LeBron right on money
Arrogance justified after Cavs make statement
“Yippee!” yelled LeBron James last night, which is pretty amazing on two fronts.
For one thing, who’d have thought any National Basketball Association player in the 21st century, let alone one of the league’s iconic players, would be saying yippee?
For another, LeBron used that word some 48 minutes before he strolled out to the parquet and scored 36 points to lead the Cleveland Cavaliers to a resounding 114-91 victory against the on-this-night-out-of-their-league Celtics.
Turns out LeBron saw something on his cellular phone, something that got him pretty animated, something he felt compelled to show teammate Richard Jefferson, who was getting his 36-year-old body stretched out on the next table.
The point here is LeBron was holding back his yippees in any discussion pertaining to what everybody else agreed was going to be a big, big game between the Celtics and Cavaliers, both vying for the top seed in the Eastern Conference. But even if you were in the camp believing the top seed to be a tad overrated in this case, last night’s game was, for the Celtics, an opportunity to say, “We’re arrived.”
And perhaps that’s why LeBron seemed to go out of his way to pooh-pooh the whole thing.
Roughly 24 hours earlier, following the Cavs’ 122-102 victory against the Orlando Magic in Cleveland, LeBron ladled out a great big bowl of ho-hum when asked about flying to Boston to take on the Celtics.
“I don’t know, I’ve played in a lot of big games,” he said. “I don’t . . . I’m the last person to ask about a big game in the regular season. I’m sorry.”
So LeBron let everyone else do the hyping. He was content to simply show up and do the scoring. Yet when the game was finished, after he had put up 36, after he had taught the Celtics that no, sorry, you are not the big dogs in the Eastern Conference, he still had a hard time getting excited about all this.
“I’m ready to get home, get some rest tomorrow and get ready for Atlanta on Friday,” he said. “Like I said, I don’t get too excited. . . . I’m even-keel about the process. Tonight was an opportunity to get better, and we did that.”
The closest he came to getting it out there that the game had even been played in Boston was when he noted, “Getting our team right going down the stretch is what brings out the best in me. We knew we were coming into a hostile building tonight and just wanted to play our game at a high level, move the ball, share the ball, and we did that.”
It was as though he was refusing to acknowledge the Celtics exist. True, the man has had big games against the Celtics, including his role in a devastating seven-game knockout by the Miami Heat against an aging Big Three in the 2012 East finals. LeBron and the Heat went on to win the NBA championship. They won another the next year. LeBron returned to the Cavs last year and led them to a title, something Clevelanders hadn’t seen since the original Browns won the 1964 NFL crown in the pre-Super Bowl days.
But Celtics fans still can cling to what happened to LeBron in the 2007-08 playoffs. He was hounded, he was bruised, he was defeated. The Celtics took out the Cavaliers in a grueling seven-game East semifinal. LeBron played all but a minute and change in that Game 7. He scored 45 points. He lost.
But hey, the man has earned the right to say what he said Tuesday night after the Orlando game: “I’ve been to six straight Finals, man. I’m the last person to ask about a regular-season game, dude. I’m sorry.”
Don’t be hurt or disappointed, Celtics fans. Pro athletes have a way of downplaying the significance of a game the rest of us believe to be really, really special. Bill Belichick has turned it into an art form. And back in the pre-2004 days, Red Sox players, notably catcher Jason Varitek, had an irritating habit of referring to every showdown against the Yankees as “just another game.” Which, of course, it never was. The hope is a Celts-Cavs playoff series would be so much more, maybe even more than . . . yippee. To borrow from Bruce Willis in the “Die Hard” movies, it might be, “Yippee ki-yay, (expletive).”
But that’s all later on. For the time being, LeBron was right: There was nothing to get excited about last night.