lebron.

do you think it upsets lebron that he's 50 times better than everyone else on the court? how can anyone even QUESTION if he's the best player in the game? lebron is really the ultimate combination of dominant scorer, passer, and now, defender. when he works an isolation he's like ladanian tomlinson. as a passer he's chris paul's equal. he plays defense like bryan dawkins or ed reed, just trolling around disrupting everything. its absolutely ridiculous.

i was the biggest michael jordan homer anyone's ever seen. so much so that my dad actually used to antagonize me when jordan would have a bad game (probably to teach me not to hero worship so much) and i would actually start CRYING. and i wasn't even that young. and i'm STILL going to go ahead and say it. lebron makes teams better than jordan ever did in his prime, and lebron would leave jordan for dead one-on-one. there's only a few things that jordan's got over lebron at this point.

1) jordan had the greatest killer instinct i've ever seen. it's not even the whole "game winning shot" thing - in the 4th quarter, jordan would just take games over. and not even games in the playoffs - mid season garbage games. you got the sense that he would cheat to win, if he had to. i've never seen anyone in any sport be that level of cold-blooded killer. the only one even close? kobe.

but lebron is getting there. i just saw him get upset that rip hamilton hit him in the face while he was going up for a rebound. he takes the ball down court, backs into a corner to lure hamilton to him, then blows by him and 3 other pistons, takes it to the hole, draws contact, hits the layup plus the foul, then stares hamilton down, giving him a "don't take me on" look. you got the sense that until he went to the olympics and hung out with kobe (who's so one-dimensionally obsessed with winning that it's almost counterproductive, much like jordan early in his career) he cared more about being a 'global icon' and being funny in commercials than about beating the Celtics. Not anymore.

2) i guess this is sort of related - you never thought jordan would miss the last second shot, and he almost never did. of course, that made him valuable at the very end of the game, but it also affected other teams as the game was winding down - they always had it in the back of their head that they had to put the game out of reach. lebron just isn't as good a shooter as jordan was, and that hurts his "end of the game" rep (as I just watched him blow by all 5 pistons, lay it in, and look bored.) BUT. he almost doesn't need to be as good a shooter because a) he gets to the hole virtually whenever he wants, and b) its insane how good a passer he is, and how good court vision he has. if the rest of the cavs could shoot, he's have 20 assists per game. Still, jordan's pull-up jumper was basically a dagger, because it was completely unguardable, and you knew that he would make it virtually whenever he wanted to. lebron isn't quite there yet.

still, as a composite athlete, he's in a different stratosphere from the rest of the world. he may have actually evolved into an entirely separate species. its nothing less than a joy to watch, and i say this even as red sox manager terry francona is stubbornly sticking with hideki okajima as his setup guy even though he's done, and i have to watch him give up 4 baserunner while inducing an amazing 0 outs in the 7th inning of a close game against the hated yankees. time to give okajima the old yeller treatment, tito. fuck.