The life of LeBron
HERE is a warning for those of you who felt the summer-long kerfuffle between Real Madrid and Manchester United for the services of Cristiano Ronaldo was overly protracted: you should probably avoid basketball’s NBA for the next 14 months or so.
The reason is that the NBA’s best player LeBron James will be out of contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010 and already speculation regarding his future is dominating the relentless sports chatter that occupies American newspaper back pages, its blogs and messageboards and above all its talk radio and sports television networks.
Cleveland’s big-city rivals are already working strenuously to put themselves in the best possible position to lure “King James” to their franchise when his contract expires.
Why all the fuss? Perhaps an October survey of NBA team general managers can shed some light. When the people who hire and fire coaches, negotiate new contracts and sign new players were asked who will win the 2008-09 season’s Most Valuable Player award, 55.6% of them chose James.
Asked who they would sign if they were starting a franchise today and could sign anybody in the NBA, the general managers were even more emphatic in their selection, 66.7% putting James at the top of their shopping list.
And remember James is in a Cavaliers team that struggles to stay on the same court as their star man.
Take the 6ft 8ins forward out of the Cleveland line-up and the remaining Cavaliers form a decent but unspectacular unit. With him in it they have the potential to push the 2008 champion Boston Celtics all the way this season.
“Every time I watch the Cavs, LeBron is literally eight feet above the rim,” says an awestruck Tony Kornheiser, co-presenter of ESPN sports talk show ‘Pardon The Interruption’ and a columnist for the Washington Post.
“There have been a lot of people hyped and the drum beat started for this kid when he was a junior in high school but he has not only lived up to it he has gone beyond it. He’s better than everybody right now.”
James’ prowess came to national prominence when he was still at St Vincent-St Mary’s High School in Akron, during which time ESPN even broadcast two of his games. When the time came to consider his options, the time-honoured route of an NCAA hoops career as a student athlete was deemed unnecessary as the 18-year-old went straight from school to the NBA.
Such is the egalitarian nature of American sports that the worst teams in baseball, basketball and American football are given first pick when it comes to the hottest young prospects at the annual drafts and as fate would have it, the Cavaliers, just an hour up the road from his hometown, were the team to land the greatest talent of the class of 2003.
By the time of his drafting by Cleveland, James had already inked endorsement deals worth more than $100 million (€71.5m), the biggest of them all a $90m (€64.3m), seven-year contract with Nike.
The sports company was not the only entity enamoured by the teenager, who was immediately embraced as “King James” by downtrodden Cleveland fans.
He returned the compliment by quickly finding his feet in the NBA and finished his first season as NBA rookie of the year. It was not until the 2005-06 season, however, with a new owner in Dan Gilbert, head coach (Mike Brown) and general manager (Danny Ferry), that James found a way to get his team into the play-offs, a first visit since 1998.
Again, James enhanced his reputation but the Cavs were defeated in the second round by Detroit. The following campaign, in 2006-07, marked the high point so far for the James era in Cleveland as he guided the Cavs all the way to NBA finals, only to be swept 4-0 by the San Antonio Spurs.
Last season spelled a step back to inconsistency as James and Co. bowed out in the second round of the play-offs to eventual champions the Boston Celtics but it is this lack of team success to match the personal milestones achieved by James that has many wondering if it is time he started looking elsewhere for on-court success.
The big guns on both coasts and some in-between certainly think it is worth exploring the possibility that James might want to jump ship in 2010 and many teams have begun to manoeuvre into the best possible position to make their play.
None more so than the New York Knicks.
James has done little to quash the speculation, particularly as regards New York. He is often photographed wearing Yankees baseball caps, even at Cleveland Indians games during the summer, and when he played at Madison Square Garden in 2007 against the Knicks he wore pinstriped basketball shoes in honour of the famous baseball team.
Over Thanksgiving weekend this last month, when the Cavs arrived back in the Garden, James again did little to kill off the rumour mill and was cheered to the rafters by Knicks fans fed up with their own, desperately poor team.
NBA legend and television analyst Charles Barkley took exception to the love-in at the Garden, saying: “If I was LeBron I would shut the hell up. I think it’s disrespectful to the game, I think it’s disrespectful to the Cavaliers. James response was to call Barkley “stupid”.
Kornheiser’s ESPN co-host and fellow Washington Post columnist Michael Wilbon, understood Barkley’s argument but was not prepared to lay the blame at James’s door.
“I am offended as a consumer of basketball in this country that (James) goes to New York and he is welcomed like a future star of the New York Knicks,” Wilbon said.
“I’m offended by that but I will differentiate from Charles in this way: I don’t hear LeBron saying any of this.
“I see Nike doing it… I think the league should tell people to shut the hell up but I don’t hear LeBron saying anything but ‘hey, I play for Cleveland right now’.”
What James has said on the subject has been guarded. “I think you do what is best for you and your career,” James said of his future recently. “If a franchise decides to give up on a player it’s okay, so we have to do what’s best for us.”
That spoke volumes for Kornheiser, who said: “I’m reading two words into that statement — ‘I’m Gone’.”
Bloomberg.com sports business columnist Scott Shosnick agrees but does not believe a move to New York would be for the money, as large as any deal with the Knicks could be.
“No other team can pay him any more than the Cleveland Cavaliers so if this is going to be principally a money decision, then he stays in Cleveland,” Shosnick said.
“They can offer him a six-year contract starting at about $17m (a year with 10.5% per cent annual raises. So if it is going to be a money thing then he stays put. But I don’t think it will be for LeBron.
“Remember, wherever LeBron plays they’re a contender. He makes them a contender. The question is, will another team have another piece (in the jigsaw) kind of like Kobe (Bryant) and Shaq (Shaquille O’Neal, at the Lakers 1996-2004) to help him get over the hump? That, I think, is what he’s going to look at.”
Should James bowl up to the Garden in 2010 he will have to contend with the famously chaotic Knicks ownership, led by James Dolan, CEO of Cablevision, a media and telecommunications company that owns Madison Square Garden, and both the Knicks and New York Rangers ice hockey teams.
The Knicks may be the most valuable NBA franchise for the fourth year in a row according to Forbes magazine, worth $613m (€438m), but Dolan presides over a club that has failed to record a winning season in seven consecutive seasons and is well on the way to an eighth.
Not only that, Dolan’s Knicks management team were last year embroiled in a damaging sexual harassment lawsuit against a female former executive that cost his organisation $11.5m (€8.2m) in damages, and which this year is paying its current star Stephon Marbury the remaining $21.9m (€15.6m) of his contract while intentionally keeping him on the bench.
Is that really the sort of organisation James would want to align himself with for the prime of his NBA career?
Unfortunately, we all have a long time to wait for the answer.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
