NBA: James wants to team up with me

Although the Cavaliers lost to the Spurs and suffered their first defeat of the new season, the morale of the team was not greatly affected.

Again, with 82 games in a season, even the strongest team will lose, not to mention that the Cavaliers are a new team that was just formed this summer?

Moreover, taking a step back, in the game against the Spurs, the other players of the Cavaliers were indeed restricted by the Spurs' defense, but this was also due to their own underestimation of the enemy and poor touch.

The most typical example is Irving. The player facing Irving was the Spurs' main point guard Tony Parker, who is not a player with particularly strong defensive ability. Even with the Spurs' overall defensive bonus, they would not have been able to prevent Irving from making only 16 of 4 shots. This can only be attributed to Irving's own poor performance.

A poor performance in this game does not mean that the team will perform poorly in all subsequent games, so losing a game is not that crucial for the Cavaliers.

In fact, this is true. The Cavaliers, who lost to the Spurs and ended their winning streak, immediately started a five-game winning streak again, bringing their record to 5 wins and 14 loss!

At this point, what many people are most looking forward to is the matchup between the Cavaliers and the Heat. Not only because these two teams are currently the biggest favorites to win the championship, but also because there is a gossipy mentality involved.

Whether it is the rematch between Wang Chong and James, the two fateful rivals, or the grievances between the Cavaliers and James, they are the favorite plots of many spectators who like to watch the fun.

The league has scheduled the first matchup between the two teams in the new season for December 12, which is the league's traditional Christmas game. The venue of the game is still the Quicken Loans Center, the home of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Since the beginning of December, Cavaliers fans have been counting the days, waiting for the arrival of Christmas.

Although more than four years have passed, many Cavaliers fans are still angry when they think of James' smug expression on the TV show when he chose to abandon them and join the Heat without hesitation.

Before Wang Chong appeared, they would still be thinking about James as one of the top stars in the league and hoped to play the emotional card to invite him back. But now that they have Wang Chong, who would care about James?

You're the fucking James? You're so fucking arrogant, let's see if my Wang Chong will give you a beating!

As the Cavaliers fans looked forward to it, time passed day by day and soon it was the end of December.

Most of the December schedule has passed, and the Cavaliers' record has been quite stable. After more than a dozen games, they only lost one away game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, and won all the rest of the games without exception.

这使得骑士队截止到12月25日前，战绩已经来到25胜2负，胜率高达92.5%，眼瞅着就要奔着公牛队73胜9负的历史最佳战绩而去了。

On the other hand, the Heat's record in the new season is somewhat unstable. They lost a lot of games that they should not have lost. Their record is only 18 wins and 10 losses, with a winning rate of only 64%. Not only were they left behind by the Cavaliers and the Bulls, they were even overtaken by the Celtics and fell to fourth place in the Eastern Conference.

Such a performance has disappointed Heat fans. The Heat's Big Three lineup is so luxurious that no other team in the league can match it. Why is the record so bad?

But there is no way around it. This season, the Heat's Big Three have been plagued by injuries, including James, who has a physique of steel and has missed several games due to injury. As of mid-December 2014, Wade and Howard have missed nearly 12 games each due to injury.

Fortunately, the injuries of the two players did not occur at the same time, so in most cases the Heat can barely ensure that the two giants are on the court at the same time, which can stabilize their ranking in the upper half of the Eastern Conference.

But injuries are not an excuse, because the Cavaliers also have injuries, but even if Irving or Gasol miss one or two games due to injury, the Cavaliers can still win the game under the leadership of Wang Chong.

This immediately highlights the error tolerance of the Cavaliers lineup.

The Cavaliers' bench has Louis Williams, who should have won the Sixth Man of the Year award this season.

Because the Cavaliers have Irving, Louis Williams does not play much, only about 24 minutes on average, and his average points per game are about 12 points, 2 rebounds and 2 assists. But his strength is there after all. Once Irving is absent due to injury, Wang Chong will put him in the starting position. With sufficient shooting rights, Louis Williams will immediately show his strong scoring ability.

The Cavaliers' deep bench gives them a very high tolerance rate. Unless Wang Chong misses a game due to injury one day, the Cavaliers' record may drop drastically like a high dive. However, it is too difficult to wait until Wang Chong is injured.

On the one hand, Wang Chong's main playing style is shooting. Although he will also break through with the ball and even rush into the penalty area for confrontation, his frequency is much lower than that of guards like Irving. Less confrontation means that the possibility of injury is very small.

On the other hand, after Wang Chong's system was upgraded, the first thing he did was to improve his comprehensive durability. When the comprehensive durability was increased to the full value of 99, unless there were extremely special unexpected circumstances, such as a killer suddenly rushing out of the game with a chainsaw and cutting off Wang Chong's leg, or the opponent being possessed by the Kung Fu Football glasses man and a wrench dropped from his crotch, the probability of Wang Chong being injured would be extremely small.

So in the past few seasons, except for being really tired from playing back-to-back away games and occasionally taking a break for one or two games when the opponent in the next game was very weak, most of the time Wang Chong would play all 82 regular season games in a season. His attendance rate is the highest among all players in the league today, no doubt about it.

On December 12th, the much-anticipated Christmas battle begins.

However, the process disappointed the fans.

Before the game started, the Heat had already confirmed that Howard would miss the game due to injury.

But one day before the Christmas game, the Heat announced that their star player LeBron James will miss tomorrow's away game against the Cavaliers due to ankle discomfort.

As soon as the news came out, the Cavaliers fans were immediately disappointed.

I thought they could take this opportunity to humiliate James, but I didn't expect that he was not going to fight at all.

As for the so-called ankle discomfort, in their opinion it is just an excuse. James probably knows that in the absence of Howard, the Heat will definitely not be the opponent of the Cavaliers, so he came up with such an excuse to avoid the game. After all, in the previous game, James was still full of energy and performed a one-stop slam dunk. How could he look like he had any ankle problem?

The Cavaliers fans were very unhappy, and so were the Heat fans. After all, in their opinion, James's move was tantamount to cowardice.

What happened to the Cavaliers? What happened to Wang Chong? Are they afraid to even fight?

Although from a strategic point of view, it is correct for James to avoid this tough battle and focus his main energy on playing against other teams and strive for more victories.

But from the perspective of team morale, not even daring to play is very damaging to morale.

-

December 12th, Christmas Day.

At the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, the game entered the fourth quarter and the main players of both teams were already sitting on the sidelines to rest, because at this point the score between the two teams no longer required the main players of both teams to continue fighting on the court.

112:84, the Cavaliers led by as many as 28 points at home, but there was little time left in the game and there was no possibility of any comeback.

This was a game without any suspense. With only Wade left to lead the Heat's Big Three, how could they possibly defeat the healthy Cavaliers? From the first quarter, the Cavaliers firmly took advantage of the game, making the Heat completely unable to raise their heads. Even Wang Chong didn't exert much effort in the game, and was always paddling. He clocked out after three quarters, and the Heat had no chance to catch up.

As the game was about to end, the Cavaliers team burst into boos in unison.

Sitting next to the Heat's bench, James, dressed in a suit and tie, had a blank expression on his face, but everyone knew that the boos were directed at him.

In fact, in the past four years, whenever the Heat went to Cleveland to play, they could not avoid hearing the jeers from the Cavaliers' home fans. The scene was even bigger than it is now, but in terms of how heartbreaking it was, it was far less than it is now.

Because the positions of both parties have changed significantly.

No matter how the Cavaliers mocked James in the past, it could not cover up the fact that the Cavaliers have become one of the worst teams in the Eastern Conference without James.

But now it's different. The Cavaliers have become the biggest favorite to win the championship in the new season, and the Heat's Big Three has been formed for five years. They have also undergone a generational change in the middle, replacing Bosh with the stronger Howard, but now they are still a long way from winning the championship.

This allows Cavaliers fans to stand on a higher ground and taunt James from a superior position.

As soon as the game ended, James couldn't wait to get up and walk towards the locker room without even looking back. After all, every second sitting here was torture for him.

Watching James enter the player tunnel, the Cavaliers' home fans burst into loud cheers.

In the most luxurious box in the stadium, Cavaliers owner Daniel Gilbert watched this scene and couldn't stop smiling.

This feeling is so great. Even though Gilbert is already a billionaire, he is not immune to it.

Signing Wang Chong is a slap in the face to James. Although Wang Chong will probably only stay with the Cavaliers for one year, but...

“It’s really worth it!”

If the Cavaliers can really maintain their current strong form and win the championship this season, then even if it's only for one year, and a year later the Cavaliers lose Wang Chong and fall to the bottom, it will definitely be a huge profit.

At the post-game press conference, James avoided answering all the reporters' difficult questions about the Cavaliers, but repeatedly emphasized, "I do feel discomfort in my ankle, and there is no falsehood. I must consider my body and the long-term development of the team, and I must eliminate any possibility."

What James said sounded very righteous, but not many people believed him. After all, compared to what people say, people are more willing to believe what they see with their own eyes. James was full of energy in the previous game, but he spoke so seriously in the game against the Cavaliers. It was obvious that he was traveling during off-peak hours. What's there to explain away?

Not to mention the media and fans of both teams, even the league was very dissatisfied with the fact that the carefully planned Christmas game ended in such an anticlimactic way. A few days later, it publicly stated that it would conduct a strict investigation on some players in the league who missed the game without reason, including those who refused to play for personal reasons, feigned illness, etc. Once discovered, they will be severely punished, and suspensions and fines are inevitable.

Don't think that the league's suspension is the same as an opportunity to rest. When players are injured, the team still needs to pay their salaries, just like the future Chandler Parsons, who immediately lay down after signing a big contract with the Grizzlies. No matter how angry the Grizzlies are, they have to pay Parsons' annual salary of more than 20 million US dollars, because Parsons was injured while playing for the Grizzlies, which is definitely a work-related injury.

But the league's suspension does not require payment of salary, and if a fine is added, it would be adding insult to injury.

Many players in the league are day-to-day players who will spend all their salary as soon as the team gives them. In this case, giving them a suspension + fine package would be fatal!

Of course, this level of punishment is nothing to James, who doesn't care at all. But the league itself is not aiming to punish James, but just to scare him. With James's feather-guarding character, he certainly doesn't want to really confirm the reputation that he was afraid of Wang Chong and the Cavaliers and deliberately chose to avoid the fight.

This is indeed the case. The alliance conducted a high-profile investigation for a long time, but the matter was ultimately left unresolved and no typical case was found for punishment.

But for a long time to come, no team in the league dares to blatantly rest players.

The Heat and James were actually not greatly affected. Instead, the San Antonio Spurs next door gave James a terrible scolding.

LeBron you are a real dog! You hurt others but not benefit yourself, you are really amazing!

As we all know, the Spurs are the team that likes to rest their main players the most. GDP, including Duncan, basically has at least three to five games of rest every season after they are over 30 years old. The Spurs themselves are a team-oriented team, and the record will not be affected too much even if a star player is absent.

But after James did this, the league's supervision has been strengthened, and even the Spurs dare not rest players easily. Poor Duncan was already 14 years old in the 15-38 season, and he still had to bite the bullet and fight continuously. Who else can he blame if not James?

Wow, after going around in circles, it seems that no one doesn’t curse James.

The Cavaliers fans cursed, the Heat fans cursed, the league officials cursed, and even other teams that had nothing to do with the team joined in the curse. The chosen one was treated like a rat crossing the street, and everyone was shouting and beating him. It was really unbearable.