LeBron should take the shot & Carmelo should pass the rock. What both should really do.

“With great power comes great responsibility.” -Uncle Ben

That quote is one of my personal favorites. Nevermind that it comes from the Spiderman saga, it speaks to the true nature of what must happen when one can over-power situations and how they must handle that power.

Ever since the NBA All-Star game, the latest reason to dog LeBron James out has been his perceived inability to take ‘’ the shot.”

When we say “the shot,” we don’t mean key buckets that tie games or bring them close in the fourth quarter which he often does, we mean the game winning, run down the court, rip your jersey off, pound-on-your-chest buzzer beater that makes the world go crazy and gets you love from every basketball analyst in the world.
“With great power comes great responsibility.” We already said that right? Ok, good.

Ever since, Carmelo Anthony re-entered the New York Knicks line-up as many absolutely feared, Jeremy Lin’s production train has grinded to a halt.

Pass the rock, share the leather, be a team player, these are the phrases thrown at Melo.

The court of public opinion is a crazy, crazy place.  One guy gets static for passing the ball and the other guy gets it for hogging the ball.

One question remains, who is winning ball games right now? That team would be the Heat.

I get it; LeBron was anointed to be this almighty being with the ability dunk over tall buildings in a single bound.

He tried that roller-coaster in Cleveland and obviously he wasn’t feeling it.  There are only two other teams in the NBA right now that can consistently hang with the Heat at their best and that’s the Oklahoma Thunder and the Chicago Bulls.

The Knicks after their quick rush to the top of the media charts have a lot to work out and perhaps at some point they will be a sincerely relevant team that can use all of their pieces to their best advantage.

But right now? These guys have to learn to play together and it appears that is going to be an issue for the immediate future.

Sports are their competitive peak are games that are played by instinct. If James instinctly feels that dishing the ball gives his team the best chance to win, it’s respectable for him to listen to his inner voice and not force a shot just to impress some people.

We all have egos and James visibly has a big one. You don’t think somewhere inside of him last night that he didn’t want to shut the world up and bury that field goal? But he chose to be a team guy and let Dwyane Wade finish it off.

C’mon let’s be real.  That game winner that everybody wants to see so badly will come. Then it will on to the fall back argument of he has no rings.

And so it will go. It reminds me a lot of what I observed growing up with former Miami Dolphins QB Dan Marino.

If Marino played in the age of the internet and high access media, he would have got skewered, burned at the stake, buried alive and tarred and feathered after all of that.

The point to all of this is that it strikes me as very interesting as to how we all (myself included) pick and choose our spots with athletes based on what we want to see them do.

There is no consistency. It’s just what we personally what we want to see them achieve. We take that perceived flaw and harp on that until they get it right.

Is it fair? Nope. But I guess as Louie Anderson said in Coming To America, that’s (why they) make the big bucks.