By Tim Baffoe–
(CBS) Tenacious a competitor as he is, surely LeBron James has preparations for next season on his mind while the champagne stains have yet to even dry. His free agency will be short lived, and he’ll re-up with the Cleveland Cavaliers and Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love and maybe Dwyane Wade to form the presumptive favorite to win a weak NBA Eastern Conference again after James was the biggest reason for the biggest sports story of 2016 until the Chicago Cubs swoon has them miss the playoffs (ducks).
In the meantime, James can drink all this glory in and watch The Godfather every… single… day like a college roommate I had who thought gangster films translated to his middle-class Irish American upbringing.
It’s good to be LeBron right now. The dude is winning.
That Instagram post, LeBron’s only presence on social media Monday, might have been simple holiday well wishes perhaps coupled with a sub-message of Michael Corleone’s story as dark American metaphor on the country’s birthday. Or maybe it had something to do with the big news of the day.
Kevin Durant leaving the Oklahoma City Thunder for the Golden State Warriors on Monday makes it much harder than it already was for the Cleveland Cavaliers to repeat as NBA champions. The Warriors are hardly a team you come back from a 3-1 deficit now. And they are all keenly aware of the outfit LeBron wore as he landed in Cleveland with the Larry O’Brien Trophy. Which is still a classic wrestling troll winning move by James.
You’d think signing the NBA’s active points-per-game leader would be problematic to the LeBron James brand. Nope. Still winning.
Besides James being King of Cleveland forever after bringing the city its first pro sports title in generations, he’s playing with house money the rest of his basketball career. He can do no wrong professionally ever again. Should he get hit by a bus tomorrow, there will be no legit speculations about “legacy” or any of the other bad “Did he win enough?” narratives that hound obviously generational individuals in team sports a la Peyton Manning before his final Super Bowl. James is solidified as the best postseason player we’ve ever witnessed and one of the best to ever play the game period. He has won — and more than just championships in multiple cities. And he continues to win.
To take it even deeper, James leading the Cavs to a title goes beyond the game itself, as Joel D. Anderson of BuzzFeed explained in a series of tweets:
More than anything, I'm celebrating Cavs' championship as a triumph of black excellence. I want LeBron’s greatness to be forever undeniable
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
In a world where people would deny LeBron his props out of pettiness at best or something much darker at worst...
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
I’m glad that he made them seem a little more ridiculous today.
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
He’ll never convince everyone. But at a min, it’s even harder to entertain the arguments against him & his rightful place in league history
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
LeBron has always been everything that we say we want from stars: excellent, dedicated to his craft, publicly humble, measured, generous...
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
And accomplished. It still wasn’t enough.
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
Mediocrities, like Skip Bayless, felt comfortable questioning his game, his legacy.
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
It has all felt like it does when someone like Sarah Palin feels comfortable calling Obama “a special kind of stupid.”
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
They might not recognize it as such, but it’s in keeping w/racism that twists black people into knots believing weve got to be twice as good
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
Look what LeBron had to do to finally kill some of that noise. Some of it. He had to be unprecedented and do the impossible.
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
That’s not a reasonable standard.
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
It was especially telling that LeBron generated so much hatred after he asserted his own agency and took control of his professional destiny
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
That’s why last night felt, in some ways, like the revisionist support and fandom that suffused those tributes to Muhammad Ali.
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Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) June 20, 2016
That’s a kind of winning that goes beyond box scores.
Durant’s move Monday rekindled all the fire-spitting from the time James bolted Cleveland for Miami in terrible gut-ripping televised The Bachelor fashion six years ago. There are a lot of thoughts out there that smack of history repeating itself as far as how we instantly villainized a player for “the easy route” taken only to now kneel at the foot of LeBron and mea culpa all that venom we conjured up for a guy choosing to improve his own situation in a way we all wish we could. Durant knew what his choice would produce in the public sphere, knew we’d be digging up old tweets.
Now everybody wanna play for the heat and the Lakers? Let's go back to being competitive and going at these peoples!
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Kevin Durant (@KDTrey5) July 16, 2010
This week we are reminded that — save for specifically the tone-deaf production of “The Decision” (which still raised $6 million for charity) — James won then, won in the meantime and still wins with the Durant move now.
Plus the onus of the upcoming season is on Durant’s new super-team with Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green to avenge that Cavs’ title. There’s no pressure in Cleveland or on James despite being seemingly the only challenger to the Warriors. Golden State is going to be micro-analyzed all season with every regular-season loss a critique on their ability and cohesiveness. Question after question about their super-team status will eventually drive wedges in alpha personalities, which will then create more questions. And then there’s the 73 regular-season wins challenge that gets inevitable attention.
Meanwhile, James and the Cavs get to cruise through the regular season, conserve energy when appropriate and maybe get dominated in the Finals. And then so many will apply an emotional asterisk to the Warriors title as tainted (by playing by the rules). And then James still wins.
Most delicious of all ironies, people who still — still –– hate LeBron are made to root for him now, at least against the newly villainous Warios.
https://t.co/rJNr9iOofZ
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(((Jesse Spector))) (@jessespector) May 31, 2016
James today is the lesser of two evils for the fringe still clinging to Jordan nostalgia or whatever weird illogical reasons it uses to minimize obvious all-time greatness. And if Wade joins him in Cleveland, that still makes them sympathetic in comparison to the hated Warriors.
A majority of people — including some who don’t watch the NBA but strangely have opinions on the league — will be saying next spring that they hope LeBron James beats Kevin Durant. That’s the world we find ourselves living in.
LeBron wins.
Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.