LeBron James Choosing The Miami Heat: The Right Choice for Him and the NBA

For LeBron James, the summer of 2010 was supposed to be a coronation.  Instead, a career choice became a character-defining moment, and in the eyes of most, he came up short.

The “Decision” became a symbol for everything wrong with sports and basketball in general.  He didn't challenge Dwyane Wade; he joined him.  

Worst of all, he committed the most grievous sin an NBA player can do, he challenged the legacy of Michael Jordan.

Jordan's story is the founding myth of the modern NBA.

The young hero proves the non-believers (the coach who cut him in high school, the team who passed him in the draft) wrong, becoming the best player in the world.  But before he can reach the ultimate goal (the NBA title), he has to defeat a ruthless challenger (the Bad Boy Pistons).  

He doesn’t succeed until a wise older figure (Phil Jackson) teaches him to control his talent and trust his teammates (the Triangle offense).  Unseen forces drag him away at the height of of his powers (his first retirement), but he returns humbled after a period of self-reflection (his basketball excursion) to vanquish his challengers once more (the second three-peat).

But as Spike Lee tells the audience in this Air Jordan commercial, the story doesn’t end there.  The chosen one will one day return.  

Jordan’s departure coincided with a dramatic decline in public interest in the sport, and the basketball community has spent the last fifteen years desperately searching for signs of his “return.”

Various contenders—Harold Minor, Grant Hill, Penny Hardaway, Allen Iverson, Dwayne Wade—were bandied about and dismissed.  

Kobe, with a similar frame and an eerily similar game, was the obvious choice.  But he seemed too calculating and almost too eager to please, never able to match Jordan’s charisma while marred by a running feud with Shaq and a criminal charge in Denver.  His first three championships, where he played off of a dominant center, were seen as tainted, and not as worthy as Jordan’s, whose best center was Bill Cartwright.

Enter LeBron, the self-proclaimed Chosen One.  A young man whose long-suffering hometown team won a lottery for the right to select him and redeem fifty years of sports misery

His first few playoff defeats were shrugged off; after all even Jordan needed seven years to win a championship.  But the last two years, with the Cavaliers putting a championship-caliber team around him, were supposed to be different.  

This summer, LeBron had several different avenues to pursue Jordan’s legacy in free agency.  When he signed with the Heat, he wasn’t just choosing with Miami, he was turning his back on a search that had consumed basketball for a generation.

A Heat title won’t just be his alone, it will be “shared” with Wade.   LeBron might have been able to match Jordan’s titles in New York or Chicago or Cleveland, but now we will never know.

That’s where the overwhelming anger (outside of Cleveland) comes from.  It’s the sad anger of Obi-Wan Kenobi yelling at the charred corpse of what would become Darth Vader in Star Wars Episode III: “you were supposed to be the chosen one, to destroy the Sith, not become one.”

Yet this quest to find the “next Jordan,” for every basketball star to maximize their individual gifts, is an inherently selfish one.  Maybe LeBron did not want to spend his entire career consumed  by someone else’s shadow.  Maybe he just wanted to win a lot of basketball games in the next few years.

“The Decision” was a subjugation of individual talent for the good of a team; all three (Bosh, Wade and LeBron) even took less money to play there.  How did these become bad things?

The Jordan myth, while great for Jordan, was never great for the game.  It broke up many young duos—from Kobe and Shaq to KG and Marbury.   It turned the NBA from a sport dominated by teams and rivalries (the Lakers vs. the Celtics, the Bulls vs. the Pistons) into one of individual players.

The three best players on the Miami Heat will sacrifice their statistics in order to win. Their games will lead Sportscenter every night and arenas across the country will sell out to watch them play.  These are fundamentally good things or the game of basketball.

By creating his own legacy instead of trying to recreate Jordan’s, LeBron really might be the Chosen One after all, offering a new and more selfless path towards greatness for the next generation.