playa2 wrote:To prove it, we scrounged up a list of athletes who left their teams either through free agency or a trade and left a trail of tears behind. Grab a box of Kleenex, this isn't going to be pretty. TOP 2
The Player: Wayne Gretzky
The Transaction: Traded from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings in 1988.
The Reaction: Gretzky was already a king in Edmonton. So when the owner of the team faced financial troubles and traded him to the L.A. Kings for a slew of draft picks and a pile of money, hearts all over the city broke. People even called for the Canadian government to get involved and block the swap. To this day, it's still referred to as the biggest trade in the history of sports.
The Player: Brett Favre
The Transaction: Traded from the Green Bay Packers to the New York Jets in 2008.
The Reaction: Stop us if you've heard this one: Brett Favre retired and then came back and... O.K., O.K., so it's a little hard to keep track of all the times he's done it. But this trade happened after his first retirement. He wanted to rejoin the Packers but the team had moved on. So they agreed to trade him to the Jets instead, leaving many of the franchise's fans in shambles.
Brett Favre has been widely lambasted by the media & the fans for his diva act for the past several years... bad example to state your point.
Allen Iverson gave all of his best years to the Sixers franchise & only asked to be traded when he was approaching the end of his career... same thing with Wade Boggs, he left Boston after giving his best years to them... Lebron is leaving his team in the lurch just when he's hitting his peak... completely different scenarios... & neither Iverson or Boggs ever built up the hype to leaving their respective teams for 2 full seasons & notify his fanbase with an hour long special on ESPN either.
Johnny Damon is hated in Boston for signing with the Yankees, get it straight... if he had signed with the Royals or went back to the A's, there would have been no uproar... plus he'd already helped the Red Sox accomplish their goal of winning their first championship in 87 years before he left... he didn't want to leave Boston btw... another completely different scenario, so i fail to see what the point is in bringing up his example... & he was never considered close to being the best player in the game the way Lebron is in hoops.
Carlos Boozer? really? since when has he ever broken Cleveland fans' hearts by leaving? he was a good player, but an icon like Lebron? not even remotely close.
Shaq leaving Orlando is the closest example you can point to, but even he didn't engage in the self indulgent promotional tour that Lebron went on for the past 2 years leading up to it, all the while stringing along several other teams getting them to dump their entire rosters just for a glimmer of a chance to land him so he could prove how powerful & desirable of a player he was to everyone to witness.
After 7 years & 40K+ posts, banned by martin for calling Nalod a 'moron'. Awesome.