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Lately, he’s been the underdog and the finals’ outcome has been predictable.
That doesn’t seem like the best thing for a championship series, though James representing the East is a better finals option for the NBA than a Kyrie Irving-less Celtics squad or the uninspiring Raptors.
James provides the star power to drive TV ratings. So the NBA hasn’t needed the best teams in the finals; it has had the best player.
”The real answer is it’s better to have both,” said Scott Rosner, the academic director of the sports management program at Columbia University. ”The NBA, if you step back from it, has been very much on an upward trend, you can argue more than any of the other big four sports leagues. There’s a lot of different reasons for that, but clearly it’s a star-driven league.”
For eight years running James has provided the glimmer of hope that the JV against the varsity really can be competitive. He can almost single-handedly create compelling basketball. Still, he’s on the verge of losing in the NBA Finals without winning more than a game for the fourth time. Nonetheless, fans are still watching in huge numbers.
It’s been a nice run, but the NBA probably needs to think about getting the best teams in the finals when James isn’t.
He could leave Cleveland as a free agent this summer, maybe even head West. And once he’s done slipping on his Eastern Conference champion hat every spring, the problem that’s been concealed by his immense talent comes into full view.
The Larry O’Brien Trophy won’t be awarded before Friday night in Cleveland, or maybe sometime next week back in California. But the NBA championship was essentially decided on Memorial Day in Houston, when the Warriors rallied to take Game 7 from a Rockets team that was the only one with a realistic chance to beat them, and would likely be beating Cleveland now.
”To me Billy Price Bengals Jersey , Houston wasn’t just one half away from advancing to the finals. They were one half away from winning a championship,” ABC analyst Jeff Van Gundy said.
That’s why Van Gundy advocates a playoff format where the top 16 teams were seeded by their records. That would allow any two teams to meet in the final round, rather than the current system that mandates East against West.
”Listen, I’m for the best teams meeting in the finals,” Van Gundy said. ”I’d be fine if they played the conferences for travel purposes through the year to minimize how many times you’d have to go cross-country. But I’ve always been for the top 16 records should be in the playoffs, and I would be absolutely fine if you then seeded 1 through 16, regardless of what conference you played in during the regular season.”
Commissioner Adam Silver continues to say concerns about too much travel make that change impossible for now. James has said he prefers the traditional East-West format, and it’s hard to blame him since it’s helped provide him such a smooth path to the finals. Even in a season like this, when he doesn’t have the strongest of teams around him – and one of the worst in the league defensively – he can carry them through seven-game series in the East.
Silver said he looked it up and found that James has had 59 different teammates during his run, so it’s not as if his teams need continuity and cohesiveness. All it’s taken to play for the title the last eight years is James.
”My point before, if you have LeBron James playing with 59 different players over eight years, it means that presumably the team LeBron is on is going to be a dominant team,” Silver said. ”Whether they get to the finals every year is a separate issue.”
They almost certainly wouldn’t have won more than one round this season, where as the sixth-winningest team in the league they would have been slotted to meet the third-seeded Warriors in round two in a 1-16 format.
That could create must-see matchups in every round of the nearly two-month march to the championship, but it comes with risk to the league.
Having James home in mid-May would be disastrous from a business standpoint. His mesmerizing performances against the Celtics, when he played all 48 minutes in a Game 7 victory in Boston, catapulted ESPN to the most-watched Eastern Conference finals since 2012. And questions about his future dominate the sports headlines as long as the Cavs are playing.
If the East loses its most imposing player and most important personality Denzel Ward Browns Jersey , the league and its marketing partners would be left to sell an NBA Finals matchup lacking its marquee product.
”It is certainly a situation where all things being equal you’d rather have your best teams with your best players in it, your superstar players in it,” Rosner said. ”That said, given your druthers would really prefer to have a competitive series.”
There are only a handful of teams considered legitimate championship contenders. The number could grow even smaller this summer after James makes his future plans.
”Can our system be improved upon?” Silver said. ”I think it can. I think it’s something we’re constantly looking at.”
Better hurry. James won’t be around forever.
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The football field was Tony Sparano’s element, just like the coaching peers he left behind.
Walking in the freshly cut, bright green grass on Wednesday while directing the Minnesota Vikings through their first practice of training camp was, naturally, the best place for Mike Zimmer to be.
”It takes a little bit of the sting away,” Zimmer said, pausing to recover from a crack in his voice, ”of losing a great friend, a great coach, a good man.”
The Vikings and the rest of the NFL were stunned on Sunday when Sparano, their tough-loving offensive line coach, died suddenly at age 56 of heart disease .
”It’ll be a hard few days, but we’ll get through it and we’ll get back to work and do the things that we do,” Zimmer said Cheap Rashaan Evans Jersey , ”and that’s what he’d want us to do.”
After two days of workouts for rookies and others selected for early duty either due to relative inexperience or a recent injury, the Vikings will take a break Friday to attend Sparano’s funeral in the Twin Cities area. Then the entire team will convene for the first full practice on Saturday.
”The most important thing is when you’re a family, the family is what helps you get through it,” said general manager Rick Spielman, who like Zimmer had to stop for composure several times during an interview session with reporters.
As evidenced by and during the run last season to the NFC championship game, the Vikings from the top down have forged an environment as tightly knit as any point in their history. This is an organization that has seen plenty of dysfunction over 57 years. The solidarity comes in handy at a tragic time like the unexpected loss of life, but it can also intensify the grief.
”We had quite a relationship,” said Zimmer, who was on the same staff as Sparano for the last four of his 13 seasons with the Dallas Cowboys. ”His wife, Jeanette, I told her the other day, she reminds me a lot of my wife. She’s the sweetest lady.”
Zimmer’s wife, Vikki, passed away in 2009. His father, Bill, died in 2015. So he’s had unfortunate experience in straddling the fine line between proper mourning and pressing on. What’s clear to the Vikings, at least Cheap Isaiah Oliver Jersey , is that Sparano would pick the latter.
”If Tony knew we were having this talk about him, I could just hear him in his very endearing way what his opinion on this would be,” Spielman said.
With darkened sunglasses he wore since a teenage accident with hot oil from a deep fryer while working at a restaurant, Sparano had an intimidating presence. A significant portion of the screaming audible during a typical Vikings practice came from Sparano, who as a fellow understudy of former Cowboys head coach and Pro Football Hall of Fame member Bill Parcells came from the same hard-nosed mold as Zimmer.
”He was a lot like me, probably the only person in the building who was grumpier than I was,” Zimmer said. ”But he really cared about his players. I’ve sat in with him in offensive line rooms a lot, and he had a way of poking the stick at the guys and then putting his arms around him.”
Sparano’s daughter was married in Texas just 2 weeks ago. He told Zimmer last month he felt his health was the best it’d been. Since Zimmer hired Sparano in 2016 to help instill a tougher mentality in the offensive linemen, the two early-to-arrive-and-late-to-leave coaches spoke often, and not just about football. As a former NFL head coach, Sparano served as a sounding board for Zimmer, as was their shared mentor, Parcells, the source of many of Sparano’s customary colloquialisms.
”Instead of saying, `It’s one or the other,”’ Zimmer recalled, ”he’d say Jimmy Garoppolo Jersey , `It’s a horse apiece.”’
That could’ve been applied, for example, to an assessment of a couple of potential draftees. Spielman fondly remembered Sparano’s thoroughness, taking the time to study video of a tackle prospect when he played guard in a years-old game.
”I’ve never been around a coach who put in so much time and energy into everything he did,” Spielman said.
There was a soft side to Sparano, too, when it came to his family, whether immediate or football. Zimmer smiled as he recounted playing in Spielman’s charity golf tournament on the course where Sparano’s house was, not far from the team’s old headquarters.
”We get to whatever hole he was on, and he’d have a big cooler out there with beer and wine,” Zimmer said. ”He gave me a bottle of wine so we could play the rest of the course. That’s Tony. He was a genuine person who cared an awful lot about a lot of people.”
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