So all year everyone seems to agree that Chicago isn’t a great fit for LeBron because he plays the exact same “primary ball handler who starts the offense by driving off isolation or a pick-and-roll” style as Derrick Rose, and it would be a waste of both of them to have them split time in that role. Then Chicago suffers an organizational meltdown in which their coach is fired, but only after their GM tries to punch him, and the hot rumor is that they’re trying to fill his spot with a guy whose short pro-coaching experience was a total disaster remembered mainly for the time he called a reporter a “Mexican idiot” … and all of a sudden, the Bulls are the No. 1 contender to sign LeBron? What?
The guy has one bad game and all of a sudden he’s going to trust his basketball future to these people? That’s an appealing situation for someone who’s being accused of acting too much like a business professional and not enough like a savage sports warrior? Y’all: LeBron James is an enormously skilled and highly motivated basketball player surrounded by a very competent team of business advisers — whose much ballyhooed “global branding” efforts, by the way, have so far been a massive success. (Hey, we hate the fact that “branding” is part of sports, too … just pointing out the facts.) For sure, he might need to tweak his game and reassess the balance of his priorities if he wants to reach a Jordan-Kobe level … but let’s bear in mind that another way to put that is that we’re talking about a 25-year-old megasuperstar two-time MVP who just needs a little push to become one of the three greatest basketball players of the modern era. We have no inside insight into this, of course, and may be wrong, but we don’t think that just because the Cavs didn’t quite meet expectations this year that we should now consider LeBron an aimless knucklehead who wants to hitch his wagon to the guy whose most recent résumé line is “coached one of the top eight teams in college basketball.”