The Decision, Part 2

40 years ago, the Cuyahoga River, once only slightly less polluted than the river Styx, caught fire.

It sez so right here that the Hater-aid currently flowing out of Cleveland in the wake of The Decision is only about a million times more toxic than whatever burned back in the day.

As noted in my recent article, The Decision (Part 1), Cleveland has suffered a disproportionate share of professional sports disaster. That history might lead one to dump on LeBron James for choosing to leave Cleveland and play with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami.

Dumping on James is easy. It's also wrong.

First off, I was wrong in a column that I penned a few months ago, when I suggested that James would stay in Cleveland to secure his legacy. The truth is that no great player has ever had to go it alone in the elusive search for a championship.

Bill Russell, the greatest winner in NBA history, has more championship rings than fingers. It's easy to forget that we could build an entire wing devoted to Russell's teammates who are also enshrined in Springfield. For example, a quick look at the 1962-63 NBA champs would show that Russell, himself a future Hall of Famer, played alongside seven (!!) other future Hall members, while being coached by another.

When you're winning eight titles in a row, and eleven out of thirteen, you're not looking for greener pastures...you're standing in them.

But that's Russell. I could also talk about the talent surrounding guys like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan during their halcyon days, and that would kinda miss the point.

There is precedent for great players changing shirts to win a title.

Wilt Chamberlain wasn't always a Philadelphia Warrior. Seems to me that the greatest scorer the league has ever seen wore a couple of different jerseys while hoisting what became known as the Larry O'Brien Trophy. I daresay that Chamberlain was a greater talent than LeBron James, and his legacy doesn't seem to suffer for having played for three teams.

Moses Malone took the Houston Rockets as far as they were going with him on the roster, only to run into Larry Bird's Celtics. When he jumped ship for Julius Erving's 76ers, all they did was run out one of the all-time regular season records and storm through the playoffs like a plague. Malone knew exactly what he was doing; he needed Erving as much as Erving needed him, and his immortal "fo', fo', fo'" prediction lives in sports lore just below Joe Namath's guarantee by a poolside.

Oscar Robertson kept running into a Celtic wall during much of his storied career; it wasn't until he went to Milwaukee to team with a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar that he finally broke on through to the other side.

That same Jabbar would leave Milwaukee for Los Angeles and watch as former-great-player-turned-great-general-manager Jerry West assembled one of the greatest lineups the league has ever seen. It even looked like Mr. Sky Hook was having a little fun playing alongside Magic Johnson...but winning early and often will do that to even the most stoic of players.

What about the argument that LeBron needs to be "The Man" for his legacy to be fully cemented, that joining other great players (including Wade, who has already won once without him) will somehow diminish him? There is no small crowd of voices that are saying that James won't rightly be considered in the same class as a Russell, a Magic, a Bird, a Jordan, or a Bryant if he's not the undisputed leader of a team built expressly for him.

There are two problems with this argument. The first is that James is in the discussion with guys like Jordan or Bryant; he's not, and he won't be unless and until he wins multiple championships. Note, that is multiple championships. For James, the discussion won't be over if and when he finally hugs the trophy. It will just begin.

The second is that having talent of great stature somehow diminishes one. Did Kevin Garnett suffer for playing alongside Paul Pierce? Of course not. Is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar lesser for having played with Magic Johnson? Perish the thought. Should the Miami Heat win multiple titles with Messrs. James, Wade, and Bosh aboard, there will be credit aplenty to go around.

This brings us to the final portion of The Decision: the why.

Why, with everyone willing to throw rocks at his reputation for leaving, would LeBron James choose what seems to be the easy route to a title by going to Miami?

Because, in one free agent swoop, the Heat were able to do something that the Cavaliers never bothered to do for all of James' tenure: provide James with some help.

For all of his finger-pointing and caterwauling in the press, psycho ex-girlfriend nee' Cavs owner Dan Gilbert has no one to blame but the man in the mirror for James' "defection." (Mind you, as a free agent, James owed no loyalty to anyone but himself; the idea that he owed something to Cleveland is flat-out ludicrous, because he simply out-performed his contract...but I digress.)

Gilbert had the most electrifying single talent that the league has seen since Michael Jordan, and he did nothing to keep him.

Nothing.

Let no one come crying to me about how James and his no-championship legacy should have stayed, the fact is that his ownership owed him a championship-level lineup and they failed to deliver. They didn't just fail, they failed spectacularly.

The Bulls, for example, realized that Michael Jordan comes around once, that they had one chance to maximize his abilities before he lost a step, and they built a team around him that could weather the playoffs and finally deliver a title to the organization. Yes, Jerry Krause might have seemed out of line when he said it, but he was right: organizations win titles. If Krause doesn't draft Scottie Pippen and Horace Grant, Jordan might have finished his career in Los Angeles looking for a first title as Kobe's understudy. If Krause doesn't have the guts to draft Toni Kukoc and sign Dennis Rodman, there is no second three-peat.

Sure, it was Jordan's team (for all those "gotta be The Man" guys out there). Anyone else remember how many times Julius Erving's teams won the NBA title before his management finally got him a decent center? That would be zero.

So here's James, looking at the roster as currently constructed, and, yes, he can't see 30 million more reasons to stay and neither can I. The fact that he is hauling the likes of Mo Williams and Anderson Varejao to the Eastern Conference Semi-finals year after year should be proof enough of his greatness, because this is a lottery team without him.

How on earth does this organization not realize that they needed to move heaven and earth to get a championship to Cleveland? Don't they have calendars in Cleveland? Only everyone knew that James was going to be a free agent this summer...you'd think that the Cavs would have done something like what Chicago did: build a playoff-ready roster AND clear cap room to sign him.

Instead, somehow, in LeBron James' (!!) walk year, they managed to roll out a capped-out lottery team with no draft pick.

Incredible.

Say what you will about James' inner circle, the guys that supposedly have his ear, but this much is certain: for all that they might have wanted him to stay in Cleveland (more cash for him means more cash for his leeches, natch), the truth is that he can see Carlos Boozer joining a playoff roster in Chicago, Chris Bosh joining Dwayne Wade in Miami, and he looks to his own roster to see...what? Jamario Moon? Sebastian Telfair?

Stop it.

We now know what we needed to know about The Chosen One: he chose to try to win.

We also know what we needed to know about the Cavaliers: they chose not to help him.

We are all witnesses.

Sources:

Cleveland.com