We Are All Witnesses To The Cavs Giving Up [Quitters]

Lift a glass to the end of my days as an NBA fan.

I had stopped watching it altogether for years until LeBron James entered the league. Since I grew up in Northeast Ohio, it was hard not to root for #23 and the Cavs.

He had clearly evolved, I thought, into the best player in the league. He was the hometown kid carrying the local also-ran squad to the best record in the league 2 years in a row. (Insert fart noise here)

Meaningless. I don’t care whether he leaves or stays. That’s right, I said it.

If his team is just going to pack it in and GIVE UP with 90 seconds left in a single digit ELIMINATION game, the Knicks can have him. He’ll fit right in with that sorry bunch of losers.

Game 5 was completely baffling. Up until 1:30 left in the 4th quarter of tonight’s Game 6, I would have been disappointed had they lost, but the mysterious performance the previous night would have been absolved.

Then the unforgivable happened.

The team stopped defending or trying to score and let the clock run out. I don’t know about you, but I like my losers broken and bloodied — and warring until the end. Have some f**king pride.

Forget about what you owe the fans. You owe it to yourselves for all the work it took to get here to not QUIT.

OK, you owe it to me a little bit too. The guy that bought your “Witness” shirts, and even more, bought into all your garbage about competing and winning. He doesn’t seem to care too much about winning, so tonight I quit caring about him.

James Goldman once wrote that, “when the fall is all that’s left, it matters a great deal.” Tonight with 90 seconds, maybe all that was left was to fall dead.

And the Cavs showed us that it didn’t matter a great deal to them whether they died on their knees begging for mercy or standing upright and throwing haymakers.

Supposing this was James’ last game in the wine and gold, my guess is he might become the most reviled athlete in Cleveland sports history. I guess he should be applauded, for that is no small feat.

Combined with the Cavs, and LeBron’s in particular, puzzling Game 5 performance, this has to be one of the most disappointing and mysterious finishes to a season in history.

To have worked so hard to be the best team in the league and then finish it out in this manner is confusing at best, and infuriating at worst.

For a stretch, I thought I would never see the NBA as good as it was when I was a kid. Magic and Jordan, the Dream and Barkley. They almost got me this time around.

I was fully prepared to jump in the NBA-deep end. But I’ll gladly take another 50 years of losing before I again root for a bunch of gutless, heartless quitters like I did tonight.

Adios, NBA. We’ll always have ’95-’96.