LeBron to LA

cheech13

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Can’t wait for LeBron to constantly get doubled in the post and then be forced to kick it out to his collection of tough minded shitty shooters.
Second-worst three-point shooting team in the league last year and they've added knockdown marksmen Rondo, Stephenson and JaVale McGee to the mix. I hope Lebron likes having multiple defenders draped all over him because the spacing could be terrible next year.

It'd be funny if Kevin Love followed him again.
Banishing Lavar and Lonzo to Cleveland so that Love can be Lebron's whipping boy again is just too hilarious to think about.
 

nighthob

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Lillard was first-team All-NBA and is under contract through 2021. What exactly are the Lakers giving up to get him? You'd think it would start with at least two of Ball/Ingram/Kuzma plus picks.
Portland might be willing to roll the dice on a Ball/McCollum backcourt, so something around Ball/Deng/Hart could work.
 

snowmanny

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Don’t you lose GOAT points for ignoring the Ferraris to your left and your right and choosing to ride in the clown car?
 

BigSoxFan

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What's the current projected rotation?

McGee / Zubac
LeBron / Kuzma / Wagner
Ingram / Stephenson
Caldwell-Pope / Hart
Ball / Rondo

Ingram had better work on his 3's. Shot a good percentage last year but only made 0.7 / game.
 

Kliq

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The Windhorst piece makes it look like the Lakers are **surprise** building their team to win in the 1980s. They don't need any shooters; they just need tough defensive players and guys that can create instead of LeBron! So you bring in Stephenson and Rondo, who in addition to being noted bricklayers, are also difficult personalities who have bounced around the league.

I love the rival executive who said that it's easy to find shooters. I hope that was Sam Presti, who has run through countless scrap-heap shooters to pair with his stars and almost every one of them has failed. Maybe it is easy to find guys who shoot north of 37 percent; but it's really hard to find guys who are good shooters and can stay in the floor in a playoff series.
 

cheech13

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The Windhorst piece makes it look like the Lakers are **surprise** building their team to win in the 1980s. They don't need any shooters; they just need tough defensive players and guys that can create instead of LeBron! So you bring in Stephenson and Rondo, who in addition to being noted bricklayers, are also difficult personalities who have bounced around the league.

I love the rival executive who said that it's easy to find shooters. I hope that was Sam Presti, who has run through countless scrap-heap shooters to pair with his stars and almost every one of them has failed. Maybe it is easy to find guys who shoot north of 37 percent; but it's really hard to find guys who are good shooters and can stay in the floor in a playoff series.
What's amazing is the number of media types that are buying into what the Lakers are selling. I read not one, but two articles today that compared the Lakers roster construction to the Rockets because they are building around big, switchy wings and guards. That's laughable considering that Stephenson, Lonzo and KCP are the only guys on the roster you'd describe as better than average defenders and you are never going to be able to play more than one of that group at a time without completely cratering the offense. But more importantly the Rockets built around two MVP-level players, not one plus a budding star at center.

Also, finding shooters is probably the most difficult and expensive thing to find in free agency or trades. Every team outside of the Rockets and Warriors last year was looking for more shooting. How many first round picks did the Cavs squander the last four years trying to find shooters to put around Lebron?
 
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Montana Fan

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I like the length of the new look Lakers. There's also going to be a lot of competition for playing time and Lebron will have a lot of options if they're playing D and running. Can he get Playoff Rondo to play at that level all season?

They could use a shooter and probably Brook Lopez as well. He can hit the 3 though he only takes a couple a game. Maybe they resign him at a bargain price.
 

nighthob

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Don’t you lose GOAT points for ignoring the Ferraris to your left and your right and choosing to ride in the clown car?
I think he’s the one pulling the damned clowncar. It was definitely a short-sighted decision.
 

DJnVa

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Well, that piece isn’t saying they don’t want shooters, it’s saying they can get them anywhere so they’re waiting.

Uh, can they?
 

bigq

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What's the current projected rotation?

McGee / Zubac
LeBron / Kuzma / Wagner
Ingram / Stephenson
Caldwell-Pope / Hart
Ball / Rondo

Ingram had better work on his 3's. Shot a good percentage last year but only made 0.7 / game.
Starting PG as a platoon with Rondo getting the nod for nationally televised games?
 

PedroKsBambino

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I kinda-sorta get the idea of creators from the article—that does matter. But Rondo is a very ball dominant creator (odd fit next to Lebron) and Stephenson has been a very low-efficiency creator for years. Together, it feels like some creation and a lot of possessions where Lebron doesn’t get the ball. At least they both know where to find the clock, so that’s better than having JR Smith I guess
 

Sam Ray Not

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One of the many potentially horrid things about that roster: FT shooting.

Career FT%
====
.786 KCP
.739 James
.710 Zubac
.707 Kuzma
.702 Hart
.698 Wagner (college)
.685 Stephenson
.655 Ingram
.604 Rondo
.582 McGee
.451 Ball

.848 Magic
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

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What's the current projected rotation?

McGee / Zubac
LeBron / Kuzma / Wagner
Ingram / Stephenson
Caldwell-Pope / Hart
Ball / Rondo

Ingram had better work on his 3's. Shot a good percentage last year but only made 0.7 / game.
Kuzma as to start in this lineup.

Rondo, Stephenson, and McGee make interesting off-seaon headlines but this team is going to be determined by how well Ingram, Kuzma, and Ball play with LBJ. It's certainly a long, athletic lineup.
 

the moops

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Portland might be willing to roll the dice on a Ball/McCollum backcourt, so something around Ball/Deng/Hart could work.
If POR put Lillard out there, they could do a hell of a lot better than Ball, a complete shit salary in Deng, and a decent 3rd or 4th guard in Hart. Like a hell of a lot better.
 

Mugsy's Jock

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Magic was on Kimmel last night and described the recruitment of LeBron.
Man, Magic is so funny and charming it's hard to remember why I ever hated him. [Also met him in person once, and he was beyond awesome. Told him I was more of a Bird man and he fake-choked me, before laughing and saying he was a Bird man, too.]

 

DJnVa

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LBJ said at an appearance in Akron that going to the Lakers was a dream come true, because it's a historic, championship franchise.

He said while growing up he was a Cowboys, Bulls, and Yankees fan. So, yeah, Lebron was one of those annoying dudes that when picking his favorite teams, picked the best ones--from 1990 through 2000 (when he was 6 to 16 years old) his teams won 3 Super Bowls, 4 World Series, and 6 NBA titles. What a lucky kid rooting for those teams.
 

Ale Xander

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LBJ said at an appearance in Akron that going to the Lakers was a dream come true, because it's a historic, championship franchise.

He said while growing up he was a Cowboys, Bulls, and Yankees fan. So, yeah, Lebron was one of those annoying dudes that when picking his favorite teams, picked the best ones--from 1990 through 2000 (when he was 6 to 16 years old) his teams won 3 Super Bowls, 4 World Series, and 6 NBA titles. What a lucky kid rooting for those teams.
What about the NHL? Close by Pittsburgh or an Edmonton fan?
 

Sam Ray Not

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LBJ said at an appearance in Akron that going to the Lakers was a dream come true, because it's a historic, championship franchise.

He said while growing up he was a Cowboys, Bulls, and Yankees fan. So, yeah, Lebron was one of those annoying dudes that when picking his favorite teams, picked the best ones--from 1990 through 2000 (when he was 6 to 16 years old) his teams won 3 Super Bowls, 4 World Series, and 6 NBA titles. What a lucky kid rooting for those teams.
Hah, I feel like a pretty lucky kid, too: I got five Superbowls, three NBA titles, and three World Series since 2001 — possibly "and counting" on all three fronts — and I didn't have to jump on gravy trains from random cities where I don't live to get them! (Became a Warrior fan in '86-87 when I moved to Berkeley for college, but that was hardly a gravy train; indeed, all three of my teams were officially sad-sack when I started rooting for them).

Also: three of those six Bulls titles and two of the three Cowboys SBs happened when he was 6-8 years old, so I wonder how much he really appreciated them.

His failure to stick by the Cavs, Browns, and Tribe strikes me as a minor moral shortcoming. Of course, he's a lot smarter than me, and has like 100 times my work ethic, plus is a great humanitarian, on top of having possibly the best genes ever bestowed on anyone by the Sports Gods ... so I guess I can forgive his being a bandwagoner when it comes to his childhood sports allegiances. :)
 
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InstaFace

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yeah, that all speaks poorly of him as a sports fan.

Doesn't change the fact that he's a great person when it comes to what actually matters (see e.g. that school he just opened). But it does kinda fit his whiny, entitled on-court persona. If he can't win everything all the time, even when it's just rooting for another team, then he's going to blame others and look to switch allegiances to something more convenient and better aligned with his ideas that he deserves to win everything, all the time. Not exactly inspiring stuff.
 

Spelunker

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I have to think that what Lebron watched sports for, and what you or I so, are slightly different.
 

DJnVa

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I have to think that what Lebron watched sports for, and what you or I so, are slightly different.
Sure---I was kinda having fun with it. I don't think he's an a-hole or anything and the school above is awesome.
 

the moops

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yeah, that all speaks poorly of him as a sports fan.
Meh. I know plenty of sports fans that developed love for the teams not by geographic proximity but by player persona/mystique/team awesomeness or ineptitude/cultural significance/etc.

I find their experience no less significant than a traditional "I am from BOS, I love all things and only things Celtics/Bruins/Sox/Patriots" fan.
 

Sam Ray Not

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So this may be a good time to confess — at the risk of expulsion — that I totally rooted for the Reds in the '75 series as a 7 year-old. Who knows why ... I think it was partly cos I thought they were the cooler/better team and were going to win, and maybe partly to bust my dad's chops? Probably the same things that drove a 7-year old Akron kid to root Bulls over Cavs. Anyway, during the Fisk home run, while my dad and the rest of New England exulted, I whined (or maybe cried?) uncontrollably and punched him as hard as I could.

I always feel like I had to go through '78, '86 and '03 to expunge that mortal sin and deserve '04.
 
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Kliq

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I find that obligatory rooting for the hometown teams is less common in other parts of the country than it is in the Boston area. That being said, I stick to my belief that non-LA-based Laker fans are the most annoying fans in all of sports, slightly ahead of Barca/Real fans, Yankee fans, and Notre Dame fans.
 

Kliq

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So this may be a good time to confess — at the risk of expulsion — that I totally rooted for the Reds in the '75 series as a 7 year-old. Who knows why ... I think it was partly cos I thought they were the cooler/better team and were going to win, and maybe partly to bust my dad's chops? Anyway, during the Fisk home run, while my dad exulted, I whined (or maybe cried?) uncontrollably and punched him as hard as I could.

Anyway, I always feel like I had to go through '78 and '86 to expunge that mortal sin and deserve 2004.
I was around the same age for the Pats/Panthers super bowl and somehow chose to root for the Panthers. I totally dug that black and blue color scheme and that cool black logo; plus I really liked Stephen Davis and Mushin Muhammad. When you're a kid, you can pick a team for the strangest reasons and sometimes that can end up sticking.

I knew a kid in college who was a huge Browns fan, and I asked him why someone from Massachusetts would choose to subject themselves to being a Browns fan, and he told me that when he was a kid he played pop warner and the team he was on was called the Browns, so he decided to root for them in NFL.
 

InstaFace

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Meh. I know plenty of sports fans that developed love for the teams not by geographic proximity but by player persona/mystique/team awesomeness or ineptitude/cultural significance/etc.

I find their experience no less significant than a traditional "I am from BOS, I love all things and only things Celtics/Bruins/Sox/Patriots" fan.
There is nothing wrong or dishonorable about choosing the team(s) to root for based on a player, a fun vignette you saw once, rumors, youth sports affiliations, a team your childhood friend liked, or any other non-geographic-based reason.

It amounts to a lame expression of insecurity, in my view, to choose as your teams each league's contemporary hegemon at the time of your formative years. As if the only reason to ever root for a team is if they are going to win a championship most often, in that current snapshot of time.

(and again, not that any of this says something meaningful about Lebron James the person, about whose character we have a great deal of positive evidence. But Lebron James the sports fan is a soulless front-runner.)
 

Kliq

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There is nothing wrong or dishonorable about choosing the team(s) to root for based on a player, a fun vignette you saw once, rumors, youth sports affiliations, a team your childhood friend liked, or any other non-geographic-based reason.

It amounts to a lame expression of insecurity, in my view, to choose as your teams each league's contemporary hegemon at the time of your formative years. As if the only reason to ever root for a team is if they are going to win a championship most often, in that current snapshot of time.

(and again, not that any of this says something meaningful about Lebron James the person, about whose character we have a great deal of positive evidence. But Lebron James the sports fan is a soulless front-runner.)
If I was at a bar and someone told me those were their favorite teams; I'd probably say something about them picking only front-runners. That being said, if someone as an 8 year old just picked their favorite team based on who they saw the most on television, and they followed those teams for a while, I wouldn't really expect them to stop following them once they became old enough to be aware that they likely only picked those teams because they were good. When LeBron was 16, was he supposed to be say "Wait a minute, I only like these teams because they were good when I was younger. My entire fandom is based around picking the teams who have had the most contemporary success. I will have to stop following those teams and pick new, less-competitive teams to support so I don't appear to be a soulless front-runner."

It also should be noted that LeBron didn't know his father. Since many people pick their sports teams based on who their father rooted for, it's more likely that someone that lacked that relationship would end up rooting for the most popular teams of the time.
 

Spelunker

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My point was more that I'm not sure it makes sense to think of Lebron as a 'fan'. For how long has he been destined for greatness? I don't know that he has much in common with us when it comes to sports.

We root for teams for tribalistic reasons, and then try and ascribe a level of rationality to it. For someone like Lebron, it might actually be rational: choosing what teams to follow for ideative, aspirational, and motivational purposes.

We have lots of evidence that athletes don't exactly think like we do when it comes to athletics. For a lifelong super-human like Bron, maybe even more so.
 

Jimbodandy

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My point was more that I'm not sure it makes sense to think of Lebron as a 'fan'. For how long has he been destined for greatness? I don't know that he has much in common with us when it comes to sports.

We root for teams for tribalistic reasons, and then try and ascribe a level of rationality to it. For someone like Lebron, it might actually be rational: choosing what teams to follow for ideative, aspirational, and motivational purposes.

We have lots of evidence that athletes don't exactly think like we do when it comes to athletics. For a lifelong super-human like Bron, maybe even more so.
This is a good point. I don't care much about what teams he cheers for or cheered for as a kid. But people do forget how different of a life that someone like Lebron has lived.

Anyone who has been around youth baseball or basketball has seen the worship that young stars can get, sometimes as early as 9 years old. High school coaches were recruiting a fifth grader who was sitting on my bench at the time. He was a very good player, but not a kid who's ever going to play in the NBA.

I can't imagine what it's like to be Lebron.
 

DJnVa

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Man, I don't think we were, you know, actually upset with him or actually really care. It's just kind of a funny little anecdote. And we all do know a kid that we grew up with that was like that.
 

mwonow

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I find that obligatory rooting for the hometown teams is less common in other parts of the country than it is in the Boston area. That being said, I stick to my belief that non-LA-based Laker fans are the most annoying fans in all of sports, slightly ahead of Barca/Real fans, Yankee fans, and Notre Dame fans.
NOBODY is ahead of MFY fans in this regard. My stepdaughter brought home a Yankees fan from Alaska once; it wasn't the reason that the guy was a complete jerk, just a reflection of his altogether-lacking personality. [fun side note - he was such a goof that my then 12 or so year old daughter - not a sports fan - refused to call the guy by anything other than his last name.]
 

mt8thsw9th

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Can we not lose sight for a second that Lebron had a pretty rough childhood growing up without a father? If he looked for solace in "winning" teams, so be it. Yeah, it used to annoy me, too, but I was looking it through the lens of obnoxious classmates in their Cowboys jerseys in the early 1990s. I'd say growing up poor in Akron is a much worse existence than growing up football-starved in late 1980s-early 1990s Massachusetts.

It was a glimmer of happiness in an otherwise pretty rough patch in his life. I can't hate him for that.
 

Soxfan in Fla

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Can we not lose sight for a second that Lebron had a pretty rough childhood growing up without a father? If he looked for solace in "winning" teams, so be it. Yeah, it used to annoy me, too, but I was looking it through the lens of obnoxious classmates in their Cowboys jerseys in the early 1990s. I'd say growing up poor in Akron is a much worse existence than growing up football-starved in late 1980s-early 1990s Massachusetts.

It was a glimmer of happiness in an otherwise pretty rough patch in his life. I can't hate him for that.
Unless you grew up in Lawrence like Nip, JMOH and Lawtown Fool. Then growing up poor in Akron looks much better.
 

Kliq

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NOBODY is ahead of MFY fans in this regard. My stepdaughter brought home a Yankees fan from Alaska once; it wasn't the reason that the guy was a complete jerk, just a reflection of his altogether-lacking personality. [fun side note - he was such a goof that my then 12 or so year old daughter - not a sports fan - refused to call the guy by anything other than his last name.]
Non-LA Laker fans who scream about Kobe being better than Jordan are the absolute worst to me. I think part of this is that as a young person, there are a lot more casual NBA fans around me, who have very annoying opinions, while most of the baseball fans I know are fairly knowledgeable.

Barca/Real fans are very close though, due to their ability to complain about how they didn't get player X despite the financial rules being enormously tilted in their favor, even more so than it is for the Yankees in MLB.
 

cheech13

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Lebron choosing his favorite teams based on who was winning and cool at the time certainly sheds some light on how he's approached free agency over the years.