Thanks, LeBron: Heat Fires Season Ticket Salespeople

Dwyane Wade backtracks, apologizes

(NEWSER) - Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat is scrambling to apologize after he said a losing streak by the newly LeBron James-enhanced team would "be like the World Trade is coming down again." The original source no longer includes quite that wording, New York notes, and Fanhouse is blaming the discrepancy on a "transcription error." In a statement to the Miami Herald , Wade says, "I was simply trying to say that losing a few basketball games should not be compared to a real catastrophe." More»

Miami's loss shatters James' reputation

(NEWSER) - Sports columns everywhere are thick with schadenfreude today after LeBron James yet again vanished during the fourth quarter to hand Dallas the NBA title . Here’s what people are saying:

• LeBron is still royalty, but he’s not a king—he’s “an emperor with no clothes,” writes Mark Heisler of the LA Times . “James came out firing and making … then faded into the mists.” The Mavericks have exposed him, and everyone will keep him out of the lane from now on.

Meanwhile Dan Gilbert rejoices over Mavericks win

(NEWSER) - LeBron James gave his detractors a whole new reason to hate him in his post-game press conference last night, essentially telling them that he’d rather have his life than theirs. “At the end of the day, all the people that was rooting on me to fail … they gotta wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today,” he said. “They got the same personal problems that they had today. And I’m gonna continue to live the way I wanna live.” More»

Miami Heat crush Cleveland Cavaliers

(NEWSER) - Turns out it takes more than boos to win a basketball game. Because Cleveland Cavalier fans definitely delivered a flawless booing performance last night—raining down jeers like, “Akron hates you!” and “Scot-tie Pip-pen!”—and it wasn’t enough. LeBron James played spectacularly, racking up a season-high 38 points to lead the hated Heat to an easy 118-90 victory, the New York Times reports. More»

Cleveland 'not letting go' of suspicions against Heat

(NEWSER) - The Cleveland Cavaliers think the Miami Heat violated tampering rules in their pursuit of LeBron James, and they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to prove it. Cavs owner Dan Gilbert has hired a Midwestern law firm to investigate the courtship, sources tell Yahoo! Sports . He intends to build up a healthy pile of evidence from all the way back to 2008 before he requests an NBA investigation. More»