DOES CAVALIERS’ SUPERSTAR STAY PUT, OR MAKE YET ANOTHER MOVE?

For much of this season, the sub-section of basketball analysis that is entirely devoted to the future whereabouts of one LeBron James has included plenty of inference.

Video clips were studied for signals that James was annoyed with his teammates or his coach and quotes were parsed for possible hidden meanings. When James said on Tuesday that he hoped people didn’t forget the Eagles’ Super Bowl given the roiling White House controversy, many Philadelphia fans took this as a signal that he was planning to sign with the 76ers. This is where we have been for about a year. LeBron bought a house in Los Angeles? LAKERS IT IS.

But on Thursday James said something about this future, and it didn’t take a lot of extrapolation to figure out his point. It’s not one that will provide a lot of comfort to his hometown fans.

He was asked about leaving Cleveland to form the super-team in Miami, and how he viewed the fact that he was now on the other side of it, trying to face down Golden State’s collection of killers.

“I felt like my first stint here I just didn’t have the level of talent to compete versus the best teams in the NBA,” James said, explaining that at the time, it was the Celtics and Spurs who weren’t just loaded with talent, but also very smart on-court teams.”

So not only do you have to have the talent, you have to have the savvy basketball minds as well, he said. “I knew that my talent level here in Cleveland couldn’t succeed getting past a Boston, or the San Antonios of the league or whatever the case may be.”

The Warriors already were one of those teams, a title-winning team that then went 73-9 and lost in the Finals. Then they added Kevin Durant, who is like a character created in a video game by someone who doesn’t mind cheating: Let’s make him seven feet tall, and he can shoot 32-foot threepointers!

“So now everyone is trying to figure that out,” James said. “How do you put together a group of talent but also a group of minds to be able to compete with Golden State, to be able to compete for a championship?”

You probably do not do that by staying in Cleveland. The question for James is whether he can really do that by going anywhere else. The other question is whether he wants to try. He already left the Cavaliers once for a better opportunity elsewhere, and it worked. He already came back once, when the team was young and assetrich, and that worked, too. How does he want to set up the next phase of his career: alongside another batch of all-stars in somewhere like Houston or San Antonio, or by recreating his second Cavs experience by joining a young and talented team like the Lakers or Sixers?

If the Warriors remain intact — and that’s a big if, since Durant, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green could all reasonably consider themselves underpaid relative to their NBA peers — then it’s not even clear that LeBron on some other team could truly threaten them. Would James, Chris Paul and James Harden be enough on the Rockets? (Related: Would Houston GM Daryl Morey even be able to pull this off without gutting the rest of the roster?) Would he have a better shot with Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons on the Sixers? Maybe, but it is worth noting that the Warriors have a pile of centres who are basically stacked up like cordwood on their bench. If they suddenly found themselves needing to foul the crap out of Embiid, they are uniquely suited to do it.

James is so good that at 33 years old and showing no signs of a drop-off, he could go anywhere and make that team a contender. Boston, Los Angeles (both teams!), even Toronto, where if nothing else he knows how to score at playoff time. He could also go nowhere and keep the Cavaliers a contender. They, too, could make a pile of moves and come back next season with something more likely to give Golden State a run.

But the problem with speculating about anything LeBron-related is that the NBA off-season has become, in a word, bananas. In two words: crazy bananas.

There are many big-ticket stars who could, at least in theory, be moved in the summer. Kawhi Leonard, Paul George, DeMarcus Cousins, Carmelo Anthony, any of the guards in Toronto, Portland and Washington. It’s not moving pieces around a chess board, but flipping the table over and then scrambling to see where all the pieces land. LeBron’s Decision III probably does not come until some of that begins to sort itself out.

Kevin Love was asked about the possibility of another super-team being formed this off-season, and he said he expects it might given the Warriors’ success. “That’s always going to be the talk because, I mean, somebody has to try to dethrone these guys and work their way to that.”

Love said that with Golden State so hard to beat, he predicts “a lot of movement.”

Including, perhaps, him. Or that other guy on his team.