The NBA moratorium doesn’t close until July 6 and nothing is official, but Nick Friedell reported Thursday what most of us suspected was inevitable: LeBron James is down to Golden State and Cleveland, “about 50/50,” and everyone else should probably stop holding their breath. Rich Paul confirmed LeBron is leaving the Lakers after eight years. “[This is] the first time that LeBron James is making a decision pressure free,” Paul said. “He’s won already. This is strictly for his happiness.”
https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/2071988062259736871
That framing — pressure free, strictly for happiness — is the tell. Because the rational case for Golden State is pretty much airtight. Steph Curry, Draymond Green, Steve Kerr. LeBron and Steph already won Olympic gold together in Paris. The Warriors are a proven postseason infrastructure, and LeBron at 41 is still averaging 20.9 points, 7.2 assists, and 6.1 rebounds per game. He can still play meaningful playoff basketball. On pure basketball logic, Golden State offers the clearest path to another ring.
https://twitter.com/NickFriedell/status/2072756408085574059
The Warriors’ financial vehicle is the $15.1 million non-taxpayer midlevel exception, which is not exactly a max contract, but Rich Paul said this isn’t about money. And yet — the original Warriors plan hinged on pairing LeBron with Anthony Davis. Without AD, ESPN’s reporting indicates Golden State isn’t “top of the list” for LeBron the way it might have been a month ago. The pieces shifted. The math got murkier.
Which is right around where LeBron’s emotional geography tends to take over.
Cleveland is Akron. Cleveland is the 2016 Finals, the 3-1 comeback, the franchise-saving championship he promised and delivered to a city that had waited 52 years. Cleveland is the storybook. It is also, if we’re being clinical about it, a team that already built a playoff core without him — one that would have to reconfigure around a 41-year-old, however good he still is. The rational case for the Cavaliers is nostalgia with some basketball attached to it.
https://twitter.com/KingJames/status/2072027386737025132
Here’s the thing about LeBron’s decision history: he has never made the purely rational call. In 2014, he left a loaded Miami team — the easier, likelier path to more titles — and went back to Cleveland for legacy reasons. In 2018, he bypassed Houston, which had just gone 65-17 with James Harden dropping 30 a night, and chose Los Angeles for the platform, the movies, the empire. Both decisions were defensible. Neither was the cold-blooded optimal basketball play. My brother texts me Suns highlights from Phoenix like they’re dispatches from another era, and even he — not exactly a LeBron apologist — agreed last night: “He’s going Cleveland, isn’t he.” I think he’s right.
The rational case for Golden State is real. The emotional case for Cleveland is realer.
LeBron James does not end his career as a mercenary. He ends it as a myth.
