“The Cleveland fans were bitter and they had a right to be,” opined ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons (above) after watching LeBron James decimate the Cavaliers last Thursday night. Get Buckets’ tjarks takes a somewhat more measured approach, declaring “there isn™t an athlete in the world who would compel me to boo him for more than one or two minutes…and there isn™t a person in the world I hate as much as the fans seemed to hate LeBron.” You have to give some kind of decorum award to a person who’d not even boo Hitler.
The Cavs players have played basketball their entire lives. They knew they weren™t good enough to win a championship; œThe Decision was business, not personal. Most of them were just happy to see their friend again, a long-time colleague who left for a better opportunity.
Why should they be mad at him? LeBron made them all rich! If Daniel Gibson, who never had a PER higher than 11.7 in his first four seasons in the NBA, had been drafted by any of the other 29 teams, he™s fighting for a spot in the league right now. In Cleveland, playing off of LeBron, he got a 5-year $21 million contract. Andy Varejao ” who has never met a lay-up he couldn™t botch ” got a 4-year $32 million deal.
Seemingly everyone, from the fans to the media, was not happy about the Cavs professionalism:
“He started yapping at his old buddy Boobie Gibson (sitting on Cleveland™s bench), as everyone who grew up in the Rick Mahorn/Charles Oakley era waited for one of the Cavaliers to stand up and punch him in the face, or at least tell him to have sex with himself. Nope. Nothing.”
I™m going to assume that Bill Simmons didn™t actually want to see a reprise of the 2004 Brawl at the Palace. So what exactly did people want the Cavs to do? Be mean to LeBron? Would a wedgie have sufficed? How about attempting to injure him? Or maybe they were supposed to punch him in the face.