One Year After "The Decision"

Did LeBron James make the right decision by going to the Miami Heat? Admittedly, I watched The Decision last year and was in shock that he decided to go to the Miami Heat. I thought he would stay in Cleveland and try to bring that franchise its first ever championship, and Cleveland's first championship in a major sport since the Cleveland Browns won the 1964 NFL Championship. I actually gained respect for James after he made the announcement he'd be leaving Cleveland, because while Cleveland would've built monuments for him, he shunned that to play at a place where he could get one thing he wants more badly than anything else -- championships. 

But back to the original question. Did he make the right decision? In some ways he did, and many other ways he did not.

How did he make the right decision? With Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh playing alongside James, the Heat immediately have an advantage over almost the entire league. Just this past year, they've shown that they're the class of the Eastern Conference. Plus, this was just their first year playing together, so next year the expectation is nothing short of a championship. This year was more of an experiment, and it proved to be a pretty successful experiment up until the end. Wade, Bosh, and James still have many years ahead of them and if they can pull it out next year, there's no reason to believe that they can't win 2 or 3 more championships together. 

Plus, I don't think the trio was thinking about this, but with the NBA's new collective bargaining agreement, it's going to be much more difficult for teams to stock up on superstars. It may very well be that the Big Three will remain a unique situation in the NBA. To the Big Three's defense, and more specifically to James, I don't see why they were dragged through the mud for not being competitors and winning championships the hard way. Very similar things happened when the Lakers teamed up Kobe, Shaq, Karl Malone, and Gary Payton. And didn't the Celtics unite Ray Allen, Paul Pierce, and Kevin Garnett for a run at a championship? 

BUT, maybe it's just me, I'm of the opinion that James winning just one championship in Cleveland would've been so much sweeter than if he ends up winning 3 or 4 in Miami with Bosh and Wade. Look, I know every great player needs another great player, or at least a couple of good players, to win a championship (Jordan and Pippen, Kobe and Shaq, Kobe and Gasol and Odom, the Celtics triumvirate, Nowitzki and Kidd and Terry, Duncan and Ginobili and Parker, Hamilton and Billups and Prince and Wallace, and even Wade and a still very good Shaq), and there's no reason why James couldn't have demanded another great player join him in Cleveland. How about if Billups and Carmelo Anthony had joined him this year had he stayed in Cleveland? Or what if Deron Williams had joined him in Cleveland? He could have done this and been the MAN in Cleveland. Now, he's just second string to D-Wade. 

And there's another team he could've gone to where I believe he would have won a championship this year. The Chicago Bulls. If James had gone to Chicago, he would've instantly become the man, and become the second coming of Michael Jordan. People were saying that he would've forever been in Jordan's shadow. Seriously? Is Kobe Bryant in Jerry West's and Magic Johnson's shadow? Was Shaquille O'Neal in Kareem Abdul Jabbar's shadow? NO. So don't give me that lame excuse. With Derrick Rose running the floor, he and James would've created an unstoppable force. Throw in Luol Deng as a relief man for James and two very good centers / power forwards in Carlos Boozer and Joakim Noah, and I don't see anyone competing with them. The Bulls were all set with Rose, Boozer, Noah, and Deng, and they were recruiting James to join them. The Bulls had the best regular-season record in the NBA without James, imagine what they could've done with him. And talk about a roster built for the future. All those guys are younger than 30.

In the end James' decision to go to Miami will be measured by the number of championships he wins. It would've been slightly different had he gone to Chicago, where the hype the Big Three generated this season for the Heat would not have been a factor in Chicago. Had he stayed in Cleveland, he would not have been measured by the number of championships he won, but by his sheer effort, even if it seemed unreachable, to take his team and its city to heights it has not seen in nearly 50 years. How many championships can quantify how much he meant to one city? It's hard to say, but I don't think James could ever win enough championships compared to what he could have meant to Cleveland.