Is it Really OK to Root for Another Team Just Because you Hate One Player on the Opposing Team?

Cavs for Mavs logo by Brett Nehls

The city of Cleveland really hates LeBron James. LeBron led the Cavaliers to an appearance in the NBA Finals and to the best record in the NBA 2 consecutive years, helping LeBron win MVP both years. After failing to reach the NBA Finals (not mentioning the Eastern Conference Finals) last year, the Cavaliers took as many steps as possible to keep LeBron James, now an unrestricted free agent. It started by firing coach Mike Brown, who LeBron did not exactly have a favorable opinion of. Next, Delonte West would be let go amidst rumors that West was sleeping with James' mother. LeBron apparently had already made up his mind, because less than 5 days after trades were declared open, LeBron announced on ESPN's special hour-long program that he would be joining the Miami Heat.

Since then, the Cavaliers crumbled away from grace so much that they clinched the worst record in the Eastern Conference and managed to get the #1 and #4 picks in the 2011 Draft. Cavaliers fan Brett Nehls took it upon himself to create the logo to the left, the Dallas Mavericks logo in Cavaliers colors with the words, "Defeat. Pure. Evil."

I'm not sure LeBron is exactly the personification of pure evil, but he is an arrogant person. LeBron has learned over this season to feed off the hate towards him, so it's kind of unwise at this point to antagonize him even more. This logo isn't anything new however, it's quite common in baseball for fans of one team that hate a former player to root for any team that plays against them. Generally, any time a star player is bought out by the Yankees, the former team's fans begin to learn why the Yankees are so hated, a new Yankees haters are created.

There's a bit of a phenomenon with logos with the wrong colors in baseball, too. Lids is a baseball cap store that will actually take special requests to take a team's cap and color it in another team's colors. Like these, for example:

Why on earth would someone wear a team's logo with a different team's colors? Well, it could be an instance of a displaced fan (like myself) who is in the rival city. I live and breathe L.A. every day, but I will always be a Giants fan. Therefore, the cap on the left would probably be well-suited to me. The cap on the right might apply to someone in San Francisco who is a Dodgers fan.

Of course, they could also be the result of an entire team moving to a new venue with pre-existing colors:

Bet you didn't remember this, did you?

Yeah, it's a fictional team in a fictional school with a fictional conflict over its mascot, but whatever. In D3: The Mighty Ducks, (most of) the USA Junior Goodwill Games national team are given scholarships (really?) to attend a private academy, similar to a co-ed boarding school, despite almost none existing in the US, being far more common in the British Commonwealth. The academy, Eden Hall, is undergoing an internal conflict over its mascot before the movie begins, with some students declaring that the use of the warrior as a mascot is racist and stereotypical. The Ducks feel that the warrior is a great mascot and can even be a generic warrior, not just a Native American. During the film, the varsity hockey team (because apparently Eden Hall is located in an area in the US where hockey is the #1 sport, which is nowhere) feels threatened by the Ducks, thinking that the Warrior will be gone and replaced by the Duck, and giving more reason for the people running Eden Hall to change its mascot. At the end of the film when the junior varsity team (the Ducks) defeat the varsity team, a banned unfurls, revealing the "Eden Hall Ducks," created by the Ducks' former coach, Gordon Bombay. Although the events after the film are left to our imagination, it's pretty obvious that the future of Eden Hall will be Ducks, not Warriors.

Don't Eden Hall's colors look suspiciously like the Cavaliers' colors? Could Brett Nehls have gotten his idea from The Mighty Ducks??? We may never know. What I do know is that this hat is infinitely more popular than the standard Dodgers cap in L.A.:

In a city where basketball is infinitely more popular than anything, it's actually fairly common to see Dodgers caps in Lakers colors, especially in an era where no one in L.A. actually gives a damn about the Dodgers.

So is it actually OK to root for a different team just because a hated player is on that team? I'm not actually sure. What I do know is that the Cavaliers didn't just lose LeBron James, they lost Zydrunas Ilgauskas, too! Ilgauskas has several records playing with the Cavaliers, including playing the most consecutive games for the Cavs. He jumped shipped to the Heat with LeBron, especially after the Cavs treated Ilgauskas like a piece of meat and traded him to the Wizards to get Antawn Jamison, even though Ilgauskas returned to the Cavs 30 days later. So in reality, the Cavs fans have two reasons to hate the Heat. Is it OK for them to root for the Mavericks?

...Upon further thought, I don't see why not, it's just a game. It's not like that could ever come back to bite them in the butt.