Notes and Errata: August 24th, 2010

2010-08-23 Off By John Krolik

Just a few things tonight — I was in transit today, and now I’m back at school for my last semester and settling in a bit.

First off, here’s a fairly substantial piece I did for NBC on what LeBron’s game might look like next season in Miami.

Not many people know this about me, but I’ve actually been published in China. Here’s the story: SLAM China needed someone to grab quotes about LeBron from Phil Jackson and Kobe Bryant, and I was in LA and available, so I got the gig. They gave me two questions to ask, one of which was the following: “Which of these four terms would you say best describes LeBron James to you: A Man, The Man, My Man, or a Humble Human Being?”

Seemed a little silly at the time, but isn’t that the question just about everyone has been wrestling with w/r/t LeBron this off-season? Just kinda struck me as interesting. (I do suspect that there aren’t a lot of people who would choose the “Humble Human Being” option at this point in time.)

So J.R. Smith is available, apparently. Once upon a time, I wanted to see him on the Cavs, but I think his bad habits are embedded way too deep. Jacking threes whenever you feel like it when you’re as talented as JR isn’t the best way to go about things, but he’s convinced that that’s “his game,” and he’s been successful enough to get away with it, I suppose.

-Delonte with a 10-game suspension to start the season, assuming he gets picked up. Amazing how quick his stock fell, and I really hope he lands on his feet somewhere. I still think he’s worth taking a chance on, assuming the off-court stuff wasn’t too terrifying.

-Oh, let’s please get at least one documentary film crew to capture the Kwame/MJ reunion. Open thread question: Nobody really cared about reports that MJ repeatedly and viciously blasted Kwame with a certain anti-gay slur back in the early part of the milenium.

I feel like LeBron or Kobe would get in a LOT more trouble if reports of that nature surfaced about them now. Is it just that MJ will always be made of Teflon in the eyes of the public? Is it that our sensitivity to homophobic slurs has gone up in the last decade or so? Is it the integration of twitter/TMZ/Gawker-type stuff into the sports world? Or do people just not have sympathy for draft busts? Or am I just wrong here, and people/media types still think that homophobia in the sports world is just “boys being boys?”

That’s all I have for tonight. Until tomorrow, everyone.

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