An interpretation of the NBA Finals

By Chris Hanneke

You do know Dallas won right? Just making sure you saw that in the midst of all the Lebron bashing.

It’s been 24 hours since the Dallas Mavericks became champions of the National Basketball Association. Or, if you go by what you read/watch, it’s been 24 hours since the Devil got his due, justice was served and, more simply, Lebron James’ career was tarnished beyond repair.

That’s the NBA we have now. Like it or not, James is still the focus of the entire league. The story of the Finals was not about Dallas’ triumphs, or even Miami’s failures, but specifically of James’ failures. Likewise, the story headed into next season (barring a lockout, which will trump all other stories, obviously) won’t be about Dallas’ search to repeat, but about James’ search for vengeance.

What I find most interesting and paradoxical about this entire situation is that even the discussions focusing on how Lebron failed, and how he will never be great (which I already gave my views on), are essentially just reinforcing just how great he is to begin with. Because greatness is more than what happens on the court. No other star could have taken the discussion away from a weathered veteran like Dirk Nowitzki capturing his first ring, not even MVP Derrick Rose, but that is exactly what James has done. Sure there are the “noble” sportswriters that forewent the chance to bash James’ shortcomings to praise the Mavericks, but the overwhelming majority focused on James. And in these stories, I couldn’t believe how many had the balls to say he would never the same in their eyes. YOU ARE WRITING ABOUT LEBRON JAMES INSTEAD OF WRITING ABOUT THE FUCKING WORLD CHAMPIONS!! THAT DOESN’T TELL YOU ANYTHING ABOUT HOW MUCH HE MEANS TO THE LEAGUE?! YOU THINK THAT WILL JUST CHANGE OVERNIGHT?!

It was a lonely walk to the podium as Lebron had to prepare to face his critics.

Look, James will never be Jordan, blah blah blah, we get it. As much time as I’ve spent defending him, I find it absolutely impossible to defend his play in the Finals, especially Games 4-6. I will never understand why he refused to impose his will and instead and was comfortable settling for jump shots and playing second fiddle to Dwyane Wade. But I yearn for a time when everyone got off of their high horses and stopped pretending that Lebron James coming TWO GAMES SHORT of an NBA Championship speaks to some larger problem in his character. The Decision was a stupid idea, get over it. The parade Miami held for him was a stupider idea, get over it. He played every game this year, every single one, with a bull’s-eye on his back. He never used that as an excuse. He embraced the role of a villain and played with an intensity we’d never seen from him before for the first three rounds. And then the Finals came, and he froze up. And that deserves criticism. He is the one who created this giant spectacle surrounding him, and he set the stakes from the beginning, it was championship or bust. I just never thought that James coming up two games short of delivering the ultimate “told you so” moment (I think Rick Reilly said that initially, in which case I really should use a better term, because Rick Reilly’s name should only ever appear in this blog if he is being absolutely skewered) would all of a sudden make him one of the biggest failures in the history of sport.

You know who had similar problems in the Finals once upon a time? Dirk Nowitzki. He finally got a ring and now he can coast through the rest of his Hall of Fame career, never having to win another. Even if he retires in five or six years with just that one ring, the discussion of him as a top 20 all-time player will still continue. Not saying I agree or disagree with that, I’m just saying that’s the case.

James is in a far worse situation. Even if he would turn it on for a year and finally win his ring, the discussion wouldn’t be about him finally achieving the ultimate goal. It would be about how he needed help, how he better win at least three or four more if he wants to be considered one of the game’s greatest ever.

That is the reality, and it got me thinking about how much of our sports reality is based on our perceptions. Anyone who has ever had a Communications class knows the power of the media to shape perceptions of the audience, and never has it been more obvious with James, and Nowitzki provides the perfect foil. Case in point: Nowitzki’s emotional celebration after the game.

"Look at the humble White Guy! He celebrates so naturally." Ugh

To recap, the final buzzer sounded and he walked off the court, hurdled over the front row of people, walked through the tunnel and into the locker room where he could presumably cry without everyone seeing it. Oh, but the camera caught everything until he actually made it into the locker room. It was the type of moment White Middle America could absolutely eat up. “Look at the White guy enjoying the moment by himself, what a humble way of going about his business.” Even Bill Simmons fell into the trap, and it messed with everything I consider to be true in this world. “It was the most genuine sports moment of the year,” he wrote, “LeBron would have done it at midcourt in front of everyone, partly for effect, and maybe that's one of the biggest differences between them right now. You play basketball for you and your teammates, not for everyone else.” I would defend Simmons to the death, but that part absolutely made me want to throw up. I couldn’t believe he’d gone soft and fallen for that. My counter to his point on Lebron is simple, if James had done the exact same thing, you don’t think the talk would have been something along the lines of “Look how selfish he is, instead of crying naturally with his teammates, he made it blatantly obvious that he was too big for this moment and left his teammates to celebrate alone while he stormed to the locker room with all of the cameras following.” You see what I did there?

The real difference between the two is that Nowitzki has chosen the career path that allows him to hide away and no one will doubt his intentions. If he wants to cry by himself, we will let him cry by himself because he’s earned it. Lebron chose a career path that eliminated his right to do that. He chose to do The Decision. He chose to be the center of attention. So I’m not saying either one’s path is right or wrong.

Personally, I’ll take the James saga any day of the week. It’s more entertaining, and as I’ve said, that’s what sports is at its core: entertainment. And like other forms of entertainment, everything is up for interpretation. The second I realized what Nowitzki was up to after the game, I knew that everyone (fans, media, etc.) would eat it up, because I realized that was the best way to interpret it. And you know what? They have the right to interpret it that way. They can think he just wanted to be alone, to let the moment sink in. I saw it more as a moment in which he was announcing to the world, “look how humble I am, here’s your photographic proof of my humility,” which of course is a contradiction. And the truth is we’re probably all wrong. None of us really know why athletes do what they do, but in this age of Twitter and blogs especially, just about everyone (i.e. me) has an interpretation as to why. And no matter how many theories we come up with, none of us will truly understand why an athlete like Lebron James does the things that he does. We can only interpret it through our perceptions of that athlete.

As Chuck Klosterman said today on Grantland, sports is art, and art is open to interpretation. We may want sports to be as clean cut and perfectly crafted as “The Wire,” with every piece coming together so beautifully that it ends in the only way we could possibly see fit. But the truth is, sports is much more like “The Sopranos,” with a bunch of flourishing moments so surreal that they overshadow any of the more unsatisfying ones from the past. And yet, just when we think we have it all figured out and there is only one way it can end, everything just goes black.