Archive for the ‘The LeBron James Hate Index’ Category

I don’t wanna talk about the winning streak. Yes, it’s incredible. Yes, the Miami Heat are incredible. Yes, LeBron James is incredible. Yes, it’s incredible that a Jeff Green game that redefined what we think of as being a “career night” wasn’t good enough to end it. Yes, it’s incredible that late in the game against the Cavs, I went to get my laundry with Cleveland up 27, and when I got back they were only up nine, and a channel-flip-and-back later LeBron was shooting a three to tie it up. It’s incredible how nostalgic I am now for those months where LeBron actually went under-the-radar with his casual brilliance.

All those nice things that people are saying about how incredible this streak is are true, and then some. It’s incredible.

But all that said, it’s still just the regular season. As discouraging a regular season as this has been for a LeBron Hater, it’s not too late for him to turn it all back around in the postseason, for him to come up short when everyone assumes he’s just gonna cruise to the title. Of course, there’s a reason that everyone now assumes that, and that’s because it seems really, really likely that cruising to the title is exactly what LeBron and the Heat are gonna do. It’s borderline-impossible to beat this team once right now, how the hell could any team possibly be expected to steal four of seven?

At this point, the only thing that concerns me in the Good Fight is finding some shred of hope to latch on to with a team, a player, a cosmic force whose intervention could possibly result in LeBron James not repeating as champion this season. I’ve come up with 10 possibilities, presented from least to most likely to actually get in the way of LeBron getting that second ring.

Win out for the rest of the regular season, LeBron, see if I care. (I will, of course, but not so much, hopefully.) I’ll just be biding my time, hoping one of these 10 opponents (internal or external) results in your eventual downfall.

10. Chicago Bulls (with everyone healthy). Pretty bad bet here, since the Bulls haven’t exactly been playing like contenders lately, it’s not looking super-likely that Derrick Rose will be back in time, and the Heat dispatched them fairly easily a few seasons back when they were basically at full strength. Still, a healthy Bulls team would be about as tough an out as the Heat would be likely to face in the East, and it’s not totally impossible that the return of D-Rose could lift the Bulls (on the court and in the locker room) enough to give them a real series. At this point with LeBron, anything “not totally impossible” is worth discussing.

9. Oklahoma City Thunder. Gotta include them since they faced the Heat in the Finals last year and looked like the better team for about a game and a half. I just don’t see it really happening with the Thunder this year.

8. Jeff Green. He certainly seems to get up for the games against LeBron, playing his best two games of the season (one on each side of the ball) in the Celtics’ last two matchups against the Heat, proving something of a worthy adversary for LBJ. Hard to say if he could keep it up for six or seven games, but the Celtics have always been trouble for LeBron to begin with, and Green’s emergence is a fascinating, fun new wrinkle in the two teams’ rivalry. Real shame about Rondo though.

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Andrew Unterberger is the Last Angry Man in the crusade against LeBron James and his not-so-gradual march towards total unassailability. He’ll be checking in with us once a month this NBA season for an update on where he’s at with his LeBron hating, and how his attempts to channel all the world’s negative energy towards one generally well-meaning basketball player are progressing.

You probably will not be surprised to hear that this has been a hard month for a LeBron hater. I wouldn’t have guessed that a streak as obscure as consecutive games with at least 30 points scored and shooting over 60 percent would have been able to capture national attention among sports fans, but I suppose as far as streaks of undeniably good play go, this one was about as indicative of general domination as any. And unlike Rajon Rondo, the player behind the other most weirdly well-publicized streak of the 2010 season with his 37 straight double-digit assist games, LeBron never even seemed like he was trying to hit any benchmarks while playing — he was just playing business-as-usual, and ended up with a streak not even Wilt or MJ had ever matched. Sigh.

The hardest part of this all for a hater might not even be watching LeBron approach the game of basketball like a tenth grader who’s already beaten “Super Mario Bros. 3″ a dozen times or so but thinks “Eh, maybe this time I’ll skip a couple of the secret worlds and see how long I can go getting every single one of the bonus coins.” It might not be the endless stream of all-too-justifiable accolades poured upon LeBron on countless halftime shows, podcasts, and blogs such as this one. It might not even be when it comes at the expense of my own team, as it was when LeBron dismantled the Sixers with a 16-11-10 in barely a half-hour game action, propelling the Heat to a 14-point road victory without working off the calories in a stick of Carefree gum.

Rather, the hardest part probably comes with the wave of anti-haters — those who may or may not have hated LeBron once upon a time, but now espouse an unconditional You Gotta Love LeBron philosophy, feeling all should be grateful to witness his unique brand of greatness. The anti-haters can now count New York Magazine’s Will Leitch among their ranks, as Leitch responded to this very recurring column at the end of January, declaring the crusade against LeBron to be over: “No one feels that way about LeBron anymore, this side of Unterberger,” Leitch writes.

He continues:

We have other people to hate now: Lance Armstrong. Alex Rodriguez. Hating LeBron takes more effort than we’re willing to put in. Except for lonely, devoted Andrew Unterberger. He keeps the hate alive, to remind us what we once were, to hope that we will all get there again. But watching LeBron fly through the air last night [against the Nets], making the game of basketball look as natural and easy as anything in the world, all that old hate … it all felt, now that we looked at it, kinda dumb.

Leitch is not misguided in his remarks, nor is he alone. The Anti-LeBron bandwagon essentially reached its last stop in the 2012 Finals, and has gone absolutely nowhere since. There’s been very little ammunition lately, very little on or off the court that a hater can point out to others as fuel for their hatred without coming off as petty, delusional and probably a little bit creepy. I won’t deny that in my darker moments, even I have considered joining the YGLL movement, embracing the man and player I have spent so many years rooting against, burying the hate and spending our remaining days together in appreciative awe, basking in the glory of LeBron.

But such moments never last long, and the fleeting insecurities they produce ultimately just make me more fortified in my position. And that’s because I’ll never be able to make the choice to stop hating LeBron since I never even made the choice to start hating him.

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Andrew Unterberger is the Last Angry Man in the crusade against LeBron James and his not-so-gradual march towards total unassailability. He’ll be checking in with us once a month this NBA season for an update on where he’s at with his LeBron hating, and how his attempts to channel all the world’s negative energy towards one generally well-meaning basketball player are progressing.

Perhaps the most complimentary thing a hater, or anyone else for that matter, can say about LeBron James is this: When you watch LeBron play, especially against a team that you’re rooting for, you always feel like he’s singularly in control of the game’s potential outcome. When he loses, it doesn’t feel like he was outsmarted, outplayed or even out-lucked — it feels like he did a cost-benefit analysis and decided that winning the game wasn’t the most important thing at this point in time. That was what always made the postseason meltdowns so incredible to us, because it still felt like he could’ve won those games if he wanted to, but decided not to for some reason, even though it’s hard to imagine what kind of a reason that could have possibly been.

LeBron James could’ve killed the Celtics yesterday afternoon. I don’t just mean he could’ve won the game against them, but I mean he could’ve finished what he started in Game 6 in Boston last year, and what he continued opening night this year in Miami, and put an end to the entire Big Three era of Boston Celtic basketball with one final dagger defeat. With Rajon Rondo out for the game, announced partway through to be undergoing season-ending ACL surgery, with the C’s reeling from an astounding six straight losses, with the team and the Garden crowd behind them so craving a win against their hated rivals that you could practically feel the blood pumping into every possession … I think one final knockout punch from LeBron in that one, and the Celtics don’t get back up.

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If LeBron James’ December was notable for something, it’s that it wasn’t really notable for anything. Take a look at these box score lines from December on — none of them stand out from one another as being particularly good or particularly bad. In every single one up until Christmas, LeBron hoists somewhere between 15 and 25 shots, scores somewhere between 21 and 31 points, hands out between 5 and 11 assists, and turns the ball over five times or fewer. The only semi-exceptional stat lines (26/13/11 in Washington, 31/10/9 against New York, 36/11/8 in Orlando) are basically negated by the fact that they came in rare Miami losses. (Needing OT to beat the Magic while giving up 29 rebounds to Nik Vucevic counts as a loss.) Really, LeBron James has done nothing of interest this month.

Indicative of this fact was the recent Grantland post entitled “A Couple of Things About LeBron James Booster-Rocketing Into Orbit Above Al Horford,” pertaining to a dunk LeBron slammed over the Hawks center. Without reading the article, I watched the video a couple of times and was convinced I had missed something. Not really — this was just a typical LeBron James alley-oop, which while impressive for 99 percent of more mortal-leaning NBA players, was more of a once-a-game thing for LeBron James. Twice, tops. Chris Ryan did an admirable attempt of making the dunk seem like a big deal, but really, aside from Jay-Z and Beyoncé being in attendance, it was simply not a remarkable NBA occurrence.

Had it taken place in, say, December of 2010, it would not have been one of the first 20 LeBron-related subjects demeed article-worthy by Grantland. Maybe not one of the first 50. This month, it was just about all they had, so sparse was the news on the LeBron front that they even ran a sort of “History of LeBron” PTI montage, like a rerun while LBJ was on winter break.

It would appear that a little more than nine seasons into his microscopically analyzed professional career, LeBron James has reached a place few great professional athletes, especially in the NBA, ever dream of reaching: Being boring. Kobe Bryant has managed to play twice as long without EVER being boring for an entire month. Even in the few drama-free moments of his pro hoops tenure, the lack of news was newsworthy enough that people never went in ignorance of it. But without a title to chase, a troublesome teammate or coach to battle, or a facet of his game particularly thriving or lacking, there’s just no drama left in LeBron. He’s so boring now that he can’t stop listening to Wiz Khalifa.

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Andrew Unterberger is the Last Angry Man in the crusade against LeBron James and his not-so-gradual march towards total unassailability. He’ll be checking in with us once a month this NBA season for an update on where he’s at with his LeBron hating, and how his attempts to channel all the world’s negative energy towards one generally well-meaning basketball player are progressing.

It didn’t take long for me to round into mid-season LeBron James hate form. I was wondering if after a summer spent in the undesirable position of having to root for LeBron in the Olympics — I may be a hater, but I ain’t no commie — and a relatively quiet offseason quote-and-activity-wise, maybe my stance towards LBJ would soften once his first post-championship season tipped off. Unsurprisingly, half a quarter into the Heat’s first game against the Celtics — a couple brilliant layups and passes, a couple shots of his smiling mug, a couple flashbacks to him collecting his championship ring pregame — and I was pretty much good to go. Hate springs eternal in the NBA.

Helping matters (or not, depending on your perspective) were the commercials. Now, in his nearly decade-long NBA career, LeBron has only ever made two good commercials: that very first one from his rookie year picturing him “freezing” in his debut game against the Kings (a bit surreal in its vision of an NBA never influenced by Danny Biasone, but affecting nonetheless) and the famous “Rise” spot from two years ago, which almost came close to almost coming close to making LeBron seem sympathetic in the post-”Decision” fallout and hopefully won somebody at Nike an extended makeout session with Joan Harris. (I don’t count the LeBron copier-jam “This is SportsCenter” ad, as the brand obviously overwhelmed its star on that one.) Other than that, it’s been an atrocity exhibition of poorly scripted spots that attempted to make LeBron seem relatable (nope), charismatic (nope) or funny (he gone!), and which have probably increased DVR subscriptions by 65 percent among NBA viewers over the course of the last nine seasons.

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