Free You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will by Colin Cowherd Page B

stagnant Cleveland team—for
less
money—to join a team with a better chance of winning a championship.
    Joe Girardi went from managing the Marlins to managing the Yankees. Does anybody criticize him? No, he simply left for a better opportunity. Everyone seems to understand that—in most cases. Not in LeBron’s, however.
    The power of marketing can be seen in other sports. Everyone loves Peyton Manning more than Tom Brady, even though Brady has three Super Bowl wins and two Super Bowl MVPs while Manning has one Super Bowl win. (Jordan, by the way, seems to judge everyone by titles won, as evidenced by his contention that he’d take Kobe Bryant over LeBron because he has more NBA championships.) Why is Manning more popular? One reason: he has more and funnier commercials, which means he has a better image.
    Why does Derrick Rose sell tons of sneakers while Tim Duncan sells none? Because Adidas has created an effective and widespread marketing campaign around Rose—who has limited success in the NBA playoffs—and Duncan couldn’t care less about any of that stuff. It doesn’t matter that Duncan is one of the best players in NBA history and has won four NBA titles.
    Again, Jordan made a lot of his own breaks. But he didn’t win any titles until he was teamed with Phil Jackson and Scottie Pippen. And look at these numbers: the year he retired for the first time, the Bulls went from fifty-seven wins with him to fifty-five without him. Nobody’s saying he wasn’t the most important player on that team, the difference between an NBA title and a flame-out in the playoffs, but the fact remains: fifty-seven with him, fifty-five without him.
    LeBron’s final year in Cleveland, the Cavs won sixty-one games. The next year, they won nineteen.
Nineteen
. They dropped forty-two games and went from having the best record in the NBA to getting the No. 1 pick in the draft.
    Let’s look at two specific charges at LeBron:
    1. He’s a quitter. This stems from the 2010 Eastern Conference Semifinals, James’s last games in Cleveland. Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert was quoted as saying, “He quit in games two, four, five, and six. Watch the tape.”
    Let’s grant Gilbert Game 5; there’s no dispute he disappeared in that game, possibly because of the unsubstantiated rumors of problems with a teammate. But in Game 6—another game Gilbert cited—against a Celtics team that went to the Finals and outplayed the Lakers—LeBron had 27 points, 19 rebounds, 10 assists, and 3 steals in 46 minutes.
    A triple double. If that qualifies as quitting, LeBron should immediately be inducted into the Quitters’ Hall of Fame. He’s the world’s greatest quitter. Retire the trophy.
    But whatever. Don’t let facts get in the way. LeBron has been labeled a quitter, and there’s nothing he can do about it.
    Back to Jordan: he quit on his sport—his entire
sport
—during the prime of his career.
    One doesn’t stick, one defines.
    2. LeBron’s a traitor: he misled the Cavs and the entire long-suffering city of Cleveland by waiting until a television show to tell the world that he would play in Miami.
    Let’s look at this a little bit closer. LeBron’s destination was the biggest basketball scoop in ten years. Was he going to New York? Miami? Chicago? Would he stay in Cleveland?Take yourself back to those days and remember how relentless and breathless the reporting became. Every NBA reporter was on this story.
    Did he know where he was going? Three days before LeBron announced his decision, Stephen A. Smith told me the people around James had no idea what he was going to do. People
inside
LeBron’s inner circle didn’t know. And if Stephen A. knew, he would have broken it. There was no value to holding the information. None at all, and as it turned out he broke the news shortly before
The Decision
aired.
    And yet the misperception persists: LeBron knew where he was going to play and simply chose not to tell anybody because he wanted to make it