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Zeke to Lebron: “Do You Want to be Loved, or Do You Want to Win a Championship?”

March 27, 2007

I won these

Before he became enthralled with acquiring small forwards with high salaries and similar talents, New York Knicks head coach/GM Isiah Thomas was the ballsy point man who led the Detroit Pistons to back-to-back NBA titles in 1989 and 1990. And according to the Beacon Journal, Thomas recently dropped this juicy nugget at the feet of Lebron James as to what it took to push his team over the top:

Isiah Thomas once felt the pressure to lead his Detroit Pistons to a championship, the sort that is building on James with the Cavs now. The New York Knicks coach had one piece of advice for James before the game Friday:

“Do you want to be loved or do you want to win a championship?” Thomas told FSN-Ohio’s Fred McLeod. “I don’t know of any great players that were loved in the locker room who won a championship. Guys I played with might love me now, but they didn’t love me then.”

Very interesting, both the advice and the fact that Isiah willingly volunteered something semi-negative about himself. Of course, he couldn’t help but slip in the part about how his old teammates “might love [him] now,” but for Isiah, this basically amounts to a confessional with the Pope.

He makes a great point though: one of the few aspects lacking (at times, Cavs fans, settle down) in Lebron’s game still is his killer instinct and ability to push his teammates to overachieve. Currently surrounded by capable-yet-inconsistent guys like Drew Gooden, Larry Hughes, Big Z, and Donyell Marshall, it’s going to take just that for ‘Bron to will his team past the second round of the playoffs. Lebron, himself, is going to be a bitch to deal with, I can already tell. The rest of his team? That remains to be seen.

Posted by Brian Spencer on Mar. 27, 2007 at 3:40 pm in NBA

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