Posts tagged Lebron James

Lebron James’ MVP Season Visualized

Graphic provide via ESPN

He is a global icon, a basket-ball monolith, the most prevalent and recognizable athlete of our generation,” says Battier. “And he’s one of a kind, because he’s the first to rise to prominence in the Information Age, which is why he’s such a fascinating sociological observation. He’s accountable every single day for every single thing, from how he plays to what he tweets to what he says in the pre- and the postgame interviews. He has a camera and a microphone on him wherever he goes, and then when he [goes out to] dinner, there’s a camera phone on him. This is what he signed up for. There is a price to pay. He understands that. But I don’t think a lot of guys could handle it.
Shane Battier on Lebron James SI.com
LeBron James just got my MVP vote. Kevin Durant is second. It’s not just about tonight, although it certainly played a part. But the guy has been phenomenal. He hit a rough stretch recently but so does everybody. What he did tonight — after rolling his ankle early in the first quarter, mind you — is what MVPs do. He put his team on his back, did everything he had to do, when he had to do it, and turned his mediocre performance ten days earlier in Oklahoma City into a distant memory.
Darnell Mayberry of The Oklahoman
This pretty much sums it up nicely.  Sour grapes. via Some-e-Cards

This pretty much sums it up nicely.  Sour grapes.

via Some-e-Cards

"Not only is it okay to hate LeBron, but it's a fucking character flaw on your part if you do not."

andyhutchins:

fek:

Basically, yes.

Can we talk about this? I mean, we could talk about Drew Magary’s frustrating tendency to call people “cocksucker” as if this is Deadwood and not 2011, where “faggot” is a no-no but a practical synonym for it has been re-entered into the lexicon to talk about bad dudes. Or we could talk about the use of “lane-raped.” We should start by talking about this:

LeBron James has never been arrested or caught with naughty drugs or done anything explicitly “immoral,” I suppose. But that doesn’t matter, because he’s still a piece of shit anyway.

Gee, that sounds like a kind of vigilante moralizing that Magary would probably decry if it came from Peter King. It’s also hate, pure and simple, which is cool if you own it as you kind of being an asshole, too, and less cool if you suggest anyone who doesn’t is in possession of a fucking character flaw.

Calling LeBron James “an entitled fuckwit” seems like the work of a writer who has concluded that he, himself, is not. But, of course, as sports fans whose Internet connections make all the world a bar rail and whose Twitter accounts make us all refractions of Skip Bayless, we’re all so entitled to nod to the rhythms of our sentences that we don’t realize it.

Suggesting that LeBron is “a piece of shit,” has “a certain kind of social retardation,” and is not “behaving like a normal human being” is neither novel nor anything less than the same sort of othering that anti-anything language aims to do.

I’m tired of being told that LeBron is a monster by people who know about as much about who he is, personally, as I do. (Though I’m not asserting things about him that are contradicted by editor’s notes on Deadspin.) And if not seeing him as one means I’m flawed, I guess I’ll live with being flawed.

But I’m not going to shut up about the character assassination of LeBron James by cowards with keyboards.

Also, and this isn’t directed at Magary: It’s LeBron. Not Lebron. Spell the man’s name right.

fek