With LeBron James and Miami Thrice coming to the Prudential Center today, it’s not only the fans who are reminded of the team’s failure to attract one of the “Big Three” in free agency this past summer. Fred Kerber talks to members of the front office, and captures what exactly went wrong in the team’s pursuit of LeBron and Chris Bosh, which reportedly went well when the team first made its pitch in July. Key section:
(Bobby) Marks and (Rod) Thorn gave a laundry list of why James and Bosh (they felt all along Wade never would leave Miami for New Jersey) snubbed the Nets. The stigma of a 12-70 record plus two years in Newark were killers. Others inside the franchise believe the groundwork was set at the 2008 Olympics and the Nets had no chance going in.
“We never got any correspondence from LeBron’s camp after the first meeting,” Marks said. “When it was a three-, four-day stretch that we didn’t hear, we knew we were out.”
Leading into the summer, I thought the Nets had no chance of getting LeBron in New Jersey, but I’ll readily admit, in the day or so that followed their pitch, I was probably being delusionally optimistic. Alas, it seems that really no team but Miami had a chance of making this happen, since the Big Three wanted to play with each other anyway. I hope this is the last analysis of “The Decision” that we read about going forward. What’s done is done.
