From his latest mailbag:

I figured out why the LeBron/Wade alliance bothers everyone beyond the irrefutable "Jordan would have wanted to beat Wade, not play with him" argument. In pickup basketball, there's an unwritten rule to keep teams relatively equal to maximize the competitiveness of the games. That's the law. If two players are noticeably better than everyone else, they don't play together, nor would they want to play together. If the two guys have any pride at all -- especially if they play similar positions -- then getting the better of each other trumps any other scenario. They want that test. Joining forces and destroying everyone else would ruin the whole point of having the game. It's like a dad kicking his young son's ass in a driveway one-on-one game. What's the point? When LeBron and Wade effectively said, "Instead of trying to whup each other, let's just crush everyone else" and "If these teams end up being uneven, we're not switching up," everyone who ever played basketball had the same reaction: "I hate guys like that."

So when my wife asked in all sincerity, "What's the big deal if they play together?" I couldn't really explain it to her other than to say, "It's a basketball thing. You just don't do it."

Makes absolute perfect sense, doesn't it?

Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, and Chris Bosh will all be playing for the NWO, este, the Miami Heat

There’s a new world order in the NBA today after LeBron James announced that he’s joining Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami. If you’re on Twitter you’ve probably seen the letter from Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert – written in Comic Sans, no less – ripping James a new one. The letter is way, way over the top, but apart from expressing Gilbert’s anger, it was calculated to appeal to spurned Cavs fan to still care about the team.

Everyone’s getting their shots in – Yahoo’s Adrian Wojnarowski still has nosebleed from the high horse he rode on for his column yesterday before the LeBron decision – but I really enjoyed the take of Will Leitch at NYMag.com: “Fans of teams in the LeBron Derby were disappointed — though no one as much as Cavs fans — but mostly they were flabbergasted by the tone-deafness of the whole enterprise.”

So now that we’re all going to hate LeBron and the Heat, do we all go on the Kevin Durant bandwagon? He’s kind of the new superstar du jour, even though it’ll be weird rooting for Oklahoma City after the whole Seattle debacle. For the true hater, rooting for Kobe is, of course, out of the question.

UPDATE: The excellent Joe Posnanski sums everything up perfectly at SI:

I can understand the draw to Miami, beyond the sun and beach. Dwayne Wade, when healthy, is in the conversation as the third-best player in the NBA behind LeBron and Kobe. Chris Bosh is — well, I’m not entirely sure why he suddenly gets talked about like he’s an all-time NBA great or in the Wade/LeBron league (he’s not), but he’s obviously talented and was a very good scorer and rebounder as the No. 1 option in Toronto. I think there are some major questions about the team and how those three will play together, but it’s obviously very promising and I understand and appreciate why LeBron James would put his chips down in Miami.

...

But, his apparent lack of feeling for his old city … that I don’t understand. He just seemed utterly unfeeling about it all from the start. He mouthed a few words of thanks to the City of Cleveland, which he said with all the emotion that baseball announcers use when reading airport parking advertisements. When asked how he thought Cleveland would react to him, he mostly shrugged and said his friends would stick with him. He simply did not seem aware that he had broken the heart of a city that always feels just one heartbreak away from collapse.

The Los Angeles Lakers booked the first seat to the NBA Finals after routing the Denver Nuggets, 119-92, last Friday. A day later, the Orlando Magic sent LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers packing with an impressive 103-92 victory.

The Western Conference Finals series was maddening to watch. As much as I like rooting against the Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, it was just so hard to get behind a team as dumb as the Nuggets. They kept making dumb plays, risking dumb passes, taking dumb shots, and generally just playing dumb basketball. The team must have a collective basketball IQ of about 17, and that's even considering the addition of steady floor general Chauncey Billups.

Oh and the Lakers were steady, and Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom dominated the Nuggets frontline, and Kobe was awesome, etc.

I feel sorry for LeBron, who was nothing short of spectacular in the Eastern Conference Finals. There were two things that did them in: first, Orlando was a terrible matchup for the Cavs, and second, Cleveland's Mike Brown decided to coach the series with a noose around his neck.

Let's talk about the matchups first. Sure, Dwight Howard was a monster, but it was the Magic's forward line of Hedo Turkoglu and Rashard Lewis that killed the Cavs. It wasn't a coincidence that Rashard Lewis hit the game-winning three over Anderson Varejao (who gave him a ton of space) in game 1, or that Hedo Turkoglu hit the go-ahead basket over Sasha Pavlovic in game 2 before LeBron James hit the game-winner. The Cavs only have one athletic swingman with size, and that's LeBron James, so Turkoglu and Lewis were able to wreak havoc in the perimeter and in the post. You've got Delonte West wrestling with the much bigger Turkoglu and Ben Wallace and Varejao chasing around Lewis all game long, and it was chaos for the Cavs defense. It wouldn't have been a problem if Wally Szczerbiak were still alive.