he finished third in Defensive Player of the Year voting and third in league MVP. This is while he was fourth in Win Shares, ninth in BPM, and fifth in Value Over Replacement. Those are the teammates he joined to win his four titles with and never, never got any criticism for. While Kobe was doing it the hard way, taking the challenge to try to live up to the guy he inherited the league from. Say what you will about Kobe Bryant and how close he actually got to Jordan, but know this: he is decisively the closest we have ever seen, and likely ever will see. And it doesn't even really have to do with his talent or his gameplay, but more so the mentality, the will, the desire to compete, the, the willingness to take the challenges, face the difficult obstacles. Failure is a natural, even necessary, process of sports, of life. LeBron, though, wasn't even willing to do that. Not even willing to try to meet the bare minimum threshold requirement to meet the lofty levels of his predecessors. And yet, there were no consequences, no repercussions to his legacy. Quite the contrary, he has only been celebrated for it. Can you therefore blame Steph Curry and Kevin Durant for doing what they did? This is, after all, a follow-the-leader, copycat type league, and it is the responsibility of the best player to set the tone. LeBron dropped the rope, refused to carry on from Kobe, what Kobe carried on from Jordan. And again, it was the media that was and remains implicit in all of this. It is still happening to this very day. The media should be bending over backwards, hell, breaking their damn backs in half to anoint Nikola Jokic the king, at least of this putrid, watered-down era. Jokic is more dominant than LeBron in any which metric you want to slice it. Prime for prime, standard box stats, advanced analytics, winning. Jokic has stayed in his small market, cheap team, who has refused to spend the money to keep the players around him, who have made dreadful decisions in spending the money that they have, yet he hasn't run and he has won. This is the kind of player who should be propped up, yet the mainstream continues to cling desperately to this grotesque league destroyer, this as he gets his next top-five league-wide savior to mount one more pathetic, overrated run with. As the Lakers have now risen from the five seed up to the two since making the Luka Dončić trade. And the year prior to Luka's pairing with LeBron, you might be wondering, well, first-team All-NBA, third in MVP voting, and fifth in Win Shares, second in Box Plus-Minus, second in Value Over Replacement. If Nikola Jokic were on the LeBron track to accelerated and undeserving GOAT conversations, it would have been him who teamed with his close pal Luka this season. But not that's for LeBron, still up to his super-teaming coward ways. But why would he change now? His lack of desire to compete has permeated his play on the court now for years as well. A truly elite defender when he wanted to be, that is, hasn't been worth a damn on that side of the ball in years. As LeBron has made a grand total of six All-NBA Defensive selections, which included five straight first-team honors, but all the way back in 2009 through 2013, in those five seasons, he accumulated 26.1 defensive win shares, which is an average of 5.22 per season, while he averaged 2.7 per year for those five seasons in defensive box plus-minus. With the final season of that span coming in his aged 28 season. From that season on to this present one, the 12 years that would follow, James has accumulated only 35.3 defensive win shares, an average of just 2.9 per year, while sitting at only 1.3 per year in defensive box plus-minus. He has essentially been half the defender he was through his aged 28 season. From that year on, and yet the sycophantic, jock-sniffing media protectorate of his continues to endlessly drool all over his accumulated stats and longevity, that is, while he has essentially been playing only half of the game for well over a decade to preserve himself for stat-padding purposes on the offensive side. So again, I ask, why should any of the other great players care about competing on that end of the floor when LeBron clearly doesn't and is only praised for it? The NBA is fundamentally broken, and the chosen one, face of the league since the early mid-2000s, is the one who broke it. And now he sits back, pontificating on why no one wants to take over the torch from him, why no one wants the responsibility to clean up this trash he is leaving behind. And that is pretty much the crux of it. Why does no one want to be the face of the league today? Because the responsibility is even greater than it was before. It's not just about carrying the torch, maintaining the product at its current height. It's coming in and fixing the problems that their loser predecessor left for them to inherit. And that certainly isn't going to be an easy feat for anyone out there in today's league. Perhaps that person doesn't even exist in the league at the moment. But it would certainly behoove the media to get behind that guy when he does arrive, like their lives depend on it, because the fate of the NBA's life actually does. And for more on the media morons that helped destroy the league and the fraud king they slobbered over, check out this video. And please make sure to subscribe now to stay up to date with more from me. Until next time.