Barnes: Thunder, Heat don’t deserve to win NBA Finals

With the NBA Finals about halfway completed, the Oklahoma City Thunder and Miami Heat are only… With the NBA Finals about halfway completed, the Oklahoma City Thunder and Miami Heat are only games away from determining the winner of the Larry O’Brien NBA Championship Trophy.

Winning the title is a joyous time for any team and its fanbase, and the accomplishment is usually celebrated around the league.

I, however, am not happy at all.

If I had it my way, some sort of non-lethal event would occur preventing the NBA Finals from reaching completion and keeping both the Thunder and the Heat from winning the championship. If I had it my way, neither of these teams would take home the trophy.

Here’s why.

I’ll start with the Thunder.

Undeniably, one of the best basketball cities in America is Seattle. For those of you who don’t know, that city is where the Thunder previously played as the SuperSonics from 1967 to 2008.

During its time as the Sonics, the team featured many of the league’s best players, most notably Walt Hazzard, Lenny Wilkens, Spencer Haywood, Dennis Johnson, Jack Sikma, Tom Chambers, Shawn Kemp, Gary Payton and Ray Allen. As a result of fielding such talented players, the Sonics became one of the NBA’s marquee franchises, winning six division titles, three Western Conference championships and the NBA Finals in 1979.

You’d think 41 seasons in one city as one of the most reputable franchises in the league would earn that city the right to keep its team.

Think again.

In 2006, the Sonics were sold to an ownership group headed by Clay Bennett and Aubrey McClendon after Seattle’s taxpayers were unwilling to put up $500 million to build a new arena for the team. The team’s then-home, the Key Arena, was in great shape at the time. Bennett and his cronies then moved the Sonics to Oklahoma City, despite previous assurances from the ownership group that its intention was to keep the Sonics in Seattle.

Bennett, along with NBA Commissioner David Stern, essentially punished the city of Seattle for not wanting to pay $500 million for a new arena while a suitable one was still in place by taking away the city’s first and most successful professional sports franchise.

Later, following the announcement that the Sonics would be leaving for Oklahoma City, the franchise experienced unprecedented success in the NBA Draft lottery, landing picks that netted the team formerly known as the Sonics the players now known as the Thunder’s “big three” — Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden.

The Thunder winning the championship would be a victory for David Stern and Clay Bennett, and as a self-respecting human being, I do not want to see Stern or Bennett benefit from their inexcusable decision to take the Sonics out of Seattle. And you shouldn’t either.

As for the Miami Heat: This team winning the championship would also represent a victory for the NBA as a whole, because Miami’s star forward LeBron James is currently the face of the league.

The problem I have here is not with the league, but with James himself.

James represents the antithesis of what basketball should stand for: He is a player who wants to make as much money as he can and stuff the stat sheet as much as he can.

The former Cleveland Cavalier is capable of great athletic feats on the basketball court, and no one can debate that he is a once-in-a-generation talent. I will not deny that. What I will deny is the idea that he is a winner, let alone that he cares about winning in the first place.

From my perspective, James cares about his brand and wealth more than making himself one of the best players in NBA history, which he could certainly do with the talent he has. If he cared about being the best, he would have stayed in Cleveland and not run to Dwyane Wade in Miami, where any titles he may win will be tainted by his quick desertion of his former home.

If he truly cared about winning, he would not have announced his decision to leave Cleveland in a self-promoting, one-hour television special, and he certainly would not have wanted to participate in the equivalent of a championship celebration in Miami before he even played a game, at which he infamously promised Heat fans “not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven …” championships. Presumably, he was not implying they’d win zero.

Think about the players that are associated with winning in the NBA’s history — Bill Russell, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson. These players cared about what happened on the court, and nothing else mattered to them. They wanted to win, and that’s what they did.

James arguably is more talented than any one of these players. And eight years into his career, what does he have to show for it? Some regular-season Most Valuable Player awards, two losses in the Finals and a lot of NBA fans who hate him.

I don’t know what’s going on inside LeBron’s head — although that would certainly be nice to know — but based on the pattern of his career, James appears to care more about what happens off the court than what he does on it.

Regardless of both franchise’s jaded recent pasts, sometime in the next few days, the NBA Finals will come to an end with either Oklahoma City celebrating a championship that should have been won for Seattle or James and the Heat prevailing and lifting the trophy.

Either way, the fans lose.