"I will never respect this Heat Championship", "I don't care if LeBron won another championship, I will never respect him"  "The Heat bought this championship"

These are a sample of the what I saw all over Twitter and Facebook last night. I've never been someone who has "hated" random players for perceived slights, I've always found inherently good things about most players and disliked some teams because they were rivals of my favorite teams. Those teams were few in number, that number being one. St. Mary's Gaels, this is the only team I hate. I dislike the way they play, the way they act, frankly sometimes I wish they didn't exist (Spoiler, this may have to change if Devyn Galland transfers to play for the Women's team next year). I'm the type of person who still recognizes greatness, no matter if its LeBron who I like playing well or Matthew Dellavedova who I greatly dislike. 

These days people get too caught up in disliking people and not realizing how lucky we are to see some of the greatest basketball players of all time play. The NBA finals pitted the greatest power forward of all time Tim Duncan vs LeBron James destined to be an all time great. Instead of enjoying watching both players be great this series most "fans" were too involved in their anti-LeBron rhetoric to even watch the games because they were nitpicking each and every hair follicle that has failed to grow hair on LeBron's head. 

There is a great disconnect between having "respect" and "liking" a player. Having respect for a player doesn't have anything to do with liking that player. Some say "real recognizes real"  but most who say that don't. They let their bloviations get in the way of recognizing how great some players are. "Tim Duncan is so boring to watch", "LeBron left Cleveland", I'm tired of hearing it, Duncan may not be exciting but he has been a consistently great player since the day he set foot on the stage to shake David "the angel of" Stern's hand. LeBron may have left Cleveland, but what would you have done in his shoes? Stay with a team that for seven years hadn't provided you the talent around you to be consistent? Its easier to sit behind a screen and type than to realize that you would do the same thing if put in the same situation. 

Needless to say I enjoyed the Finals, maybe not the inconsistency that plagued games 2-5 but the moments of brilliance by two of the great players that the NBA will ever see