The internet has thus far refused to broach the topic, but we find ourselves rubbing up against a violent end to a fruitful era. At approximately midnight (Eastern) tonight, sportswriters, bloggers, fans, women and children could be forced to face a grim fact: LeBron James is an NBA champion.
Almost a decade after LBJ entered the league in the vaunted 2003 NBA Draft class, he's one win away (standard sports phrase right there) from winning his first NBA Finals title, which will certainly be accompanied by a Finals MVP award. While a win won't silence his critics -- change comes slowly -- it will at the very least force them to revise their narratives and to devise fresh boilerplate blog posts about James and the NBA. The proverbial well has, proverbially, dried up.
But the Guggenheim Sportswriters Collective will remember the good times. It's safe to say that LeBron James' success in the NBA Playoffs this season is the result of the fact that nobody is fucking his mom/girfriend/sister/aunt/cousin/best friend. That's good news for LeBron and bad news for those of us who rely on the insatiable lasciviousness of internet users to give us traffic. Who could forget this legendary SportsOlogy post, the one in which we proved, definitively, that Stephen A. Smith had been rumored to have confirmed a rumor that Rashard Lewis banged LeBron James' girlfriend.
What about the time, almost exactly a year ago, that the internets collectively decided Dirk Nowitzki was one of the greatest players ever, one who had cemented his unassailable legacy, while LeBron had sealed his fate as an underachiever? That was a fun post, too!
Of course, LeBron's on-court issues were only augmented by his off-court persona as a pampered superstar out of touch with reality. We, the internet, eat this shit up. The time that LeBron James threw away his $3,000 birthday cake was AWESOME. Hell, we'll even write about the fact that James prefers his steak well done and cut up. Stories like these are grist for the internet mill.
Tonight's Game 5 could irrevocably change all that. Sure, we'll post about LeBron James' food preferences, but it won't have the same "he also chokes in the clutch" context. In other words, those posts will fall flat. Posts on LeBron James, rather than pulling in the sort of clicks and vitriolic reactions writers have become accustomed to, will instead induce a kind of esthesia loss among readers, a numbing feeling that should eventually bring LeBron James down to earth in internet terms. Like we said, it's the end of an era.
Of course, there's a slim chance the Oklahoma City Thunder could accomplish the unthinkable and become the first team ever to recover from a 3-1 deficit to win the NBA Finals, in which case the internet will collapse under the weight of its own verbal hemorrhaging. The scene is unimaginable. Let's just hope it doesn't happen.
So, we (potentially) bid adieu to a decade of LeBron James, Ultimate Loser. It's been fun, and we'll miss you terribly.
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Follow on Ology: Anthony Schneck | NBA
Follow on Twitter: @AnthonyOlogy | @OlogySports
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