“I would like him to make his announcement already, so we can finish the schedule,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said last week of LeBron James. “As you might imagine, the teams are calling us, the networks are calling us, and everybody wants to lock in the schedule. But it will influence how we set the schedule, how we set opening week, Christmas Day, etc. So I need him to make a decision.”
According to reporting in Cleveland, LeBron had already been preparing to announce where he would play next season. But Silver’s remarks irritated his camp, so the announcement was delayed — a way of demonstrating that nobody could pressure him and that LeBron James still operated entirely on LeBron James’ timetable. The claim came from Cleveland radio host Andy Baskin and was never independently confirmed.
It is exhausting just to read that paragraph. But late-career LeBron James has become an exhausting person.
He is one of the greatest athletes in history. His career is without parallel. He is recognized in every corner of the world. He is a businessman. A billionaire. A happily married family man. He is 41 years old and has gray in his beard. And despite all of that, LeBron James still appears to require a constant supply of attention.
It is difficult to know whether Silver’s comments truly angered him. The commissioner had just announced that the entire league was waiting for LeBron’s decision — and that, after all, is precisely the position LeBron has wanted to occupy throughout his career.
The festival surrounding every James “decision” has always been meticulously planned and carefully orchestrated. In that respect, the man has not changed by a millimeter since he was 25 and took his talents to South Beach.
LeBron has now made his choice, signing with the Philadelphia 76ers and describing it as his “last decision.” The identity of his new team inevitably shaped the reaction, and the internet received the news with its customary restraint.
But even had he chosen to return home to Cleveland — the one decision that would have been almost impossible not to embrace — it would not have erased the deeply sour aftertaste left by yet another migraine-inducing LeBron drama.
Advanced-stage narcissism
In 2010, after a season in which Cleveland finished with the NBA’s best record but lost in the Eastern Conference semifinals, LeBron decided that he no longer had the patience — and perhaps not the character — to keep trying with his hometown team.
So he left for Miami.
Naturally, he did not do so before staging an exceptionally ugly reality-television spectacle, culminating in an hourlong ESPN special. “The Decision” was a public-relations catastrophe that pursued James for years.
He eventually overcame it for one simple reason: He was an extraordinary basketball player. He led the Heat to four consecutive NBA Finals and won two championships.
LeBron finally left the soap opera surrounding his move to Miami behind when he decided to return home to Cleveland in 2014. That festival was excessive too, but at least it felt authentic and moving.
James published a personal essay in Sports Illustrated, explaining that his connection to Ohio was greater than basketball and that he wanted to bring Cleveland a championship.
(Photo: AP Photo/Mark Duncan)
That is exactly what he did. Along the way, he built an exhilarating rivalry with Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors before delivering the Cavaliers’ championship in 2016.
Nothing else LeBron has accomplished, before or since, approaches that one title — won in the only place that has ever loved him completely and unconditionally.
LeBron’s move to the Los Angeles Lakers came with comparatively little noise. He was already 33, and it felt somewhat like the beginning of a gradual transition into retirement. His Hollywood production company was growing, and his family liked the California weather.
But with every passing year, the true scale of the physical anomaly known as LeBron James became clearer. He remained one of the league’s best players and did what every great star who joins the Lakers is expected to do: He brought them a championship.
Today, LeBron is no longer one of the NBA’s best players, and even his seemingly impossible body has begun to creak. He remains an excellent player, however, and one who could certainly complete the puzzle for a championship contender.
Players belonging to James’ exceedingly rare category find retirement extraordinarily difficult. But difficulty walking away does not justify staging another chapter of this ritual — especially when it accompanies the powerful impression of narcissism that LeBron has projected in recent years.
(Photo: Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images)
That includes pressuring the Lakers to draft his son and then waiting to leave until Bronny James’ guaranteed contract for the following season had taken effect. Bronny’s $2.29 million salary became fully guaranteed shortly before LeBron informed the Lakers that he would play elsewhere. There is no verified evidence proving that LeBron timed his departure for that reason, but the sequence inevitably fueled that perception.
It is such small behavior from such a monumental player.
A player like LeBron James should never have needed a career encompassing five separate stints with three — and now four — different teams. LeBron should have been like Michael Jordan, Stephen Curry or Kobe Bryant: the defining player of one franchise, winning four or five championships there and ending his career unconditionally loved by that team’s supporters and admired by everybody else.
LeBron will always receive the immense respect he deserves. He has built a reasonable case for the greatest basketball career in history, one whose longevity and accumulation of achievements may never be matched.
But the relentless need for attention, even now, is exhausting.
More than anything, it is sad.