Kendrick Perkins' LeBron James Twitter Comments: Why Perkins Is out of Line
Blake Griffin's dunk over Kendrick Perkins' back on Jan. 30 will not soon be forgotten. It was a dunk both violent and beautiful, and it's a dunk that only Griffin could make.
When it happened, the dunk blew up Twitter. Everyone had something to say about it, but one tweet in particular stood out from all the rest.
It came, of course, from LeBron James:
Since it was LeBron who said it, this tweet naturally became a big deal. SportsCenter couldn't air the Griffin dunk without airing LeBron's tweet, and it got plenty of buzz around the internet as well.
On Tuesday, Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports finally got around to asking Perkins about the tweet, and he wasn't too happy about it:
"“You don’t see Kobe [Bryant] tweeting,” Perkins said. “You don’t see Michael Jordan tweeting. If you’re an elite player, plays like that don’t excite you. At the end of the day, the guys who are playing for the right reasons who are trying to win championships are not worrying about one play.
“They also are not tweeting about themselves talking about going down to No. 2. I just feel [James] is always looking for attention and he wants the world to like him.”
"
If nothing else, Perkins gets top marks for honesty. Beyond that, very little of what he had to say was particularly fair to King James.
In a nutshell, what Perkins is saying is that LeBron is not allowed to be a fan of the game of basketball. He's not allowed to get excited when he sees an exciting play, and he's sure as hell not supposed to flock to Twitter to rave about it.
Apparently, LeBron's tweeting is that much worse because he's an elite player. The gospel according to Perkins is that elite players should be seen, but not heard.
In the immortal words of the Joker, why so serious, Perk?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with King James being a fan in addition to being a player. If he wants to sit down and watch a game, he's more than welcome. If he wants to tweet about an exciting play, hey, this is the 21st century and that's what people do. There's no rule that says he can't.
As for this nonsense about how LeBron should be chasing championships, that seems to be exactly what LeBron is doing this season. He's having a spectacular year, and his Miami Heat currently have the second-best record in the Eastern Conference. We'll see what happens once the Heat reach the postseason, but Perkins and everyone else better believe that the Heat are a championship-caliber team.
If there is one thing I agree with Perkins on, it's that LeBron shouldn't have joked about his dunk over John Lucas III taking a back seat to Griffin's dunk over Perkins. He probably meant to give props to Griffin, but instead it came off as LeBron making a rare gracious gesture that he is not, in fact, the best thing to ever happen to the NBA.
Does Perkins have a point about LeBron only wanting people to like him? Yes, he does.
Is that such a bad thing? No, it's not.
Listen—LeBron's not an idiot. He knows that he's arguably the biggest villain in American sports, and he told USA Today before the start of the season that he doesn't want to be a villain anymore. If he thinks joining in on the fun on Twitter is a good way to endear himself to his haters, so be it.
Personally, I don't think LeBron had it in mind to win people over by raving about Griffin's dunk. He got excited, tweeted about it, and that was that. We don't need to assume that he took to Twitter with an agenda in mind.
Maybe he was just in the moment, as we all were at the time.
That doesn't make him a villain. It doesn't make him unprofessional, either. It just makes him human.
