LeBron is two losses away from being forgotten forever

I always thought one of the biggest shortcomings of Fire Joe Morgan, besides the sadly unfunny Fremulon Insurance running schitck, was their propensity for picking on crappy and incompetent writers from nationally insignificant newspapers. It's like, yeah, of course the guy writing about baseball for the Harrisburg Gazette-Post is a moron. That's why he hasn't been hired by someone else. I agree that it's ABSOLUTELY HILAROUS that he thinks Darin Erstad deserves MVP votes, but come on.

You'll notice we've never done much of this here. Probably 80% of what we've ever written about comes from ESPN, 5% comes from Mariotti (5% and falling as time goes by! Poor Jay can't seem to catch a break and get a job anywhere! Gotta feel for the guy), and 15% from assorted national outlets that aren't as bad as ESPN but are still pretty fucking bad.

You can probably guess that I put together that intro because I'm about to pick on some writing from a small newspaper. You're sort of right, except that the Denver Post is sort of kind of on the fringe of being a nationally significant newspaper, and also, what Benjamin Hochman wrote in it is so fucking dumb that I couldn't pass it up.

LeBron James can't not win the NBA title this season.

Off to a bad start.

Pardon the double negative,

I don't think that stylistic choice had the effect you wanted it to. It's not an intentional error that adds impact to the point you're trying to make. Instead, it just makes the reader think "Why the hell didn't he just say 'LeBron absolutely has to win the title this season'?"

but that's simply the sentiment — and the simple sentiment, at that.

The intentionally complicated sentiment that could have been said better and with more simplicity.

He must win this thing.

There it is!

Yes, he's the best talent to ever play the game (maybe any game).

And we've entered the world of "Say provocative and obviously incorrect things to get people to talk about this article and link to it."

But LeBron's legacy will come down to the King's rings.

This is true, and in order to be thought of in the same way that people think of Jordan, he's going to need to win a few more.

And the Chicago Bulls' Derrick Rose was out with injury this season, and the Oklahoma City Thunder's Russell Westbrook was injured this postseason, so the Miami Heat has had its path cleared to win back-to-back titles.

Also true, but unfortunately this is merely a setup for the stupidity to come. There's nothing wrong with noting that LeBron will need more than one title to solidify his legacy. But does he need THIS title? If the Heat had lost to the Pacers (sorry, obviously this is old, I'm a lazy piece of shit who has been sitting on this article for weeks), or if the Spurs manage to top them, will this be some kind of black mark on his resume that can't be erased, even if he won eight more titles in the next ten years? Only a fool would think that. And Benjamin Hochman is a fool.

Which brings us to Thursday's Game 5 of the Indiana-Miami series.

Game 5s are always pivotal,

They are never not pivotal.

but this one is pivotal in the sense that not only could it determine the series, it could determine (or derail) the legacy.

What?  Derail the legacy?  Benjamin Hochman has hotdogs for brains.  I don't even think Simmons with all of his obsession over legacies would ever say anything that loony. (Update: the Heat lost three games in the ECF and have already lost two in the Finals, so according to Simmons, they can no longer claim "one of the best teams of all time" status, even if they come back and beat the Spurs in 6.  Sorry guys. The VP of Common Sense has spoken, and five losses in the ECF + the Finals = not great.)

James and the Heat are tied 2-2 with the Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals. Thursday's game is at Miami, where the visitors lost Game 1 by one in overtime — and then swiped Game 2.

The end of Game 2 was maddening (if you've forgotten, that was the one where LeBron got an uncontested layup to beat the buzzer and win the game with Roy Hibbert on the fucking bench for some reason). I'm glad I'm not a Pacers fan. I would have kicked my TV through a window after that.

Yes, of course, Miami grabbed a road game in Game 3, but the Heat faltered in Tuesday's Game 4. James fouled out (a star fouled out?), Dwyane Wade traveled late (they actually called traveling?) and Roy Hibbert and the Pacers bullied the Heat on the boards (Ray Allen led the Heat in rebounding? Ray Allen, really?).

The Pacers are pretty good. I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're so good that if they had topped the Heat, LeBron's legacy would have been, at the very least, salvageable with a few more titles in the next decade.

James is playing exactly three more minutes per game in the playoffs than he did in the regular season, but he's down, slightly, in every major statistical category. After making 12 and 14 field goals in Games 1 and 2, he made just eight each in Games 3 and 4. Clearly, nucleuses win games, not just one player. Look at the Thunder's struggles without Westbrook, even though Oklahoma City has the second-best player on the planet.

Stat showing that LeBron had only been scoring a ton of points through four games of that series, rather than a whole fucking huge shitload of points, followed by anecdote that contradict's the writer's thesis

But James must ascend. This is his chance, his time.

Like, he might not get another chance next year? What?

Miami blew it against Dallas in the Finals in 2011,

That Dallas team was pretty good, and they shot lights out from behind the arc (41%!  Jason Kidd, career 35% 3 point shooter, and DeShawn Stevenson, career 34% 3 point shooter, combined to shoot 25 for 51!). Not really a "the better team blew it" series.  More of a "the better team got outplayed by another pretty good team" series.

so after last season's title, James' first, he has a chance for a second ring. And one could argue that Miami, one of the best teams ever assembled,

NOT ANYMORE! Sorry, I knew I already made that joke, but Simmons is such a fucko that I figured I'd make it again.

should make another run in 2014.

If you say that the Heat will make a deep playoff run a year from now, that's not really an "argument." Barring horrible injuries or the collapse of the NBA, it's going to happen.

But after that, there are question marks as big as Birdman.

Questions like, "Where (if anywhere besides Miami) will LeBron go to continue making deep playoff runs after the 2013-2014 season?"

After 2014, Miami will face impending issues with injury-prone older stars who eat up major cap space.
It's not nice to talk about Dwyane Wade without referring to him by name. Still, if LeBron wants to stay in Miami, I'm sure they will be a very serious title contender in 2015. And 2016. And 2017. Pointing out that star players get older and that the future can't be predicted with 100% certainty are really the only two things you can do to try to build an argument that LeBron's last real shot at a title will be next year. And even then, you will have failed miserably, because anyone with a brain knows that LeBron could drag a team much worse than the 2011-2012 Heat to title contention. He already did it in 2006-2007, and even though he's getting older, he's also getting better in many ways. Please, Benjamin. Stop.

And there's no "next generation" of Heat stars waiting in the wings. Instead, there's Norris Cole.

And if this were baseball or hockey, that would be an issue. Instead, it's basketball, and all LeBron needs to do to continue to win titles after 2014 is join up with Danny Granger, Dirk, and a couple other high profile members of that year's free agent class.

Perhaps free agent James will make another highly scrutinized decision in the summer of 2014 and bolt back to Cleveland, where he could join all-star Kyrie Irving, the No. 1 pick of the 2013 draft and two other promising young players, Dion Waiters and Tristan Thompson. But will he have three rings by then? Even two? Keep in mind that during the 2014-15 season, James will turn 30.

First of all, he and Irving would be an amazing 1-2 combo in Cleveland, but LeBron could do way better than that. And also, yeah, what awesome players have ever won titles after the age of 30?

Naturally, James wants his uniform number in rings (No. 6), just like Kobe Bryant (five rings) wants to get seven, one more than Michael Jordan, which is why some speculate he chose the uniform No. 24, which of course is "one over Jordan."

All that is true. Where are you going with it?

So it all comes back to James' current quest for ring No. 2.

Oh, there? No, it doesn't come back to that, other than in the sense that it's what he is doing now. In the sense that "this quest for ring No. 2 determines his whole legacy" it most definitely does not come back to that.

Here's one optimistic thing in his favor: James' brain.

Now he's just wandering around, rushing to make a word count target before deadline.

LeBron has grown as a mentally tough player. Last season, same playoff round, James and the Heat lost to Boston in Miami in Game 5. Down 3-2, James headed back to Boston, home of his eternal tormenters. In Game 6, he was glorious. He rose. Forty-five points, 15 rebounds and five assists. Miami won Game 6. Miami won Game 7. Miami won the NBA title.

Go on.

And, yes, I've gotten this far without mentioning

anything of substance. What happened to the part where he carried the Heat to the 2012 title?

that the Spurs are playing well, waiting and rested for whomever comes out of the East. But in the NBA Finals I'll take the team that has home-court advantage, the team that has defeated the Spurs four consecutive times, the team that isn't resting nine days and the team that features a ravenous LeBron James.

Wait, what? How the hell did we get here? So James is teetering on the edge of "all time great" relevancy, but also, if the Heat make the Finals, they should have no trouble with the Spurs, but also, the Pacers are terrifying?

All he's got to do is get there first.

I'm lost. This is both shitty analysis and shitty writing. I have no idea how Fire Joe Morgan covered this kind of stuff so often.

That's Not An Excuse

Rob Dibble, on XM's "The Show" today, speculating as to why C.C. Sabathia is having a horrific season so far:

"And on top of all that other stuff, he saw a lot of his teammates getting big extensions this offseason, and maybe that messed with him a little."

Well, Bobby, if you made your living by talking about baseball, I'd expect you to know that C.C. turned down a four year extension rumored to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $70 million this offseason. Is that Barry Zito or Johan Santana money? No. Is it as much (or as many years) as he can expect to command on the open market this coming winter if his 2008 numbers end up resembling his 2007 numbers? No. But if Sabathia really wanted the kind of security his teammates were being given, is it a reasonable amount of money to accept? Definitely. So, uh, as the title implies: this is definitely not anywhere close to a good excuse for C.C.'s miserable performance in 2008. Rob Dibble, just say "fuck" on the air and get fired already. Wait, XM isn't regulated by the FCC? OK, just get fired a different way then. Pull a Harold Reynolds or something. I don't care.

Jonah Keri + Rob Dibble = "What?"

Jonah Keri takes on the question of "Are the Red Sox a dynasty"?

It's a too-wordy article, but it does ask a good question. Basically, Keri compares the current Red Sox to two groups: teams that were actual dynasties (like the Big Red Machine) vs. teams that approached dynasty level (like the '86 Mets).

Now, I have a number of qualms about his method for classifying "approaching dynasty" teams - he highlights five one-year wonderteams (like the 1990 Reds, who didn't make the playoffs for any of the three years before or after their WS title, which, I think, precludes them from dynasty consideration. I might've chosen the late-80s A's as potential dynasties. Actually, it's a crime that he makes no mention of the late-80s and early-90s Blue Jays, who won four division titles and two WS in a five-year span.

Here's some stuff in here that merits mention:

"There's too much movement now," former Reds reliever Rob Dibble says. "Chemistry is a big deal. You need to come up with the same guys, stay with them, get to know their tendencies and their inside jokes. Otherwise, it doesn't work."

I suggest that Reds' GM Wayne Krivsky immediately telephone Rob Dibble and hire him as an inside-joke consultant. Obviously, the Reds' recent lack of success comes from an extreme dearth of tendency-knowing and inside-joke playing. Man, I loved Rob Dibble growing up, but he's an idiot.

Dibble knows something about the challenge of building a dynasty.

No, he doesn't. You are a moron, Jonah Keri. Rob Dibble knows something about injuring innocent first-grade teachers while throwing a public temper tantrum. The Reds' GM in 1990 (Bob Quinn) knows a lot about that challenge. Jonah, why didn't you interview him? You interviewed Rob Dibble. That's what I call "bad journalism".

In 1990, he was a member of the Cincinnati Reds team that won the World Series. Joined by Randy Myers and Norm Charlton, Dibble helped form the Nasty Boys bullpen, a collection of hard-throwing young relievers who -- along with Barry Larkin, Jose Rijo, Eric Davis and other young stars -- figured to form the nucleus of a Reds team that could reel off multiple championships. It didn't happen. Injuries and bad luck conspired against the team, and management soon took it apart.

Well, we could also consider that it was a team that really wasn't that good at all. In fact, Keri did a series of other articles on failed dynasties where he concludes (correctly) that:

Nearly two decades later, it's clear what the Reds' shortfall was: They just weren't all that good. Larkin is a player who deserves a spot in Cooperstown one day, but Davis was the poster boy for those teams, a player with all the talent in the world whose inability to stay healthy eventually sapped his ability. Players such as Duncan, Sabo and Armstrong had career or near-career years in 1990, then soon fell off the map.

And that's where Keri's article turns into a real stretch. There's no real comparison between the 2003-7 Red Sox and the 1990 Reds - because the Red Sox have sustained their success over a span of multiple years. They're not built solely on a few guys having career years. I'm not sure the '03-07 Sox are a dynasty, but they're getting pretty close.

"Once you break a link in the chain, it's never as strong as it once was," Dibble says. "Free agency has ruined the game."

What, Rob? You mean the advent of free agency (circa the 1970s) ruined the game? Yeah, you would know. You were playing in the sandbox when free agency was ruining the game.

Forgive Dibble if he sounds like the lords of the realm who still keep Marvin Miller out of the Hall of Fame.

I won't. It's stupid for Rob to long for a baseball past he never experienced.

It's not that he begrudges players the opportunity to choose their employer and make a healthy living. It's that, as a fan of the game, he misses those Mount Rushmore-level teams of the past, the ones you either respected or hated, but could never ignore.

Here's where Jonah Keri is an idiot. Not seven years ago, the Yankees won four titles in five seasons. That's a dynasty by any definition. In the same article, Keri mentions ten distinct baseball dynasties - over one hundred years, that's about a dynasty a decade. Major-league baseball, though experiencing some degree of parity, is not struggling from a lack of dynasty. Say what you want (and this the fault of your employer, Jonah), there are teams that we can't ignore in baseball today. They're the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Although teams such as the Yankees, Red Sox and Mets pull in and spend more money than their lower-revenue counterparts, bigger dollars haven't translated into the kind of juggernauts that once littered baseball's landscape, teams such as Casey Stengel's Yankees, Branch Rickey's Cardinals and John McGraw's Giants.

The 1996-2000 Yankees did that. The current Red Sox are doing that. Still - he's full of shit when he claims that those teams "littered baseball's landscape" - the three teams he cites are separated by 50 years!

Actually, Dibble was born in 1964, too young to remember any of those teams, barely in middle school when the Big Red Machine was winding down. He might pine for the powerhouse teams of the past, but more because of what he has read and heard than what he has seen with his own eyes.

Finally, some sense.
From 2000 to 2006, Major League Baseball crowned seven different champions: the Yankees, Diamondbacks, Angels, Marlins, Red Sox, White Sox and Cardinals.

How many times have I heard that stat? 2397812

Buzz past the Yankees' run to 1995,

Why? Because it disproves your point - that dynasties don't exist in contemporary baseball?

and you find a similar mishmash of teams in the winner's circle -- East Coast, West Coast and in between; big markets and small; expansion teams and old-time clubs. Bud Selig's oft-repeated mantra has come to fruition, for long-suffering White Sox fans, short-suffering Marlins fans and many of moderate suffering. "The most important part of our sport are the two words that I use at owners' meetings," Selig told a University of Wisconsin crowd last year. "Our job is to provide hope and faith -- hope and faith that your team has a chance to win."

Is that his job? Maybe so. If "acting in the best interest of the game" means "trying to make baseball a totally even playing field", I guess he is doing his job. Maybe, in order to accomplish this job, he could just hire Shane Stant to whack all the Red Sox' knees.

I think the job of providing hope and faith falls to the team's ownership. Yes, Orioles fans, unless Bud implements the Tonya Harding approach, you're screwed for the forseeable future.
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For the record, I think baseball's level of parity is just about right. The dynasty-frequency doesn't seem to have changed. Maybe the luxury tax is the best way to go about limiting the absolute power of big-market teams and giving small-market teams a small leg up. It seems better, to me, than a salary cap system, which, to be honest is just too Communist for the American pastime.