Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Leave The Best One Behind



It happens to me all the time. I get a new album, find a song or two on it I like and then play them to death. Its really a habit I should break because its ruined so many songs for me. Upon getting the newest Retribution Gospel Choir album, I found that the first song, Hide It Away, was far and away my favorite. And it didn't help that it was the first track, making it all too easy to repeat it without hearing anything else. Then I got worried that I might play it to death. Something had to change.

I got in my car one morning and the album was in the cd player. The first song had just finished but I wasn't paying too much attention to that. I just let the album play. A few songs into it, I found my self really liking the rest of what I was hearing. But I mean really liking it. I had given the cd a few plays clear through, but because I loved the first song so much, it made the rest of the songs seem very ordinary and unexciting. But something great happened that morning when the album got a good listen without being in the shadow of the best song. And turns out, the rest of it is even better than I had thought.

That leads me into my next point. Here at TBC, we've been mostly down on LeBron James. Not because he is a bad basketball player, but mostly because we didn't like being force fed hearty helpings of King James everywhere we looked. We, or maybe just me, felt that the hype was vastly over done for a guy so young and relatively unaccomplished. This season, I am starting to have a change of heart. I have seen quite a few Cavs games, though they are hard to miss, and James has definitely taken his game to another level. Its not only effecting his game, but the rest of his team looks phenomenal. He makes JJ Hickson look like the second coming of Scottie Pippen (which he isn't...Hickson will be out of the league a year after he stops playing with LeBron), he makes Boobie Gibson still look like a 12 year old and he makes Shaq (at least for 5 possessions a game) look like Lew Alcindor out there. Nobody else could do that I am convinced. Kobe would chew those guys out to the point that they wouldn't even show up to practice. Wade (as much as it pains me to say this) would get his 20 and then take the rest of the game off.

So it made me think, if you took the best player off all the teams in the league, like I did with the best song off the RGC album, which team would shine the brightest? I would be that Cleveland would not be the first team to come to mind. Or the second, third or the twentieth. This is not a new revelation. Everyone knows LeBron has been on bad teams his whole career but has managed to make them competitive. But there is something about this particular cast of characters playing with him this season that has upped the degree of difficulty, to which he has responded incredibly. And that is why I now buy into LeBron. And the Cavaliers.

48 point games by Vinsanity won't stop them. The athleticism of the Hawks won't either. Neither will KG's wooden leg. Chauncy and the Gang won't get a shot at them. Nor will Deron and his Merry Men. This year will be the matchup everyone wanted last year, Kobe v LeBron. I will stand by this prediction, even though a two year old could see this coming. The difference is, I'm not one to pencil in the favorites.

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