LeBron and the Cavs lost to the Celtics last night (it’s actually really early morning here) and the naysayers and haters have been relieved and exhaled the sigh of satisfaction because they said so. They said that LeBron cannot win alone and that his one man show would not get him to the promised land and that he is not the next because he lacks you-name-it quality Mike possessed.

They could not be more wrong.

The paralels between LeBron and Mike are too obvious to notice it is the context that has changed that much – and yes, that is the merit and the heritage of MJ that LeBron has to live with. The hype is exponentially stronger and bigger now than it used to be in the ’80s and early ’90s and the devices and tools of the media allow everyone who wants it to penetrate up to the colon of their favorite celebrities – it is not the intention of the media-workers that has changed, it is the technology that makes it possible to expose anyone who becomes lucrative enough to the level where no one really wants to be once they got there.

This results more instant judgements published than ever before (like this article as well) and even if the stars are protected to some extent, they still have to live in the spotlight and it is quite likely that the network of the managers and the entourage filters the infinite public reflection but they are still influenced more than the pre-multimedia age stars. As a consequence the impatience and the expectations towards LeBron for instance are magnifyed and it is hard to imagine that it has no effect on him no matter how often he repeats that he still remembers where he came from (and I honestly believe that he believes it from his heart but this feeling co-exists with the constant push from the surrounding world).

So overall it is not unfair to say that the media context LeBron has to deal with makes the atmosphere even more demanding in this sense.

Team and career-wise the paralel is easier to see. LeBron is 26. Mike has not won any rings until he was 28. Ok, Dwayne and Kobe can be brought up instantly as the counter-examples. However their stories are a bit more different, let’s give one paragraph to understand their situations…

Kobe is the Hattori Hanzo blade of today’s basketball: a tough and efficent weapon with extreme precision. And Kobe has struggled to become that weapon to become the player who he is now and he had to be zen patient to have a team develop around him that is talented and fitting enough to get over his own baggermen in the Western Conference. He is 33, and he won his first ring at the age of 32. The earlier ones belonged to the Shaq&Kobe corporation, so even he had to come to the appropriate maturity level to accomplish the ultimate goal. Dwayne was one lucky and incredibly talented rookie who grabbed the moment and exploited the opportunity – that was a really unique nich in the time and the space (besides the hard work) that allowed Miami to become the champion. Never happened ever before or after.

LeBron is not even 26 and no matter how he looks like and no matter how articulate and elaborated he handles his business and the media and everyone around him, he proved to be somewhat incapable of orchestrating his team to get over the hump. Last year it was Orlando, this year it is Boston. And while he was still sweating from the game but everyone started to ride him about the ‘big question’.

Well, for me it is not that big of a question at all, or the real big question is not whether James would leave the Cavs but it is about his choice between sports accomplishments and the chance of becoming a business and brand succes besides being the basketball legend. Any of them would be legit but for me his decision would show me where his mind aims at. He has all the fortune of the world and he is about to sign the maximum contract no matter where he ends up (in Cleveland too).
It is obvious that there are bigger markets than Cleveland but if he decides to leave, even if he is going to win a championship at the place he lands, it would not be the championship he prepared for for several years and it would not be the outcome of an organic growth of his organisation. It would either be a team that is assembled to win a championship or it would be a team where one or two years would have to pass by to accomodate and adapt to a new system. Anyhow, if James leaves that means that his judgement is influenced by the monetary decision and the hype more than the sportsman ambitions and this would make me sad… (And the way he ripped his jersey off after the loss suggests not too much sunshine in Cleveland for the future…)
On the other hand if he decides to stay then all the ‘smart’ people who predicted that he would bounce to New York or to any place where the cap space is cleared to at least get a shot at him by offering him everything and then some could scratch their heads because even then it is not sure that they would realize where their logics were flawed. (For me, as a Scoop Jackson believer since ‘94, it is almost mandatory to agree with him from square one of this discussion – when almost every sportswriter speculated about where LeBron would go, he calmly said that he would stay in Cleveland. I don’t know what SJ thinks now but the initial position justifies my logic presented here so I would keep that as my reference point…)

To sum it up: I wish that I could say that Scoop was right when he predicted that LeBron would stay in Cleveland and would not go to anywhere else, however the pressure is so strong and the hype is so big (or vice versa) that it must be unimaginably and extremely hard to stay sober and make the right decision.
What happened this year in my eyes was that LeBron simply showed that he is not ready yet and that he cannot be Scottie & Michael (and sometimes Horace and John) alone. He still has to mature because Mike in his championship years would have never backed off from decisive games and he would rather shoot 1 for 100 but he would have fought until the last drop of blood has gone from his body. And no matter how superior James seems to be he has to be able to toughen up when the opponents start to bully. Then there is the supporting cast – the players assisting the Bron-show have to be re-framed in LBJ’s mind that they are not just assisting but they are just as essential puzzles as he is in the complete picture… The inner mental toughness (that probably comes with maturity) might be more important though.

So the summer of LeBron may have started, the interesting question for me is not where he ends up but what his reasons are. I risk to propose that if he decides to stay in Cleveland he has the chance to become the next but if he chooses to leave he will never fulfill the potential…

post script thought: And no matter how many individual character-based brands are built in the NBA now (thanks to the devine and untouchable MJ) compared with the team-based brands, it is still the team that beats the individual on the court if God refuses to diguise himself as any of today’s players… (…and just for the record, even though MJ has won everything and has won everything multiple times to become the G.O.A.T., that particular game when Bird made his legendary statement, well, Chicago lost that one…)