Bethlehem Says

That terrifying fellow Mobutu Sese Seko (the blog one) visits GQ.com. Among other things, your Yankees/Heat analogy is torn to shreds and fed to fat pigeon-dogs: 

While the Yankees are accepted as a historical inevitability, like misunderstanding the founding fathers or making bad jokes about travel, the Patriots seem to get a pass because of football’s layers of personnel and structure—neither of which exist for the Heat. In football, signing one guy to a team can’t change the balance of a conference. Randy Moss might be a playmaker, but Darelle Revis can put him on an island. Both men serve under a pyramid of specialists and technocrats. Meanwhile, the Heat play under a coach who’s routinely reduced by fan commentary to a cipher, a poor beard for the fact that egos set the tone and ignore the sober official voices.

If you want to kill something today, read this post instead.

For GQ.com: How LeBron can learn from Dirk, and we can learn from that:

LeBron isn’t Dwyane Wade; he doesn’t attack like Wade, and isn’t nearly as harrowing off the dribble. Wade’s been given the role of closer because it makes sense, and yet somehow, that casts doubt on everything we want to believe—and feel in our gut—about James. Wade is in the mold of Jordan, both in personality and game. To crib the easy analogy, that makes LeBron into Scottie Pippen. Some people simply can’t accept that the Pippen-esque marvel could be better than the Jordan-ish guard, since Jordan is the greatest, and Jordan-esque equals best.

I really should have included a sentence about “hard” and “soft” expectations. Oh well. Imagine it in there yourself, if you find this post lacking.