Joakim Noah wasn’t the biggest fan of LeBron James while they were rivals on the Chicago Bulls and Cleveland Cavaliers, respectively. <\/p>\n
“I hated this guy,” he told NBAT2 (8:50 mark) in a video about revisiting Cleveland. “I hated his haircut. I hated the way he looked. I hated the way he talked. I hated everything about him. His interviews made me cringe. I ain’t like nothing about him.”<\/p>\n
OK, but tell us how you really felt, Joakim.<\/p>\n
Noah’s Bulls faced James’ Cavaliers multiple times in his first three seasons in the NBA, including a first-round playoff matchup in the 2009-10 season. Cleveland won that series 4-1. <\/p>\n
James then departed for the Miami Heat before returning to Cleveland in the 2014-15 season. The Cavaliers again got the best of Noah and the Bulls in those playoffs, knocking them out of the Eastern Conference Semifinals in six games.<\/p>\n
So you could understand how James wasn’t exactly Noah’s favorite person, at least during his career. Nor was Cleveland Noah’s favorite city, a place he said wasn’t anybody’s idea of a vacation destination following a playoff loss to the Cavs.<\/p>\n
“Those were the bitter words of someone who had just lost a hard-fought battle,” he acknowledged. “Do I regret it? Honestly, no. I’m not someone who spends a lot of time living with regrets. I know where those words came from, and they’re part of my story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joakim Noah wasn’t the biggest fan of LeBron James while they were rivals on the Chicago Bulls and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":702119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3772],"tags":[7,306,305,193,3846,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-702118","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cleveland-cavaliers","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-cavaliers","10":"tag-cleveland","11":"tag-cleveland-cavaliers","12":"tag-clevelandcavaliers","13":"tag-nba"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116360094100520327","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/702119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}