Scott Raab

1. No question that Jimmy Haslam was right to say that he’d decide after this season about his future head coach and GM. Simply by dumping Mike Holmgren, he put Pat Shurmur on short notice. And by bringing in Joe Banner to replace Holmgren, Haslam effectively shit-canned Heckert, who didn’t work well with Banner when both were with the Eagles. Haslam’s actions said all that needed saying at the time he bought the team.

2. Game by game, Shurmur has pissed away any chance he ever had to hold on to his clipboard. You can bet that the search for his replacement is well underway.

3. As Shurmur’s game management and decision-making continue to cost the team a chance to win, any argument for keeping him through season’s end collapses. Judging a coach’s performance always comes down to two general questions: Does he get the most out of the talent on the roster? Does he put his players in a position to win? If you feel that the Browns’ 2-7 record truly reflects the level of talent on the roster, or that coaching is less to blame for that record than the players, Shurmur’s your guy.

4. I strongly doubt that a fellow like Jimmy Haslam buys the argument that losing games this season is a plus because it means higher draft picks. How any Browns fan can study the post-1999 history of the franchise and still say that losing leads to winning is way, way beyond me. Particularly in the NFL, winning teams find and develop talent no matter where they pick. Losing teams don’t.

5. The best reason to fire Shurmur NOW — the only reason necessary — is to make clear to the players and the fans that ownership won’t tolerate ongoing incompetence. Incompetence is without question the current hallmark of the franchise, and Pat Shurmur fully and publicly embodies it game after game after game.

6. Not that it matters, but Heckert surely has provided more evidence of his competence than Shurmur. Still, that bar is so low as to be meaningless, as is measuring Heckert’s draft performance against previous Browns’ GMs. In any pro sport, a superior GM is capable of articulating and enacting a specific vision of the path to winning championships, and building and guiding scouting and coaching staffs good enough to make it happen. I see very little evidence that Tom Heckert is that guy.

When you write a book about LeBron James and call it The Whore of Akron, you also forfeit any claim to objectivity or fairness. Not only do I understand this, I embrace it. It never was fair to burden ayoung athlete with the hopes and dreams of millions of Cleveland fans suffering a fifty-year case of blue balls. Nor is it fair to blame LeBron for the Cavs’ failure to win a championship during his tenure with the team; Danny Ferry’s flailing, Mike Brown’s fecklessness, the Mo Williams playoff horrow show, the Larry Hughes Experience — these things weren’t LeBron’s fault.

My loathing for him is a separate thing. It waxes in direct proportion to his on-court success, but it is fixed at a certain level by the greatness of his game: LeBron James is simply the best basketball player I’ve ever seen. Not the fiercest — to say the very least — and hardly the most successful, but the breadth and brilliance of his skills are, to these ancient eyes, unmatched. So it comes as no surprise that LeBron has won another MVP award, his third of the past four seasons. (Truth is, he deserved to win it last year, too.)

Likewise, it’s no surprise that the media — led, as ever, by ESPN, the unsleeping uber-brand spinning the wide world of sports into ’round-the-clock merchandise — is pushing the story of LeBron’s personal and professional redemption so hard. To Cavs fans, and to those writers who covered James during his years in Cleveland, the stories about how hard James worked on this or that aspect of his game over the summer long ago became an annual exercise in bullshit. As for the ‘I played with hate last year, but now I’m back to my old self’ nonsense spewed by King Shit himself, one look at his career stat line ought to be enough to blow away that smoke.

There’s nothing — absolutely nothing — about James’s numbers this year that isn’t perfectly in line with his entire career. His shooting percentage improved, primarily because he took far fewer 3-point shots; his assists-per-game average was the lowest he’s posted since six seasons ago, likely due to playing more often without Dwyane Wade; measured by Win Shares and PER, LeBron’s last two seasons in Cleveland were better than this year’s model. All the love/hate crap aside, James is now wrapping up his 9th NBA season, and he’ll turn 28 later this year. Yeah, he’s a marvelous talent. But to talk about him at this point as if he’s going to get better and better — or as if his drama-queen persona has suddenly calmed — is sheer public relations.

Meanwhile, LeBron’s epic choke in last year’s Finals has been reduced to a trope along the lines of “I didn’t play as well as I wanted to” or “I didn’t make as many big plays as I’m used to making for my team.” This isn’t understatement; it’s lunacy. James’s playoff collapse against the Mavericks was nothing short of historic, and, like his stats, was wholly in line with his vanishing act against Boston in his last playoff appearance for the Cavaliers.

I foolishly picked the Knicks to beat the Heat. I’ll go with the Pacers next, and so on. Not only because I want LeBron James to fail, but also because the Heat just aren’t solid enough to win it all. They lack a decent center and point guard. Their coach is a cipher. And their best player has a MVP statuette where his heart’s supposed to be.