We were witnesses, all right — witness to a flat-out schooling by men who once took their own lumps on the NBA’s grandest stage, who didn’t turn their free agent signings into a WWE Raw event before they had won bupkus, who knew the pain of losing here hurt too much to treat getting out of the second round like Carnival in Rio.
And now that Dirk and Dallas’s locker room of redemption has sent the Heat and The Forsaken One into a shell-shocked summer of frustration — one only Dan Gilbert and northeastern Ohio could understand last July when LeBron left without a note (karma’s a killer, young fella) — now comes the lesson to take with him:
Of all the things LeBron James could learn from the past 11 months, and especially the past two weeks, none is more important than the message Jason Kidd and DeShawn Stevenson communicated on Sunday night, the night an old point guard, one 7-foot all-star, a hell of a bench and their teammates dropped the game’s most talented trio to capture the NBA championship:
“Worst to first! Worst to first!” Stevenson, Haywood and an injured Caron Butler chanted as they hugged one another after Dallas had closed Miami out, 105-95, referring to leaving the 19- and 26-win Wizards more than a year ago to join an NBA champion in 2011.
“My thing was, even after I couldn’t jump like I used to and people thought I was done, I just did what I could to hang around and stay in the league,” Stevenson added.(nba, lebron james, miami heat, mavericks, heat )
Kidd, once the phenom LeBron was, though not as hyped, is 38 years and 81 days old. In his third Finals try, he dusted off his three-point shot, let the ball do the work, used his large, strong mitts to compensate for his inability to stay with LeBron or Dwyane Wade laterally and, best of all, let Dirk be Dirk for a championship coveted for more than 20 years.
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