The Miami Heat have had a ton of good players, great players, and a few Hall of Famers. One NBA analyst says Heat champion LeBron James is the G.O.A.T. though.
The Miami Heat aren’t typically one for superficial squabbles or arguments, as their approach is typically one of no-nonsense and all business. Head Coach Erik Spoelstra says as much every time he speaks, with his monotone like sound and his constant cliche like phrases revolving around “working hard” and “staying the course”.
That’s all fine and dandy though, less drama from the actual team and more winning with their business-like approach, one would imagine. One doesn’t have to imagine some things though. One of these things is the fact that although the Miami Heat don’t go around looking for conversations, debates, or arguments to get themselves into, they often times get dragged into them.
While this one is a bit off the wall and abstract, it still involves a Miami Heat great, a former Miami Heat champion, and one of the, if not the single greatest, basketball players of all time. Ok, you guessed it, it’s LeBron James.
What about James, might you ask? This is what, something that never too shy NBA analyst livewire Kendrick Perkins had to say on a recent episode of ESPN’s First Take. Here it is from the official First Take Twitter page.
"I'm glad [Michael Jordan] is not my GOAT. ... He lied, he threw everybody under the bus. At the end of the day, The Last Dance was to make MJ look like a super hero, and make everybody else look like a villain."@KendrickPerkins responds to audio contradicting Jordan. pic.twitter.com/WqB6Ox6gbP
— First Take (@FirstTake) May 26, 2020
While that isn’t the main point of his above rant, it is worthy of a mention. Perkins’s main point here though is worth a mention as well. The way he made his way towards telling the world that LeBron James was “his GOAT” was by explaining how he felt about the newly released audio recordings described in the banner on the above tweet.
Miami Heat champion LeBron James is ESPN analyst Kendrick Perkins’s GOAT. Perk tells us that on his way towards making another point.
With the perception for so long being that Michael Jordan didn’t give USA Basketball an ultimatum surrounding himself playing or Isiah Thomas, a perception reinforced by ESPN’s recent The Last Dance documentary series, it has now surfaced that this perception was wrong. It was all wrong according to the audio.
It does indeed seem as though someone isn’t being completely honest in the scenario and that someone looks like His Airness, Michael Jordan. Whether you actually believe the whole thing or even care about it, is entirely up to you.
For what it’s worth though and although it doesn’t prove that LeBron James is actually the GOAT, it does prove to be something that LeBron James might just be better than Michael Jordan at. This would be playing the villain.
Lebron James successfully played the villain and basked in it at the beginning of his Miami Heat tenure. For the cold-blooded on the court Michael Jordan to be hesitant to admit what really happened then, even today in the year of 2020, is all about his public image and not wanting to be painted as the villain.
LeBron didn’t care and thus is better than Jordan at that, not that it matters a ton. I guess it doesn’t really matter that Kendrick Perkins thinks LeBron is the GOAT either, but it sure does make for interesting conversation. You have to respect Perk though and not only for choosing LeBron, but for taking on the entire topic in the first place.