LeBron James' Decision and the Spurs' long arc of glory don't just exist in a vacuum. They are experienced, reacted to, and ultimately remembered by fans thousands of miles apart. Many of us share little more in common than the event we're watching. Now, we'd like to share what we learn with you.
Thanks to the research provided by ESPN Sports Poll data, we hope to give you a clearer understanding into those of us whose passions and habits keep the games going. Who are we? What do we think? And what do these findings say about us?
That's what "Mind of the Fan" is about.
The Decision and its discontents
On July 8, 2010, LeBron changed everything with a flatly intoned, "I'm going to take my talents to South Beach." His live, televised Decision shook up the NBA landscape while unleashing anger from all over.
The fury was immediate, palpable. Many felt that LeBron had wronged the Cavs, that he'd made an unseemly power play, that he'd retreated to the ease of joining with similarly talented buddies. These kinds of anti-LeBron sentiments were far from mutually exclusive to one another. Suddenly, people had a multitude of reasons to despise a once popular athlete.
It wasn't just fans who harbored negative opinions about LeBron. The move to Miami resulted in heavy criticism from former NBA greats like
Michael Jordan,
Magic Johnson and
Charles Barkley. Animus toward the league's best player wasn't just in vogue around this time; it was near-consensus.
ESPN.com's Henry Abbott
responded to this climate the morning after it happened, writing, "People hate the Heat. I have heard people say they will buy NBA League Pass for the first time in their lives just to root against the Heat. Poke around on Twitter, or even on the Cavaliers' official team website, and you'll see that James is being called every name in the book, from cowardly to egomaniacal."
Perceptions of cowardice and egomania stuck to LeBron and took a toll on his image. In the season after The Decision, LeBron plummeted from 15.6 percent of respondents calling him their favorite player to 10.4 percent.
The embarrassing NBA Finals loss to Dallas in 2011 didn't help matters, as he dropped to 9.4 percent in the following season. It's difficult to envision a proper analog for this kind of drop in popularity, given how LeBron wasn't caught cheating at his sport or in his marriage, and he wasn't in trouble with the law. LeBron was supposed to follow Jordan's superstar footsteps, but Jordan had been a uniquely popular figure. The heir to His Airness had suffered a unique bout of infamy. Since then, it's been a steep climb up from where he fell.
For an
aspiring global icon, The Decision was a daring trade. LeBron was exchanging the short-term anger of the masses for a team that could succeed enough to eventually win them back. And the amazing thing is, he's
still not there after four Finals trips and two titles.
The LeBron holdouts skew white
LeBron was once asked by CNN if race played a role in the post-Decision backlash. His response seems rather benign when extracted from the frenzied context of late 2010: "I think so, at times. There's always a race factor," James said, stating what appears to be objective fact when you dig into the numbers. His dry "at times" assessment of course
provoked outrage. LeBron was right, though.
In ESPN's poll results, we can see that The Decision markedly hurt LeBron's popularity across the board. The impact wasn't felt equally across demographics, though.
Before the Decision, 14.80 percent of white NBA fans listed LeBron as their favorite player. The next season, that number nosedived to 8.56 percent. The next season, 6.83 percent of white NBA fans also listed LeBron No. 1, less than half his initial white fanbase. According to our most recent data, LeBron rode multiple championships to a 9.69 percent mark among white fans -- still far below his 2010 apogee. Within this demographic LeBron's the rare player who was far more popular before winning two championships.
@ you indirectly shytting on your own fanbase for being mostly bandwagon fans
