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The Roc Boys of the NBA
3 Reasons LeBron and his crew are the greatest group in sports.
“Black entrepreneur, nobody did us no favors
Nobody gave us shit, we made us
The Rap Pack, I’m Sinatra, Dame’s Sam Davis
Biggs the smart one on the low like Dean Martin.”
Jay-Z, I Did It My Way
We know, y’all. Jay-Z is the Michael Jordan of recording. Few would argue against that at this point. But what if we shifted that musical comparison and applied it to the NBA? Not a novel concept, true, but it is one that deserves attention. Michael Jordan has a lot of eerie comparisons to Hov, but in my eyes there is one man whose legacy is more comparable. LeBron, Jay’s good friend, is more like Jay-Z than one may think.
Rather than get into a back and forth over averages, records broken, and influence on and off the court, I’ll just say this: What Jay-Z and his crew did with Rocafella reminds me an awful lot of what LeBron and his crew did with LRMR Marketing. Both were revolutionary choices born out of necessity, both garnered a lot of criticism and both ended up changing the landscape of their prospective industries. Peep game.
Reason #1: They made a lane where there wasn’t one.