The End of Sports

By signing to the Miami Heat last night, Lebron James has joined one of the most unnatural ensembles of talent that physical activity has ever seen. Now, three of the five Miami Heat starters averaged over 24 points a game last year. Even if Miami signs two employees from the local Hot Topic to fill in the other starting spots, they're still going to win the NBA championship next year, or at the very least, rape and pillage all of Detroit and Minnesota, whose teams now look like a squad of English majors. I don’t really care about all that but I DO care about the impact that it’s going to have on NBA Jam 2010. With such a Marvel Comic cast of players on the Miami Heat, the NBA Jam revival, which is due to come out in October, will feed some of the worst trends in sports videogames. Unlike the real sport, NBA Jam only allows for 2 players on the court at any one time, meaning that assuming neither Lebron nor Dwayne Wade pull Michael Jordan’s “too cool to be pixilated stunt”, Miami’s two person roster will have both been in the top 5 in scoring last year. And if NBA Jam allows for a third person on the roster as a possible sub or another player on the court, they have Chris Bosh, who also rules the NBA like a tyrant.

The problem then, is the fact that although the game will be new, group videogame dynamics will always remain the same, meaning that within every group of people that plays NBA Jam, there’s still at least one asshole who gets off on simulated competition and tries to achieve permanent victory by only picking the best statistical team. He’s not actually even your friend, but rather some friend's friend who's always been tolerable because the advantages of making fun of him publicly have always outweighed the fact that he would throw a tantrum if he couldn’t be the Lakers or the Yankees every time. However, the new Miami Heat is so far superior to any past video game version of the Yankees or the Lakers, and ever since Craig started getting going home with girls at last call and wearing Ed Hardy shirts, he’s worse than ever.

I can’t write about Lebron’s signing without mentioning the Cleveland Cavs. They’ve now become the Detroit Tigers. Since Miami is now such an incomparable powerhouse, and you know that you’re the guy with the backwards hat and goatee is now going to pick the Heat every time, the only way that you can make the game tolerable is if you play with random teams. This however means that someone could potentially pick the Cleveland Cavs on accident, which is as fun as playing against the Detroit Tigers on any baseball videogame that’s ever existed, which is as fun as playing paintball with marbles, which is as fun as existing during a Twilight premier, which is as fun as living in Cleveland.

So thanks a lot Lebron James. Thank you for ruining the revival of something great. Thank you for delegitimizing that awesome thing that you do before every game with the chalk. At the end of the day, I can’t blame you for wanting to be on a team of other Zeuses like yourself. I just wish that you wouldn’t feed video game assholes’ voracious appetite for supremacy. By signing to the Heat, you not only consign the city of Cleveland to the dustbin of shitty sports towns, but you are openly endorsing some of the worst, cheapest, least sportsmanlike, tribal-tattoo accompanying video game behavior of all time. And that’s disappointing.