IG2 wrote:As a Mavs fan, it's very hard for mystic to live with the fact that the ONLY reason his team won the championship was because of a bizarre mental breakdown by the opposition's top player, to the point where he basically stopped trying on offense for much of the series.
First of all, I'm not a Mavericks fan. Second, the difference in terms of scoring efficiency between 2011 finals and 2012 finals leads to 0.5 ppg difference for James; that is hardly the explanation for the loss at all.
And I encourage everyone to watch the finals of 2011 again and take a close look at two things. 1st, look how the Mavericks player's went after everyone receiving the inbound pass except James. Look how Barea/Terry/Stevenson/etc. chasing either Chalmers, Bibby, Wade, etc. pp. in the Heat half after they have received the inbound pass when James is on the court as well. They are doing that basically in all possessions. In game 6 JVG even specifally asked what Terry is doing when he was harrassing Wade only to go back on defense quickly when James received the ball to carry that over to the Mavericks half. Whenever James had the ball, the Mavericks went back into their own half and positioned themselves in a specific fashion, so that James had to face a defender with multiple help defenders backing him up. In that way, the Mavericks encouraged James to pass the ball to another perimeter player to iniate the play. That forced James to work off the ball, one of his weaknesses.
At that point, the 2nd important part of the defense was iniated, which was there to make sure that the passing angle to James was always defended well in order to ensure that James doesn't get the ball back. That was especially effective when the Mavs switched to their matchup zone defense. That either forced James to stand right next to the ball handler to receive the ball, with the distinct danger of getting double teamed right away, or go away and stand around on the perimeter. That left two main options for the Heat, either get the ball to Bosh in the midpost or lowpost area, while Bosh didn't have much space then, or let Wade try to get a position to attack the basket. One possibility the Mavericks constantly tried to deny was letting James have the ball in either spot. Watch them fight for such position in many possessions and basically defending the ball handler rather loosely.
Those were the two major aspects which forced James into the positions he was on the court and without the ball in his hand. That was much more important to his overall performance than any kind of mental breakdown the media and some people wanted to create. It is one of the most absurd things people are believing that a player of that caliber can't perform anymore, because he has a mental breakdown of some sort, while it has nothing to do with the defense of the opponents.
IG2 wrote:By crediting Dallas' genius defense, of course, which put Wade in favorable "positions" to score while completely neutralizing LeBron's pet spots.
Well, watch the game, because that's what happened.
IG2 wrote:He also, for some reason, has this belief that Wade and LeBron cannot be successful at the same time (never mind the fact that they WERE all damn season prior to the finals), that it has to be one or the other.
Well, there is just one ball and usually just one guy can shoot the ball. Wade and James also had to share with the ball with Bosh, a pretty decent player as well. Usually the amount of shots taken between those 3 players is constant (which should be easy to understand). That was also the case in the Mavericks series, in which Wade got more shots than James. Now, you may believe a two time MVP and multiple 1st team player just mentally broke down, or there were other forces at work. Given the fact that the Mavericks defense was also able to limit other star players (like Durant and Westbrook, or Bryant and Gasol), it makes very little sense to think it had no influence, especially when you watched the games and kept an eye on what they actually did.
But yeah, keep believing you are a good psychologist who can judge the state of mind of people by watching them playing basketball. Sounds very logical to me, instead of actually looking at the way the defensive team is approaching he game, we should rather make weird assumption about the mental state of the player, because we all can really judge that by sitting on a sofa at home. Incredible that some people are really that much overconfident that they actually really believe they have such an ability. Where a real psychologist would say that he would need to make a private interview with a person to actually evaluate possible mental issues, some fans without any kind of background knowledge think they are able to do that by watching a game of basketball.
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