The NBA is not a business you get into because you want to make money. Despite his desire to own the Golden State Warriors, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison resisted the urge to buy the team, feeling it was so overpriced it would never hold that kind of value. As a result, the NBA has always attracted owners more interested in their own vanity than success. Because their owners were such terrible businessmen that they couldn't properly evaluate the worth of their players, the NBA created a salary cap in the early 1980s. It's been a feature of every collective bargaining agreement since, and has turned the NBA into a profitable business for every owner in the league.
If they had paid Michael Jordan what he was worth, if you measured it by how much money he made for Jerry Reinsdorf and the Bulls, he would be among the most compensated people at their job in the history of mankind, second perhaps only to whoever originally invented the concept of a bloodsucking dead man.
For the money he made for the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, for the value he added to the franchise that the criminally stupid Dan Gilbert bought and now has run into the ground, for the way they surrounded him with consistently inferior players, millions demanded he return to the team that drafted him into this indentured servitude.
A man has an ability that no other person has, an African-American man, and a bunch of white people, some already dead, decide how much he should be paid. What a world! And when he takes a week to decide, and these pathetic owners shuffle to Cleveland to beg for his services, and every media outlet in the world reports on it, he's the villain. Did he somehow force people to watch his television special? Was it compulsory? Or did the interest for a man sitting in the chair completely blow away the rating for our incompetent president's State of the Union, the Stanley Cup, and 'Modern Family'?
The city of Cleveland fed off the talent of one man. They attended his games, bought his jerseys. For him to find out they only cared what the name on the jersey was. No shock or surprise that they shouldn't care about the person who created everything, just to the extent to which he could provide them with happiness.
There is a perverse need in this country to tear down the greatest of us. So we take a macabre pleasure in the fall of Tiger Woods; that at least can be justified by the fact that Woods is a spoiled moron who goes after babysitters and porn stars while his children are at home. But that's not LeBron James.
LeBron James didn't come from privilege. He came from a single mother; but it is more accurate to say that he raised his own mother. From the youngest age he met people who wanted to use his talents for their own personal gain. For the seven years of his life that Dan Gilbert and his incompetent organization stole from James, the man received nothing but insulting epithets and literal curses. Watching James reduce powerful billionaires to tearful missives was the real fun of the week (just one week!) that he had to debate his entire future.
No shock, no surprise that he didn't want to return to a badly mismanaged Cavaliers franchise that traded for an ancient Shaquille O'Neal and a creaky, terribly overpaid Antawn Jamison and believed those were the right pieces, as Kobe Bryant became the second-best player on his own team he had so much talent around him. LeBron's supporting cast was so inferior that his trip to the Finals several years earlier should have been viewed as an act of God.
He played for free in the Olympics, making a fortune for a mysterious conglomerate that refuses to pay athletes who make them untold fortunes. He became close with other men in his same situation, under pressure in the respective cities that drafted them into servitude. No shock or surprise that they should feel a brotherhood. Mark Cuban, America's richest moron, accuses the players of tampering. The players were the ones controlling the market, he says, and has the nerve to complain. This is the equivalent of a price-fixer in the oil business screaming at a bucket of the black stuff that refuses to flow into his pipe.
NBA owners are men who are never contradicted in their world. But without the saleable product, they're nothing. LeBron wasn't just a product; he was the product. He's had seasons that rank with the best players in the history of the NBA; Kobe Bryant could only play as well in his daydreams while he forced himself on women at high altitude. LeBron never walked into such scandals. He's been with the mother of his children since she was the mother of his children. He takes care of his friends and family, he's respectful to the fans and the media. Michael Jordan was and is the biggest dick in the universe, so you can see where LeBron went wrong.
Knowing his free agent decision attracted interest that was global in nature, he decided to televise it and donate the price of the ads to charity. Does the all-white media that resents the success of a wealthy 25-year old African-American praise him for this incredibly unselfish decision? Do they thank him for the attention he brings to their whining sports talk shows during one of the deadest parts of the year in that business? No. They make him a villain, without explaining just what it is he did to deserve such a label.
Here's how it works: they can use LeBron to drive their ratings, to attractive viewers and sell ads to companies without paying him a dime, for an untold amount of billable hours. But if he takes ONE HOUR and donates the money to the Boys and Girls Club of America, he's the hypocrite and fraud! White America should take a look in the mirror, and SI's Chris Mannix in particular should dig a hole for himself and cut his wrists.
They tore down Michael Jordan, too, but few people remember it. They mocked him for playing baseball, even though the fact that someone who hadn't played since he was in high school competing at that minor league level was itself an incredible athletic achievement. The tendency to hate anyone who can do what others can't is the central focus of Ayn Rand's hilarious novel 'Atlas Shrugged', where the man known as John Galt creates a hideaway for all the people who actually do the things that move the world.
Ayn's bright idea, perennially misunderstood by her many detractors, was that we should all want to be great. We should all want to move the world in some way. We should want to be the doers, the makers, the producers. She also believed that we weren't all equal. In fact, she didn't have to believe it; she knew it was true. The very idea that we think everyone needs a college education is based on the opposite of Rand's idea, and look where it has gotten us.
LeBron never went to college. This was before the idea that men who were ready to make a living playing basketball had to play for free at American universities because the owners wanted to make more money by turning these players into box office attractions without spending a dime. Despite never attending college, LeBron is a better business mind than either Dan Gilbert or Mark Cuban, who told LeBron that his decision to go to Miami "ruined his brand." This is the same guy whose big offseason move was giving his team's backup center $60 million, right?
Cuban did make one savvy move, which is living in a state without an income tax. Strange that he and the people of New York blame LeBron for wanting to do the same. No one needs the amount of money that some people have (although Dwayne Wade is reportedly broke), but when you prevent the wealthy from living in your state by stealing too much of their money, you deserve the consequences. Every state should want millionaires, every poor person should want to live among as many of them as possible. Living among the wealthy benefits everyone.
No doubt this sudden realization is part of the reason Cleveland residents are angry. Had they only realized it sooner, they might have passed laws that lowered taxes on the wealthiest citizens in order to have more of them. Zero percent of LeBron's new maximum contract will be available to those in Ohio who honestly need help from the government. As California found out, it's better to get a little from a lot than a lot from a little. The first way, everyone's a lot happier.
Wouldn't you want a week to decide where to spend the next five years of your life? Instead, LeBron announced his decision the very first day he was able to sign a contract with a club. He didn't find New York or Chicago's massively punitive tax codes very welcoming, and why should he?
It was Kevin Garnett who made the biggest impact on LeBron. In exactly the same fashion as LeBron, Garnett was a phenom, the first player drafted directly out of high school, answerable only to himself, rail-thin with a work ethic that surpassed that of his competitors. (Do you think this sport is easy? LeBron just makes it look that way.)
Like LeBron, Garnett went to one of the worst franchises in the NBA, and toiled for years when penny pinching owner and general troglodyte Glen Taylor failed to surround him with anyone who could play besides Sam Cassell.
Since he was traded and didn't leave of his own volition but rather because Taylor didn't want to resign him as a free agent, Garnett never experienced the kind of enmity in Minnesota LeBron faces in Cleveland. But he did tell LeBron to leave while he could before he became a shell of himself without any championships to show for it. They picked on Garnett the same way they did LeBron, despite the fact he was performing at a historic level in the shadow of more publicized players with half his skill level in bigger media markets.
In his bizarre but revealing interview with Jim Gray, LeBron said as much. He knows the game better than Dan Gilbert, better than Mark Cuban. It's not because he plays it, it's because he's smarter than they are and he loves basketball in a way they never will. It's unclear how successful the SuperFriends will be in Miami, but analysts who predict LeBron made a bad financial decision are out of their minds. This team is going to make more money for the NBA than any before a certain edition of the Chicago Bulls. There hasn't been must-see television like this in the league since one man's slivery moustache rose high in the air.
Keith Law: I could certainly be swayed, but not by cowspit arguments like "most feared." I've admitted to being on the fence about Dawson, and I'm still on the fence about Larkin for next year. I also think you can craft a better-than-expected case for Galarraga, which would probably put me on the wrong side of the aisle from other basement-dwelling stat geeks. 
Keith Law: "Clutch" is supposed to be "better when the pressure's on." That means worse when the pressure's off, to me, at least. And that's a good point about Manny - I wonder if they'd say that if he was a non-Latino American who only spoke English. "Less comfortable in English" does not equal "stupid." 
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