falcolombardi wrote:just to be clear when you criticize the players for influence in the front Office
are you criticizing any involvement by players making demands of the team or just the ones who are wrong in what to demand?
cause caruso criticism would be about NOT making demands of the front Office (as it was a tax move clearly decided by the ownership) and the westbrook criticism would be about the opposite (making the front Office DO somethingh)
in that case wouldnt you have to Blame the stars for every bad move their team makes (cause they could have stopped it) ans credit them for every good one too (cause they asked for it or allowed it)?
to put an example, if pj tucker loss affects the bucks should giannis be at fault for not pressuring the front Office into paying the tax for him, just like lebron didnt pressure the lakers into paying the tax for caruso?
if not trading simmons earlier ruins the sixers championship windows, should de Blame embiid instead of morey for not forcing sixers to trade him ?
So I'll lead with two things that are significant to me:
1. Once you start looking to move from team to team, you don't get to complain about your supporting cast because you chose it.
2. Once you start really, really twisting the arms of your franchise in undeniably political ways, then any time you don't use those techniques this is effectively your sealed approval for all that happens afterward.
Now, I have LeBron at the top of my GOAT list so I shouldn't give the impression that I'm absurdly harsh here, but yeah, to me he's long since transgressed these traditional boundaries.
On Giannis: If Giannis were behaving like this at all, he'd have gotten the hell off the Bucks before he won that title last year. The GM deserved to lose him, as did his coaches. To me he's about as clean of a modern superstar you'll find in terms of just being a player.
On "blame Embiid for not forcing the trade of Simmons". So this one's interesting because it's in an entirely different category. Here you're not talking about a superstar advocating for the keeping of a vital player, but the trading of a potential rival who is adding value to your team while you yourself are still learning the game. My immediate thought there is that that would be a red flag and something I'd seriously consider trading Embiid away if he did that.
Historically, this is more likely to happen with players demanding coaches being fired, and I feel similarly about that.
Of course the key trump card that can make me change my mind is if I think that the player was right and wasn't just lucky. The example there I always point to is Magic Johnson with his "I am the offense!" rant against Westhead. The truth is, not only was Magic right there, but the modern heliocentric approach to offense essentially begins with Magic right then and there. So while Magic perhaps could have handled the situation better, him in the end being correct makes it hard for me to look at what he did in a negative light - and in fact tends to make me see his behavior as a positive.
Of course you can certainly argue that Embiid would have been just as right to demand Simmons get removed years earlier, but this is where that "lucky" part comes in to me. I don't see any reason to think of young Embiid being smarter at basketball strategy than everyone else in the 76ers organization, so to me Embiid behaving in this way really would have come across as someone who just doesn't get along with others well.
Back to LeBron: I think the reality with him is that he planted his "I am smarter than everyone else about basketball" flag years ago. He was still coy about it during the Miami years, but in his struggle with Blatt back in Cleveland, he might clear that he basically saw everyone "above" him as just his helpers. And to be clear, I don't knock him for doing this, it's just that once he did this, it shifted my perspective of what had to be included under the umbrella of LeBron's impact.
As I say that though, I did kind of give him a fresh start on that front when he went to the Lakers and signed a long contract. But his behavior after that made clear he was by no means just content to play with whoever the Lakers put next to him. There was massive turnover in play before the Lakers won that championship, and it's not so much that I blame LeBron for that as it is that I credit him with that.
Nevertheless, I've been pretty firmly viewing LeBron's performance in LA since that time as someone who was not just a player.
Of course, new facts can come to light. Maybe the Lakers' moves this off-season blindsided LeBron. Or maybe they were literally the opposite of what LeBron said they should do. I don't claim absolute certainty into how these things transpired. It is however part of my philosophy of knowledge building to make the best estimations of things I can at any given time while knowing not all is certain, and with the goal of identifying any wrong assumptions I make and re-examining the facts when this occurs.
I'd be very, very surprised if LeBron didn't know what decisions the Lakers had to make this last off-season, didn't have opinions about those decisions, or wasn't solicited to see how he felt about the options. The Lakers FO has been a dysfunctional place for a long time but not because they didn't listen to their stars enough.
