LeBron James angered much of the NBA world when he joined forces with Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade on the Miami Heat back in 2010.
All throughout James’ first season with the Heat, he and the team got tons of bad press. Brian Windhorst, who has been covering James for many years now, recently said that the four-time MVP was “pretty salty” about ESPN’s coverage of him that season.
“There was animosity from LeBron!” Windhorst said. “He was not crazy about it. He didn’t like the way ESPN handled the fallout from ‘The Decision.’ He felt like he got left alone on an island there. And he really didn’t like the idea of ESPN creating a team of people just to cover the Heat, which was kind of revolutionary at the time, and I was the lead guy on. It was pretty salty the first year.”
James and the Heat were booed and jeered in many cities throughout the 2010-11 NBA season, but things seemingly reached a peak when Miami visited the Cleveland Cavaliers on Dec. 2, 2010.
That day marked the first time in his NBA career that James played a regular season game against the Cavaliers, and fans in Cleveland were still unhappy that he had swapped Ohio for South Florida.
Despite a rough start to the season, James and the Heat were able to find their footing and eventually made it all the way to the 2011 NBA Finals, where they matched up against Dirk Nowitzki and the Dallas Mavericks.
Although they were pretty heavy favorites in the series, the Heat wound up losing to the Mavericks in six games. Many thought the Heat’s Big 3 era would end as quickly as it started.
However, James returned with a vengeance the following season and won the first title of his career by defeating a young Oklahoma City Thunder team led by Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden in five games in the 2012 NBA Finals. James also won league MVP honors that season and came in fourth in Defensive Player of the Year voting.
The NBA’s all-time leading scorer went on to play two more seasons with the Heat after that, reaching the NBA Finals in both campaigns. He and the Heat faced off against the San Antonio Spurs in the Finals in two straight years, with both sides winning one series each.
In the summer of 2014, James made his way back to the Cavaliers and wound up winning them a title in 2016. He now plays for the Los Angeles Lakers, and while he recently hinted he might retire, the likelihood of that actually happening doesn’t seem all too high.