Much has been said about Dirk finally winning the big one and in doing so overcoming 06-07, Rick Carlisle taking the “best in-game coach” title belt, Jason Terry not having to remove his tattoo, Jason Kidd getting the championship back where he started out, Mark Cuban spending hundreds of thousands on liquor at Club LIV, J.J. Barea confounding everyone (opponents and viewers alike), Shawn Marion being the first “seven seconds or less player” with a ring, Tyson Chandler becoming a likeable version of Kevin Garnett, and DeShawn Stevenson somehow winning his feud with LeBron James while overcoming the most tragic upbringing ever to be ignored by overwrought half-time puff piece producers everywhere.
No matter how much people talk about how the Dallas Mavericks are the champs, there’s inevitably just as much talk of how LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and the Miami Heat handed them the title. The narrative goes something like this, “While the Mavericks walloped everyone else, the Heat choked, and Miami’s character flaws—mainly a lack of humility and self awareness—were the real reasons Dallas won the title, not Dallas’ superior depth, chemistry, and execution.” Dallas imposed their will and by extension their playing style on the series at both ends of the floor—just as they did in the previous three. Their best player was better than Miami’s, and their bench was too.
The Heat aren’t champions this year because they couldn’t beat the Dallas Mavericks, and neither could the Blazers, the Lakers, or the Thunder. Dallas was the best team in every round of the playoffs, and to act like the Heat choked while the Thunder lost because “they were inexperienced,” or the Lakers lost because “they weren’t on the same page,” or the Blazers lost because of “insert excuse here,” is disingenuous and cheapens what the Mavericks did over the last six weeks. The Heat lost because they weren’t as good as the Mavericks. The Mavericks dispatched Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, Dwyane Wade, and LeBron James—arguably the top four players on the planet—in three consecutive rounds. Full stop.
LeBron James and Dwyane Wade didn’t lose because of their hubris; they lost because of the Mavericks, and their hubris was exposed. Dallas is too veteran a team to need something like the shadowboxing or the cough, idiotic as it was, to fire them up. When Dirk called “the cough” childish, he was calling it what it was. He wasn’t pinning it to the locker room’s motivation board.
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Top to bottom, the Mavs thoroughly outplayed Miami, and it’s really shitty that the majority of attention is being spent kicking a downed member of the losing team, trying (futilely) to say something permanent about LeBron’s legacy in his darkest hour.
With The Decision, LeBron acted with a cataclysmic lack of self-awareness. Does that give everyone that follows basketball the license to self-righteously ignore what they know about championship teams? It’s accepted that it takes an excruciating loss to turn a team from a contender to a champion. But so then why was the Thunder’s loss considered “character building,” while the Heat’s was a choke? Because Dwyane Wade’s been there? And if so, how does that reflect on LeBron? Or is it because LeBron’s failure in his first winnable finals, while consistent with what we know about the career arcs of some all-time greats, doesn’t fit with 1) the narrative LeBron (and Nike, Maverick Carter, and the NBA) has constructed about himself and, more importantly 2) the narrative we’ve constructed around him. The first is probably worse, but whether we want to admit it or not, the second makes us angrier, because it means we’ve misjudged him and we don’t like being wrong. Because of this anger, we willingly look past the obvious fact that “The Decision,” “the Celebration,” and “the Cough,” are symptoms of his malaise on the big stage, not the reason he’s not ready.
After Game Six, LeBron was (initially) smug in defeat where we wanted humility, stumbling through an awkward, and I’m paraphrasing, “at the end of the day, I’m still a Global Icon, and people still have their problems, and I’m going to live my life, and they should too” press conference that came off as really bratty, where it could have, had he phrased things a little bit better, been a refreshing bit of perspective on what it’s like to be the Global Icon.
But not everyone can be Dirk Nowitzki, lounging in the pressroom giving introspective philosophical answers to every question, no matter how silly, while nursing a 101-degree fever and hocking mucous up everywhere. “Dirk, is your spirit animal an eagle or a falcon?” “Well, you know, let’s give credit where credit is due, both the eagle and the falcon are very noble, but on the Australian coastline I saw a solitary osprey and that’s when everything changed for me…”
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In LeBron’s press conference, his voice was tight and it looked like he was biting back tears. He cares so much about how he’s perceived, but is so thin-skinned about it all that it makes him cripplingly self-conscious, like a little leaguer that really wants to impress his dad, but is scared to swing for fear of striking out, except with the added wrinkle that everyone else but his dad is booing the hell out of him. You could say LeBron brought in on himself, sure. But at the absolute worst, LeBron’s guilty of being an insulated, un-self aware, arrogant dick. Given his upbringing, we don’t know that it’s possible for him not to be. And given the battering he’s taken the past year, why would we expect him to be at ease in a public space? How is it fair, or even rational, that we can tear him down while at the same time being angry that he’s putting up defenses in the first place? Those defenses—like faking Dwyane Wade’s championship-born ease—are up precisely because he’s being torn down so rabidly.
The moment the Mavs won the championship, Dirk went from “soft”—a character flaw—to “one of the best ever,” just the same way Mike Vick found “redemption” by winning football games last season. The only reason LeBron’s getting slammed so hard is because he lost. If LeBron wins next year, which wouldn’t surprise me at all (nor would it bother me, especially if he came back with new wrinkles in his game), everyone that’s killing him right now will be back on his side, saying he’s vindicated, or redeemed, or whatever grandiose word that’s meant to convey the fact that winning basketball games means more than winning basketball games when all he really did was win basketball games.
Right now, we should lay off LeBron and celebrate the Mavs, because all the talk about LeBron’s legacy is taking away from the fact that the Mavericks just won some pretty damn entertaining basketball games.
—Photo AP/David J. Phillip
I don’t know what these clowns above are talking about. I like reading back a couple years back sometimes and this article was amazingly written and the foresight you had about the whole situation and the year coming is amazing!
Good stuff. I hope this article got it’s due somewhere, because this is the most honest, best, and clear headed article on the topic!
….really? Really?
I heard that Mark Cuban and Shawn Marion were offered potentially illegal performance enhancement techniques and power drinks by some group over the internet.
Does anyone know if they used it to beat Miami? This news is making the rounds in many Heat blogs.
This link describes the offer .. http://merkaba.org/audio/aids.html#serena
All anyone needs to do is go test this power drink ….
if it’s openly available on the net and if they’re ready for this – ” you may have the water tested, we will drink the water in front of you” it’s probably not illegal …
but it’s on a sufficiently obscure website that most people have probably never heard of it.
Well, the next game’s going to come around eventually …(unless the world ends before that) …
all ye Heat Lovers should maybe gift-order this drink for your champs (not).
Else the Mavs Shalt Power On……