If LeBron puts up even 15 points total instead of being a shrinking violet then stopping Dallas is a non-issue. That's what people are grumbling about. If you're going to orchestrate a giant media circus for most of a summer and then throw a party like you just won a championship BEFORE YOU'VE PLAYED A FUCKING GAME then, I'm sorry, you get called out when you back down for most of one of the biggest games of your career.
Maybe the biggest part of being The Man - which The Decision clearly and adamantly showed us LeBron wants to be, at least in the best of times - is demanding to do the tough work in the most challenging moments and making people eat their doubting words. That's what made Michael Jordan into Michael Jordan. Is he maladjusted and listless in his post-hoops career? Damn right. But nobody made him cash those checks or pursue a living in a hyper-competitive field where he was the best ever. For eight years LBJ has traded and basically printed money based on potential and the sporting public's belief that "one day" he'd figure it out and couple his athleticism with a winner's drive to arrive at somewhere truly great and do things we've never or rarely seen on a basketball court.
What we're finding out is that he might not have that drive in him, and that's disappointing because when we're watching an especially gifted performer (which is what athletes are - entertainers) we want to see them get the absolute most out of their abilities. If he can't do that because he occasionally gets lost in the spotlight, no one's losing a limb over it. But that also means he doesn't get to act like the NBA's BMOC for much longer either.

Simmons' career turn as Lebron's biggest hater is 100% rooted in being a Celtics fan: He roots for a team that, along with the Lakers, has benefited from every backroom deal and incident of double dealing imaginable and now, when some players make a decision about where they want to go instead of some old plantation boss like Red Auerbach, it's a Big Fucking Problem.

From day to day this line of thinking trades places with the meme that there is no longer good music being released as the most annoying thing in the universe.

Saw some celeb tweet something about there being no great album since 2003 and I got cannedhamhead. Instant anger.

Everything looks fine now. Is it just that wade is a ball-killer?

len bias, reggie lewis, tim duncan, etc

you're obscenely angry at ridiculous shit.

I'll watch VH1's "I Love the '90s" at my parents' house with time to kill. I'm not reading it.

&, just think, the Celtics might have drafted Hank Gathers, too!

That funny.

I live 400 miles away from Boston, and I can smell the post-7-Layer Burrito shit stench of fairweatherfanism from here.
Robert Zimmerman said it best: YOU JUST WANT TO BE ON THE SIDE THAT'S WINNING.

Possibly my weakness for oral histories at play, but I found the OH on The National to be totally tubular.

No surprise that Frank Deford is a badass and Mike Lupica a fucking asshole.

100%. i was hooked by that oral history on the the national.

and now i have the espn book sitting on my coffee table, so i'll probably get to that this weekend sometime too.

That National story led me to Deford's "The Toughest Coach There Ever Was" - 16 pages long on SI.com. Sweet fancy Christ. The whole time I'm reading it I'm processing his gathering process for a story like that and it's amazing how he extracted so many revealing glimpses and anecdotes about someone who (SPOILER ALERT) at that point had been dead for 15 years.

Makes me want to do a deep dive into his canon one of these days. I've never been much a student of sports writing, just a casual consumer like most.

So far, the best thing about Grantland is Klosterman writing more sports stuff. I've always liked him, but his music and pop culture pieces can definitely skew a little elitist and annoying. The two pieces on Grantland are great, though. I loved them both.

I enjoyed this:

the judges would have also accepted "fuhrer-lipped"

i like that he's finally put those stupid footnotes on the side of his page instead of down at the bottom.

Either way, they're a gimmick. His editor would strangle him if he wasn't too busy fucking a bag of money.

I wonder how much the Subway deal is worth. That shit annoying, too.

i thought the piece on Treme today was really good.

haven't read it yet, but the title of said piece seems to reveal a most fatally-flawed thesis

I can't even read that Jeter piece but the premise (and my reaction to it) reminds me of several years ago when our buddy Devo told me he wanted to do a sports talk show that was all fake news (i guess like the Onion maybe?)

Scocca's job at Deadspin BTW seems to be to write hit pieces on stuff written for Grantland.

I fucked up somewhere because I can't believe that's a job.

I visit Grantland but the headlines and captions never tempt to read any of it.

The writing on the stuff that's good is GOOD.

Overall we're in A range, but the little things are driving me nuts.

For me, the site as a whole has been on point. The defense of Michael Bay recently was awesome. Other articles of note: Bob Bradley and the Gold Cup, the blog post about the Copa America preview, the 12,000+ word liveblog of a 8 hour cricket match, the article yesterday on the unlikeability of Treme (while I don't agree totally, it does touch on some things that bother me about the show).

I also read recently that the site is already profitable - over $10 million in ad revenue.