With End of Career In Sight, LeBron Chasing His Role Model
With the recent news that Paul Pierce will be calling it quits after this season, it put another players' career into perspective. Pierce is among others to retire or pronounce their retirement recently, including Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, and Tim Duncan. With so many great players retiring, and many of them starting to get closer to LeBron James' draft class, it has started to put things into reality for the King.
James entered the league along with Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, close friends he has hinted at playing with before hanging it up. For now, they are becoming some of the game's elder statesmen, a fact accented by a larger patch of gray in James' beard. (NBA.COM)
"We're next up in line," he said. "We've given the game all we can give. We're the next crew, so it definitely makes you reflect on everything and you don't take anything for granted. I never do, but in my career I've always been like, `Man, this is an unbelievable moment I've been put in.' I try to give as much as I can. But we on deck." (NBA.COM)
With his career getting closer and closer to being over, James decided to say something that probably everyone already knew; he modeled his game and off the court aspect of his career after the greatest to ever do it, Michael Jordan. So many people have been debating who is better LeBron or Michael, or debating whether or not LeBron has a chance to every surpass MJ as the best to ever do it.
This is news because LeBron has never really come out and say that MJ is someone he is gunning for. But, just like this quote from NBA.COM, no matter what you do in life you are always going for the best to ever do it.
"If you work for any company or you work for any designer or anywhere, you're like, `Oh, I aspire to be that guy because he's done it right.' He's the greatest and that's who you look at," he said. "So that's always been my personal goal, to use the motivation he gave me as a kid and I'll use it as motivation now as well that I want to get to where he is. That's never changed. People kind of wanted to turn it into a conversation, but that's my personal goal and that's where I land at."
But, chasing someone that has three more NBA championships than you takes time. Obviously, James can't win three championships in the next year, so he is focused on something more realistic for now.
"I'm just as hungry as I was before," he said. "It's like I haven't won. The natural, human nature would be to relax. But you work so hard and then you see what the result is. Why not have that feeling again?" (NBA.COM)
