Published: April 14, 2009
You’re a professional basketball player and you’re making money playing a sport you love.
You just handed the defending NBA Champions an embarrassing loss on your homecourt.
You’re in your mid 20’s and on the bench with some of your closest friends.
Music starts playing during a timeout and you start enjoying the victory and your 60-win season by dancing.
Seriously, what is the big deal?
This is a day and age where all we want to see is our favorite athletes showing personality and enjoying the game they get paid millions of dollars to play.
You don’t want to Cavs to dance? Then don’t lose by more than 30 points. Beat them on the court and then bust a move of your own.
“I’m always going to remember that,” Ray Allen told reporers after his Celtics just lost to the Cavs. “If I beat a team, as happy as I may be in victory, I’m always going to stay humble. … We play each other too much. Those are just great motivational thoughts for me.”
A Boston reporter then posed a question to commissioner David Stern wondering if he was upset by the antics would be looked at by the league.
Thankfully, Stern, who may be the best commissioner in all of sports, had the right response.
“I think celebrations by our players do have a place,” Stern said. “If I were the Celtics, I would make sure that tape, if one exists, runs every game in the locker room as a motivation. I wouldn’t spend my time telling our players about that.”
Let’s sit back for a second. If I was Allen, along with his teammates, I wouldn’t necessarily complain to the media.
I’d be thanking them for giving them just that little extra in motivation to work harder in the playoffs for a chance at the Cavs.
Just like Stern mentions, there is no better motivation than bulletin board material.
Not only would I want that tape in my locker before the game or on the TVs in the trainer’s room, I want to hear the song the Cavs were dancing to (Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna’ Give You Up”) playing on my iPod on repeat.
Athletes use all sorts of things as motivation and to be. This type of thing should only make that fire inside the Celtics that much bigger.
More importantly, though, is the fact that there really is nothing wrong with what the Cavs did.
Sure, they may have not done the respectful thing that veterans like Allen, Paul Pierce and the rest of the franchise deserve.
But, like James said after, the team wrapped up home court advantage through the playoffs; this is a city that has seen a lot of terrible sports moments through the years.
“We see how passionate our fans are either at a Browns game, an Indians game or a Cavs game,” James told reporters . “We see how passionate they are about sports, so to be able to be in this position and be able to fight for a championship, knowing the history and knowing fans are really, really depending on us. We accept that challenge. We like it.”
‘The Drive’ by John Elway, Jose Mesa in the ninth inning against the Marlins and Michael Jordan’s jumper over Craig Ehlo.
The Cavs know that a season like this might never happen again, so why not enjoy it?
