While We’re Waiting serves as the early morning gathering of WFNY-esque information for your viewing pleasure. Have something you think we should see? Send it to our tips email at tips@waitingfornextyear.com
There goes my hero. He’s ordinary … “LeBron James is dangerously becoming the basketball embodiment of Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman. He is charming and charismatic in a way that should disarm just about everybody. The existence of greatness lies within both of these protagonists. But honing and demonstrating this greatness seem to be their downfall. They both assume they can manufacture this greatness whenever they want to but it’s simply not that easy.
Domination is a state of mind that is either there or isn’t. There is no faking imposing your will on someone as you get deeper into the playoffs. There is not a way to fake hunger, especially when the competition set before you has real hunger. The Celtics have a hunger that derives from not wanting to be too old to win. The Magic have a hunger that comes from tasting success last season and wanting to prove everybody wrong that it was just a fluke. The Lakers have a hunger from the most singularly focused individual we’ve seen of the past 12 years. But what do the Cavs have?
The Cavs have LeBron James whose focus and hunger seem to be more marketing scheme rather than something to fear. His failures create a reaction of bewilderment, I told you so’s and trepidation that anointing this self-proclaimed “king” was an honor we should have never agreed to. We don’t want to see vulnerability from him.
Now we wait for Game Six and possibly Game Seven to see how he responds. If he’s what we’ve built him up to be, I’d imagine that Game Five of the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals will look like nothing more than a Mike Wilks production.” [Zach Harper/HP]
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Trading Wood: “Before making a comment that the Indians may have to include an MRI machine with Wood, Rosenthal writes that “the remainder of Wood’s $10.5 million salary will be an obstacle to any deal, but the Indians surely would pay some of that down to get a legitimate prospect in return.” Don’t forget that the last time that the Indians covered the remaining money on a traded player’s salary, they paid the entire 2008 salary of Lacey Cake, which…as we all know, netted them Los Santana.” [The DiaTribe]
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I got a high powered jumbo/Rolled up a wooly and I watched… “LeBron James is very much shrouded in mystery right now. But let’s be honest, that’s what it is. Mystery . . . not a conspiracy theory. If there is anyone poking around the curtain, it would be Columbo. Not the Illuminati.” [Wine and Goldrush]
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A most excellent look into the future of Terrelle Pryor, inspired by Adrian Wojnarowski [Eleven Warriors]
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And about that “one-foot-out-the-door” theory: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice? What could better explain LeBron’s astonishing deer-in-headlights Game 5 performance than the onset of the reality that the divine right of his greatness simply isn’t enough? Here it was LeBron, more than anyone, who was fooling himself. This doesn’t strike me as anything that can be fixed in the next few days, and short of a title, let’s assume it’s a non-starter to bring back a head coach who lets this happen on his watch. But for LeBron to drive the bus off the cliff, then fly away? That has to be a non-starter too.” [Cleveland Frowns]
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(Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images)
