Cavs’ Owner Gilbert Doesn’t Regret LeBron Crackback Letter

Added on Oct 28, 2010 by Jason Kearney in

NBA

The latest default excuse for professional athletes who say things they later regret (or their advisors regret they said) is that they’ve been ‘hacked’. This explanation is usually made in reference to Twitter or Facebook posts and works like this–Pro athlete John Doe makes a hasty post such as:

“IMMA GONNA GO ALL JASON VORHEES ON RICHARD ROE PUT ON MY HOCKEY MASK AND CHOP OFF HIS HEAD WITH MY MACHETE”.

The media will pick up on it and report that ‘John Doe has threatened to decapitate Richard Roe’! At which point the aforementioned Mr. Doe will respond with a post that sounds strangely like a PR consultant wrote it:

“I regret any misunderstanding caused by the assertion that I meant bodily harm to Mr. Roe. My Twitter account was hacked.”

Despite a low incidence of ‘hacked’ Twitter accounts for non-spam purposes among the general public, the occurrence of such compromised accounts used for insults, challenges and other tirades among professional athletes is surprisingly high as this chart illustrates:

For that reason, whether or not you agree with Cleveland Cavaliers’ owner Dan Gilbert you’ve got to give him props for standing behind what he says. You’ll recall that Gilbert fired off a nasty crackback to LeBron James after the made ‘The Decision’ to go to Miami and ball with the Heat. He got some ‘Heat’ of his own for this, bringing out Jesse Jackson and the usual race card players who suggested that Gilbert thought of LeBron as a slave (albeit one he’d been paying an eight figure salary, violating the fundamental premise of slavery). Gilbert ended up paying a $100k ‘fine’ assessed by the NBA, but he stands by his statement:

“I don’t regret it. I think that’s the feeling that I had and most of Cleveland had. … I can’t back off on that. That letter was to the fans and the supporters of the Cavaliers and it wasn’t to the player that left, it wasn’t to the rest of the world. It wasn’t to anybody but them. I wanted them to understand not only how I felt but how everyone felt in the entire organization.”

“There are some of the things everybody has to make their own personal judgment on. It’s a subjective judgment when you watch a game or watch a tape. You make those kinds of judgments. I’d rather not answer directly. I’d really rather not comment what my feelings are any more, but everybody has to make their own decisions on that.”

Gilbert was also asked that despite his rancor toward James if he’d consider retiring his number down the road. His response:

“We haven’t even had that discussion on any player. I would assume that it’s something you would do when a player retires. It’s something that we haven’t addressed. I’m sure it will come up and as it comes up, we’ll address it.”

He did get in a subtle jab in reference to the Heat’s opening night loss to the Boston Celtics: