anyone want explain this lebron james and why got ilx in a hizzy to a britisher?

just wonderin' like.

is there gonna be a space jam sequel or something?

hmmm, it's probably hard for a britisher to understand cuz i am under the impression that soccer teams don't hang on to their stars for dear life and will sell off their best players if they'll get lots of money

anyway, the reason we are all in a hizzy is cuz lebron is either the best or second best player in the nba -- two time mvp, incredibly skilled, jaw droppingly athletic etc. and pretty much he was playing for his hometown team, which is pretty rare in american sports because all of them have drafts, and he decided to leave his hometown team on his own accord, in his prime, when they wanted him back intensely. also because of the way the nba salary cap is structured, he left $30 million dollars on the table. this exact combination -- best player, hometown team, in prime, leaves city high and dry -- is pretty much unprecedented in american sports.

also he decided to have a one hour "special" on espn, which amounted pretty much to talking heads talking, a worthless interview, lebron saying his pick, and then more interview. but it was as terrible a PR move as it was unprecedented, because people are calling him selfish etc.

hope i answered your questions

So is he leaving for more money, for a more successful team, what?

pretty much he was playing for his hometown team, which is pretty rare in american sports because all of them have drafts

don't quite get this bit

This is pretty much how every Premiership player has behaved.

well, he's certainly leaving for less money, both because of the way the salary cap is structured to benefit incumbent teams (all nba teams can offer their own players more money than other teams, on a scale depending on time of service, as an incentive for them to stay) and because the team he is going to now wouldn't be able to afford the "max" contract

he's leaving because he's going to play with one dude -- dwayne wade -- who is either the 3rd or 4th best player in the league, and another dude -- chris bosh -- who is probably in the bottom of the top 10. so it's a superstar team, the nba has really not seen anything like it. it's a big risk tho because no one knows how they will co-exist, wade and lebron play pretty much the same position, and of course there is only one ball, and only one person can put it in the hoop. and also their team, becasue of the cap, will have 75% incredibly cheap and not great players filling out the roster.

but his old team wasn't very talented, and this new one is incredibly talented, but it's no sure thing

So is he leaving for more money, for a more successful team, what?

― ,,,,,,eeeeleon (darraghmac), Friday, July 9, 2010 6:13 AM (1 minute ago)

he's going to end up taking less money this way - it became sort of evident that he wouldn't win a championship with his former team, so he's in essence trying to win a championship. this team (miami heat) already had probably the second best shooting guard in the sport (dwyane wade) and also recently signed probably the best power forward in the game (chris bosh)

don't quite get this bit

― D, dilly, dillies, dill, d-bombs (history mayne), Friday, July 9, 2010 6:14 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

because we have drafts in our sports, obv amateur players can't choose where they play, so it's extremely rare that a top 3 or top 5 talent will be in the position to be taken by his hometown team (i.e. dwyane wade is from chicago, but got drafted by miami). the lebron situation resulted from his hometown team tanking the previous season, but lucking out and winning the draft lottery and getting the #1 pick and the ability to draft him, otherwise he would've just ended up somewhere else

this thread = the mirror image of the world cup thread

someone on fb linked the http://youropenbook.org/ results for 'lebron + (slur)', it was kind of eye-opening

the draft lottery

wait waht?

i couldn;t really answer much on football, but it's like a free market basically, i think. no lottery, just hell of kickbacks.

how i imagine it works:

ur a big deal player at college level
u get scouted
u get an agent
ur agent tries to sell you around the market for as much cashmoney as possible
repeat annually

well, this is only in the NBA ftr

they instituted a draft lottery like 20 years ago to help guard against teams purposefully tanking one season to get a draft position to draft the best player -- this hasn't always worked mind you, but it's there -- so how the lottery works is that all the teams that don't make the playoffs (16 teams iirc) get ping pong balls placed into a hopper, and then balls are pulled out, and that is the order of the draft -- but of course, the team with the worst record gets the most balls, and the team with the best record (to not make the playoffs) gets the least amount of balls, so there is still some benefit to being the worst, but the worst team still only has like a 25 percent shot of getting the #1 pick

Do his hometown team make any money off this deal?

Drafts seem p socialist btw, is the american right wing going mental?

like, the worst team in the league this past year actually ended up with the #3 pick

nah it's more like

-your team loses a lot
-your team gets a high draft # through the draft lottery
-you pick a good player or trade your pick for a currently good and established player

Do his hometown team make any money off this deal?

no not at all, they stand to lose an incredible amount of money in ticket sales, merchandise, endorsements etc

drafts sound crazeh

how it actually works:

ur a big deal player at college level
u get scouted
u get an agent
ur agent tries to sell you around to shoe companies and soft drink companies for as much cashmoney as possible
u get drafted by a shitty team against your will
u play for them

So he's going on a bosman (contract ran out in soccerball talk). Could they have sold him or does the nba only have drafts/trades?

if you're a good enough player you can refuse to play for the team you're drafted by and force a trade -- it happens once every few years in various sports

kobe bryant actually got drafted by charlotte but refused to play there and got traded to LA

the team could have done a sign-and-trade instead of just letting him walk xp

Could they have sold him or does the nba only have drafts/trades?

― fuque santa cruz (a hoy hoy), Friday, July 9, 2010 6:33 AM (42 seconds ago) Bookmark

ummm, you can sell/players picks, but since there is a salary cap, there's no real benefit to selling a player of great caliber because you can more than afford the amount of money that you are allowed to spend

yeah they could've traded him for other players, but you have no real leverage in this situation, with other teams

sell players/picks*

Poor Kobe. Guess there weren't enough hotel employees to abuse in Charlotte :(

So basically they get fucked over no matter what?

well in the nba, first round picks can leave after three years, and if you played well enough you can really cash in with a team of your choice

This is quite a big story over here - Radio 4 had a piece on it this morning!

The way they were phrasing it, LeBron has walked away from $30m but, now he's with Miami Heat, he's a far more marketable commodity and his off-court earnings will skyrocket. They were talking in terms of the first billionaire sportsman.

the benefit is that your contract is guaranteed, so even if you end up sucking you get to hang around for a few years and get paid mad dollars

being a rookie in the nfl on the other hand is pretty much indentured servitude

I was handed the keys to the kingdom, multi-million dollar deals, endorsements.

Everyone wanted a piece of my shit.

Just a man with a mind for victory and an arm like a fucking cannon.

But sometimes when you bring the thunder, you get lost in the storm.

The way they were phrasing it, LeBron has walked away from $30m but, now he's with Miami Heat, he's a far more marketable commodity and his off-court earnings will skyrocket. They were talking in terms of the first billionaire sportsman.

― Michael Jones, Friday, July 9, 2010 6:38 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

this isn't quite true -- he did walk from 30m, but he also walked from his best chance at being more marketable and being a billionaire, i.e. signing with new york

But for some reason I've always been trained to believe the knicks suck?

^good instincts

i guess a qn is, ok, it's a big deal, but *this* big a deal?

did shaquille o'neal or michael jordan (i'd guess the only two other players most brits could name) never get into this kind situation (ie leaving their team for another team)?

britishers can name magic johnson but more as a celebrity w/ aids than as a basketball..er.

xp shaq left orlando for LA but i don't remember it being as huge a deal as this, maybe because he was only 4 years into his career instead of 7. i dunno, i was pretty young at the time so i didn't really follow this type of sports news, i just watched the games.

shaq leaving was a big deal, it was kind of precedent setting in that franchise players of that era usually stuck with the teams that drafted them (david robinson, hakeem olajuwon, patrick ewing, jordan, stockton/malone). shaq just said "fuck orlando BYE" and went to the lakers who spent several years transitioning out of the abdul-jabbar/magic showtime laker days of the 80s. shaq and later kobe made them dominant again and ushered in a new model for franchise building through free agency.

(NB: many of those high-profile 90s players played a year or two elsewhere late in their careers when they were pretty much done as effective players, but they spent the bulk of their careers in one spot.)

The team Lebron left had the best regular season record in the NBA (or one of the best). They were a good team but the playoffs are a different story and the Cavaliers didn't have a strong enough playoff team to win.

did shaquille o'neal or michael jordan (i'd guess the only two other players most brits could name) never get into this kind situation (ie leaving their team for another team)?

― D, dilly, dillies, dill, d-bombs (history mayne), Friday, July 9, 2010 9:50 AM (6 hours ago)

neither player did anything exactly like this - shaq left the magic pretty quietly & signed with LA, where he won 3 championships with kobe. the big drama there was when shaq was traded a couple years later and everyone assumed kobe forced the team to trade him. jordan nevr did anything like this, except after his father died and he annouced he was going to try to become a professional baseball player (which he did briefly).

lebron, who is the best player in the world and plays in a city that loves him for a very good (but never champion) team, basically called a press conference/interview and announced to the world (dragged out over 25 MINUTES) that he was leaving his team and signing with miami

it's completely bizarre to me that britishers aren't familiar with drafts, like sam said you would figure it would be in the US that capitalism/free agency would be more prevalent

well... yeah. the uk is a very peculiar mix of free market capitalism and what looks to americans like state socialism. even after thatcher, the state was pretty large (actually, it was larger after she left), for example. but shit we pretty much invented capitalism. so from my limited knowledge, if you have billions of pounds [via being a russian oligarch], you can just buy the top players and dominate the league.

in theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notts_County_F.C.#Middle_East_investment

iirc soccer in europe is basically, you can just buy players like chattel or something?

im not an expert, but yeah, seems that way. not like any day of the week, but each year there is a 'transfer frenzy'. and it's an international free market (iirc a few north americans play in european clubs even; obviously some brazilians etc do). well, lol, i say free market, but one which involves nefarious practices (kickbacks). oh shit JUST LIKE THE FREE MARKET RIGHT?

I think the Shaq situation was pretty similar to LeBron's, really. a huge star who had lots of success but no titles with the team that he started out with left in free agency. Shaq didn't have an ESPN special, and Orlando fans aren't nearly as good at feeling aggrieved as Cleveland fans, but the main weird thing about LeBron's situation was that he was going to a team that already had an enormous star in his prime. The NBA only has a handful of alpha-dog stars to begin with, and having two on the same team plus another all-star is basically unheard of.

key dif is shaq isn't from orlando area

exactly

yeah. it just feels like sentimental bullshit. people have been setting themselves up for this for years.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

http://thegrandnarrative.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/right-on-the-nose.jpg

Wait so the college reserve league makes it on to telly? Y'all Americans need to get out more often.

― fuque santa cruz (a hoy hoy), Saturday, July 10, 2010 4:57 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

two reasons afaict: (i) the standard is not that much lower than it is in pro teams (ii) there is no concept of promotion or relegation in the pro sports (lol protectionism), which means there are not actually that many pro teams (outside of those pro teams own feeder leagues, which are nothing like championship, league 1, etc.) this is a huge country with a huge appetite for live/televised sport, and there is a shortage of pro teams. also i think a lot of people prefer college teams and the average college fan seems way more passionate (identify with the culture more, different more enjoyable style of play, etc.)

There seems to be a lot of Corinthian spirit stuff going on with love of College sports as well, if movies and TV are anything to go by.

sam, the difference b/w the most popular US college sports and the most popular UK university sport:

http://taylormadetirade.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/matthew-mcconaughey-hook-em-horns201217061.jpg

vs.

http://cache3.asset-cache.net/xc/85690665.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=77BFBA49EF8789215ABF3343C02EA548C12B4E7AEA6B4943513122098C7D4DA320DA16446450D0CFE30A760B0D811297

http://andrew1769.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/royal-henley-regatta-blazer-2.jpg

vs

http://forum.tayyar.org/members/faithful-albums-my-album-picture2023-tx-cheerleaders.jpg

If the two dudes on the left and right threw the guy with the boater 10 feet up in the air then caught him in the splits position, it wd be the most awesome sporting moment of all time.

didn't that happen in true blue?

Many americans openly talk about preferring to watch college basketball to the NBA!

fwiw those ppl are total morons imho

i've heard of the draft, but everything i know about it i learnt from jerry macguire, and i didn't realise that players didn't also move teams regularly during their career, which is what i'm getting from this thread. like i know michael johnson was at one team for most of his career, but i assumed that was an exception, like it is in football.

― caek, Saturday, July 10, 2010 3:36 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

The names here are ADORABLE

my friend is a huge basketball fan but pretty much refuses to watch the NBA because, in his opinion, the players are selfish, lazy, money/fame-obsessed jerks who are often uncoachable and only try if its the playoffs or their contract will expire at the end of the season and they need to impress other teams and "trick" them into giving them more $ than they're truly worth. Whereas college teams are filled with eager kids who give their all 100% of the time and are dominated by a tyrannical coach who makes sure even the most talented player knows the team comes before him as an individual. there's a bit of truth to it imo, but there's also a lot of stereotyping and racism there, too.

lol "michael johnson"

to answer a question above, baseball has a draft too, for US and canadian kids. it breaks down to maybe 50% college kids, 50% kids that just finished high school. it's maybe been trending towards more college kids lately.

it's the same idea as the NBA, the team with the worst record gets the first pick and so on. but with baseball it is so so hard to project who might be good 3-7 years down the road that it really turns into a crapshoot. a player like steven strasburg becomes once in a generation just because he could jump from college to the majors in a year and be nearly as good. that basically never happens, not with that short of a turnaround.

(no one watches college baseball btw. it's as hard to overstate how much no one cares about college baseball as it is to understate how much everyone loves college basketball and football)

also in baseball you can't be drafted out of college until your junior year, with a few exceptions

The baseball rule is that you can get drafted out of high school, but if you opt to go to college, then you are locked in for three years (meaning you can't be drafted again until you are either a junior or a redshirt sophomore). You can also opt to complete your stay in college if you want, but if there is $$$ waiting, most dudes seem to go that way.

Also yeah college baseball is stupendously unpopular (it is probably below college hockey, and maaaaybe even women's college basketball in terms of media/fan interest), but I will say I went to the College World Series on a whim a couple of weeks ago and it is a totally awesome thing to do. I kinda have a little crush on Omaha, Nebraska right now because I had so much fun.

Oh and also if you are Dominican or from elsewhere in Latin America, you can't be signed until you are 16 years old. Because there were issues with teams signing kids younger than that.

18y/o? I thought it was a college system? Was Lebron too stupid to go to university?

He was accepted to college but never had any intention of going.

this is honestly fascinating to me - i had no idea that drafts and stuff were so unique to america!

...refuses to watch the NBA because, in his opinion...

Much of what he says is uninformed crap. All of it is true if you selectively apply it to some players and not others, but that is like saying "white people all look and act like sitcom characters".

BTW, I'm very surprised the shitty NBA officiating didn't make that list. It is a very legitimate beef against the NBA and makes them look very, very bad. All you have to do is read what the ref who was fired for gambling on games said on the subject. It all rings true as a bell.

i just assume people who don't like nba basketball don't like things such as "skill," "athleticism," and "talent"

he does but he needs those things to be subsumed into a team-focused "system". I do wish there was more teamwork in the NBA (it's a joy to watch the Jazz run that offense, for instance, and they're pretty much unique in the league right now), but NBA haters wayyy overstate and overapply their criticisms. and the ones I've encountered seem to get off on giving a big middle finger to rich, successful, physically-gifted young black men.

well because of the nature of the game these days, inefficient volume scorers aren't really valued nor are they widespread--how many players can really be regarded as "selfish" these days. i mean yeah there's still a lot of isos and stuff but a lot of drive-and-kick and sharing the ball too.

yeah pretty sure he's still judging things based on the steve francis/marbury era

anyway the main thing college basketball has going for it is an awesome championship tournament. 65ish teams, single-elimination. it's so popular that 50yr old women who couldn't tell you how many people are on each team will join the office pool betting on it.

yup--it's pretty safe to ignore it the rest of the time

what a fascinating lil thread

can i just say by the way--i cant speak for americans who get all weird and jingoistic about the name "the world series"--but its just called the world series cause its always been called the world series and it is a funny and idiosyncratic little thing and most baseball fans are aware of the irony so shut up europe

NFL and NBA winners are called "world champions" tho too

http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/ckBxm8h4eJp/Cleveland+Cavaliers+v+Boston+Celtics

2 b fair, nba is premier basketball liga in da world, and no one outside of america gives a fukk about what the nfl does

and i thought that my grandpa was the best in the world--tho no one outside of my family gived a fuck about what he did--but still, that "world's #1 grandpa" shirt i gave him rang a bit hollow. i think we both knew that.

yeah but this if more like if he had to beat other american grandpas in a long tournament and then when he won the cover of every newspaper in the country said "GRANNY'S GRANPA IS THE GRANDPA CHAMPION OF THE WORLD" and he got a parade

I mean I guess world series champions get a t-shirt too

everyone knows american grandpas are the cream of the world's crop

my friend's grandpa just couldn't cut it here and had to spend a few years in Turkey developing his "got your nose" skills. pretty sad.

lol

another example to make this simpler for british people: in grandpa terms the miami heat are now what you would get if abe simpson, frank costanza and peter boyle's character in everybody loves raymond teamed up to talk about what they think about twitter

high-level lol

[no1 in england watches ELR]

I saw it once (on an aeroplane) and was so viscerally disgusted I couldn't actually speak

actually

god, my writing

i think more people watch elr than watched seinfeld tbh

i guess. when is it even on, except like 9am? (iirc) n e ways, no-one watched/watches either of them.

i dunno if it's been mentioned in this thread for the folks outside of the USA but part of the reason you see people so upset over this is because no Cleveland sports team has won a championship in 4+ decades. LeBron was the first superstar athlete of this degree in Cleveland in a long long time (maybe ever? i can't remember who the last one would have been)

Can I just... College World Series roffles.

yeah lol everybody loves raymond. i saw it once, the joke seemed to be he has an annoying family which iirc, no sitcom has ever made fun of before. surprising really, you think it would be a furtile area for hilarity.

kind of a sidebar, but what's the deal with betty white?

thats the internets fault

she's old and filthy

She has a great jump shot.

so whatever happened to this guy? has he become lebron air james yet?

this thread is adorable - prob what i would look like if i tried to understand soccer

sam the team struggled out of the gate, lots of questions about team chemistry etc, but they've won 5 in a row now and seem to be hitting their stride. last week the heat (lebron's new team) played the cavs (old team) and lebron scored 38 points (a lot of points) & won - sort of like a "turning point" in all this

occasionally he becomes lebron airball james

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ABZR7R9lbw

should be noted that they've been playing soft opponents of late