Is anyone else absolutely sick of hearing about the LeBron James/Carmelo Anthony “rivalry?” I know that I am. For the past year all I’ve read about for the NBA is “LeBron this” and “Carmelo that … ”

The media has gone way overboard and has ruined what could have been a great thing. They have beaten the LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony stories into the ground and now they’re already running out of things to say. All that we want to know is if these guys can play the game of basketball on the biggest stage: the NBA. I think they can, considering I called these two the best prospects to enter the draft since Tim Duncan, but that’s not what the media cares about. They care about marketing, and I guess the way these guys play basketball is not good enough to satisfy the masses.

They apparently need the juicy gossip that any true sports fan does not need to know. All I want to see are LeBron highlights and some analysis like they give other players such as Allen Iverson or Paul Pierce. There’s no need to compare LeBron and Carmelo on a game-by-game basis because the fact is that those guys don’t even care about how they compare to each other. Each of them has the same agenda that has nothing to do with stats – win games. That’s all these kids care about. They just want to win like everyone else in the league.

Forget the NBA; these guys need to fit into their own locker room. Each game is “LeBron night” or “Carmelo’s game” as the focus of the media is entirely on them. Forget the fact that both these teams are vastly improved from last year (Cavs got big Zydrunas Illgauskas healthy and Denver spent money in the free agent market to get star point guard Andre Miller), or that both have legit shots at claiming a spot in the post season (especially for Cleveland in the joke that is the Eastern Conference), all that matters to them is if LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony play and if they’ll fill up their notebook with quotes for their articles. To them, nothing else matters. They hound these kids for over an hour after the games hoping to just get a couple words with the kids. Why can’t they just be left alone, or at the very least, could the spotlight be turned off them just once? They’ve been on national TV more than Shaq, Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett combined.

These rookies have taken the spotlight away from three future hall of famers. Does anyone else see anything wrong with this? These guys are rookies. They haven’t even played a whole month in the NBA and they’re getting the royal treatment by the media. Can we wait for them to at least prove something before we give these guys everything? Before we anoint the “next Jordan” or the “next Magic,” can we wait at least a year or two to see how these players blossom? To call them the “Magic and Bird” for this generation is not only unfair to these players, but it’s also disrespectful to the greats to compare anyone to them.

They are basketball immortals, one of a kind players who no one will ever duplicate (although some may come close). Trying to force this into a rivalry was the last straw for me. When Magic entered the league after his sophomore season, he already had twice as much college experience as James and Anthony combined.

James will probably start in the All-Star game because it’s the fans who vote (the same fans who kept ignorantly voting Vince Carter into the game each year). But to compare these two kids to one of the most famous rivalries in the history of sports is wrong. Bird and Johnson didn’t like each other, but did respect each other on the court. But they also had something else in common: they competed against each other for championships (these teams won 34 games combined last year). Competing for a title brings the competitive juices flowing out. But not when both teams were terrible last year. In fact, James and Anthony actually LIKE each other. James has gone on to say that Anthony was “the brother that I never had.”

This is not going to be a heated rivalry and the media has to deal with that. Maybe the media should step back and let these guys get some breathing room before they suffocate this dynamic duo.

– Brian Pivonka is a freshman journalism major.