I was reading an article in the latest issue of Rolling Stone tonight about how Obama has performed so far as a President. The article itself is really a roundtable interview with CNN analyst David Gergen, noted economist Paul Krugman, and provocative documentarian Michael Moore.
During a discussion of the President’s efforts to shut down Guantanamo, Moore had this to say:
“Sadly, on this issue, Obama is having to play like LeBron James - he not only has to beat the opposing team, he also has to play against the people on his own team to take them to the championship.”
I hope Michael Moore is truly the expert he claims to be on health care, gun control, and the economy of Detroit, because this quote makes it glaringly obvious that he doesn’t know shit about basketball.
Not that I will ever be one to downplay Bron’s importance to the Cavs’ success, but…we won 66 freaking games last season and were the #1 overall seed in the NBA going into the playoffs. Obviously LeBron is great, but he’s not great enough to do that on his own - a fact which should be obvious to anyone not in a morphine haze or suffering from a massive head wound.
I acknowledge that the Cavs ultimately didn’t get the job done and that our supporting cast had some performance issues in the Eastern Conference Finals, but it also took a near-supernatural shooting streak by Orlando to keep us out of the Finals.
The bottom line is this: the ever-popular argument that the Cavs are a one-man show is completely ignorant of reality.
There’s no guarantee that everything will work perfectly, but it’s also obvious that the Cavs have become a progressively deeper and more talented team every single year since Danny Ferry took over the front office. This upcoming season’s team will have a strong, versatile supporting cast for LeBron, including a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
In short, the times when we had to rely on dumb luck and Donyell Marshall to help get us to the next level are dead, buried, and should never be resurrected.
Nevertheless, we should continue to expect lazy pundits and people who haven’t watched a game since 2007 to trot out this zombie criticism every time the Cavs lose this year.
Incidentally, team doctors report that Michael Moore will be out 6-8 weeks for muscle tears induced during his frantic efforts to fellate Obama over the course of the rest of the article I mentioned above. He will be put on bed rest and prescribed a continuous tape loop of the Cavs waterboarding the Pistons for the past three NBA seasons, with special emphasis on Cleveland handing Deeeeee-troit basket-baaaall its ass in this year’s playoffs.
Finally, an unrelated side note: if you’re not keeping up on the Comments sections of our posts, consider changing your reading habits. There’s some very good stuff happening in there, both from the Mesa writing staff and readers like bjt68 and others. For selfish purposes, I’d suggest backtracking to my Cavs/Celtics post from last night, which now includes an extended point-counterpoint with good friend and Celtics Nation representative adlewdruz. Big Baby’s twitter habits, Shelden Williams’ new nickname, and Shaq-Fu are all discussed.
Til next time…
-T
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