February is the deadest time for many a sports fan -- and especially for sports media. The Super Bowl has come and gone. March Madness is, well, next month, and while baseball fanatics cite the date that pitchers and catchers report for spring training as the rebirth of the year, those of us still digging out of three feet of snow don't necessarily see it that way.
And that's why sports talk radio spent pretty much the entire week talking about an historical argument about Lebron James, who'd just become the first player in NBA history to score 30+ points in 6 consecutive games while having a shooting percentage of at least 60 percent, and Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of his generation and, for many fans, of all time.
In one sense, though, James's run is a mere happenstance -- in connection with two different "events": it happened in the "dead zone" of bigtime sports events and it also happened as ESPN was publishing stories about Jordan's turning 50. With James going on his tear the very same week the network was marking Jordan's half-century mark, it just made perfect sense for pretty much every single ESPN radio and tv program to have something to say on the "Lebron v. MJ" debate, a debate that was media-generated before James played a minute of NBA ball.
There have been other interesting stories emerging this week, like the NBA players union firing its executive director, and tragically, the story of the South African paralympic star arrested for murdering his supermodel girlfriend, though this latter story broke at the end of the week, after all the hot air was already floating the balloon into another world. But all that mattered was the blather.
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