Welcome back to Basketball&Feelings where I’m reporting to you now from Los Angeles! What a strange trip it’s been for the Miami Heat and the Denver Nuggets to get to the 2023 NBA Finals, as strange as it has been for moi these first few days in Los Angeles after 9 monumental months in New Orleans. For a coastal brat like me who has never spent an extended period of time outside of either Los Angeles or New York, coming back to Los Angeles now feels like getting shot through a canon. The coffee shop I’ve been going to is buzzing with activity and I can barely focus on writing fiction because I’m being swallowed up in the electricity of people’s master plans. Let’s talk some bball shall we ? This week, one of the many things I’ve been pondering, with Lebron’s former team the Miami Heat now in the finals, is what the hell would’ve happened had Lebron just stayed in Miami.
Pat Riley has this phenomenal quote I heard the other day about guts.
"This stuff is hard,” he says, “and you got to stay together if you've got the guts. And you don't find the first door and run out of it...I didn't come down here 19 years ago for a quick trip to South Beach, and get a suntan."
He was talking about the Miami Heat when Lebron was still on the team of course.
Not to rehash the whole thing, but the basic gist is that Lebron left the Heat after he looked around and realized that they were old, gray, and not going anywhere. That they had just lost in the Finals to the San Antonio Spurs probably didn’t sit well with him either, and for someone as consistently successful as him, how could it? Losing sucks, and I would imagine there was a token of humiliation there, especially to someone like Lebron who must despise losing as much as I despise Dodge Ram commercials during NBA games. Okay, full disclosure, that one with the country song is kinda great. “I’ve got a heart — like a truck!”
Famously, Lebron left Miami and went back to Cleveland, crafting a sappy narrative about his return to Cleveland that only a PR master like Lebron could create. But what if he had worked through the hard feelings and stayed in Miami to retool? What if he had given Pat Riley time to recalibrate the team he was already on, bring in new players, what if he had allowed the cycle of sports, winning and losing, to simply play out its natural course.
You know, winning, and then losing, and then maybe winning again maybe?
Everybody wants to win 💯 percent of the time, even me, but show me an athlete afraid to lose and I’ll show you one who doesn’t win.
Lebron is a winner of course, it’s hard to argue with 4 rings, but it’s fascinating to think about the potential championships he may have won had he stayed in Miami longer. Instead he escaped to Cleveland, and then to Los Angeles 🌟 where he won some, 2 chips to be exact. Two championships in 9 years is more than what a lot of NBA players can say they accomplished, but Lebron is not a normal NBA player — he is Lebron fucking James, and I can’t help but think he left at a championship or two on the table, at least, out of his fear of losing.
There’s a lot of other people who fear losing too. In places like New York or Los Angeles especially. It’s understandable, these are the places that put the most stock in winning.
We puff out our chests and put on the masks when we’re in these places, but this summer I’m going to try and go in the opposite direction. I’m going to walk into a restaurant and not try to act like I’m special.
Few of us have Lebron’s natural talent or IQ, but maybe I can do what Lebron had a hard time doing in 2014 when he left the Miami Heat. Maybe I can stare fear in the eye and let it wash through me, maybe even win an extra championship or two because I do. Or maybe winning all of the time is the only way to make life worth it.
Time will tell.