LeBron James' unexpected stream of consciousness week: Windhorst Beat Blog
By Brian Windhorst
November 12, 2009, 7:58PM
MIAMI -- It has been a wild two days on the LeBron James beat, in fact it ranks right up there as one of the most bizarre 48-hour periods in the 10 years I have been covering him.
First off, he's playing some excellent basketball and had two strong games to lead the Cavs to quality road wins in both Orlando and Miami. He's now scored 30 points in three straight games and played big in the finish in the win against the Heat. But of couse what happens off the court with LeBron is often just as compelling and the last two days were no different.
Three different times in the last two days he's just issued edicts, seemingly off the top of his head, that will have wide-ranging results. But even as he's done it, what he says is put together and thought out and makes it seem as if he was planning his actions and just waiting for the proper time to let his thoughts out.
Last night at the end of a mundane interview session in Orlando he just announced he was done talking about his contract. This was a couple minutes after he said it didn't bother him. But not only that, he said it wasn't fair to his team to keep talking about it and it wasn't fair to Cavs fans like he had a speech prepared he was just waiting to issue.
Then tonight after the good win over the Heat with Michael Jordan sitting nearby, he says basically in passing to Craig Sager of TNT that he's probably going to drop No. 23 after this season out of respect to Michael Jordan. This was not stunning to me, I knew LeBron had been considering this move for the last year or so.
In fact earlier this year I wrote a whole story about it.
But then afterwards talking to a small group of reporters following his main media session, LeBron elaborated on the decision and backed it up with some good points and strong statements. Then he issued a challenge to the other players who wear No. 23 to think about doing the same. Like he had been working on the idea for months in his head.
LeBron did meet with Jordan, who was in town to do some sponsorship work with Dwyane Wade, earlier on Thursday. He was in an arena that honored Jordan by retiring his number as Pat Riley did as the president of the Heat. Some of that could have played into it and he perhaps got emotional after the victory in front of Jordan. But he did it with all these reasons to do it plus reasons he's ready to change his jersey to No. 6 next year.
Besides all that stuff, LeBron also just decided after the game to put Wade's dunk on Anderson Varejao in the first half in the top 10 of all-time. Along with his dunk on the same hoop in 2006 on Damon Jones, that is.
Again, it sounds like normal postgame hyperbole that he'll say in the heat of the moment and forget about. But then LeBron backs it up with history:
"Being a fan of the game, I know all the great dunks. You have Jordan going baseline over Ewing, you have Pippen going over Ewing, you have Tom Chambers going over Mark Jackson, you have myself over D. Jones here you have Dr. J over Michael Cooper and D. Wade could very easily crack the top 10 with that one."
See what I mean? You could just write it off as a guy just talking but like with the jersey number and the 2010 ban it had thought put into it. Like I said, a wild couple of days.
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