LeBron flexes his rich-guy muscle
Less than one season into LeBron James’ stint with the L.A. Lakers, the NBA megastar seems deeply unhappy with the team.
Recent reports have detailed how James wants head coach Luke Walton out, and wants to bring in superstar power forward Anthony Davis, even though, through Wednesday, Davis remained with the New Orleans Pelicans.
Davis has made plain his own frustrations with losing in New Orleans. He doesn’t want to wait for free agency to leave, but also wants control over his destination if the team trades him. On Monday, the New York Times reported Davis is willing to play for the Lakers, Clippers, Bucks or Knicks.
You could argue that both players have stepped way out of line. After all, they’re earning a combined $61.1 million this season (all dollars U.S.), and the duties spelled out in their contracts don’t include player personnel decisions. Beyond that, pro team sport athletes are understood to have agreed to an expensive trade-off. They earn big salaries but relinquish control over where they’ll play, and for how long. The setup is inconvenient, but players like Davis and James are compensated for it.
Except James has branded himself as “More Than an Athlete,” and Davis has similar aspirations. Whatever that label might signify, in this case it means recognizing that players such as James and Davis aren’t just famous but rich and powerful, and are willing to use that influence to make demands and have them met.
Outside of pro sports we don’t expect rich people to endure untenable situations, then console themselves with money. Everywhere else, wealth and power allow you to sidestep inconvenience, and shape circumstances to your desire. James and Davis understand that dynamic and are acting on it, the same way other wealthy operators do.
Phoenix city council recently passed a measure devoting $150 million in public money to a $230-million renovation of Talking Stick Arena, the Suns’ home court. And in Las Vegas, where the NFL’s Oakland Raiders are set to move in 2020, taxpayers will contribute $750 million to the $1.9-billion cost of a new football stadium, even though the franchise is valued at $2.42 billion and the local school board had to cut $43 million in spending to balance its budget.
Meanwhile, online retail giant Amazon was worth nearly $805 billion in November, when it received more than $3 billion in local and state tax breaks to locate its new headquarters in New York City.
All those concessions from local and state governments pivot on the influence and financial clout of the people making the demands. If they didn’t, any of us could talk local governments into cash subsidies for home renovations, or persuade city hall to waive our property taxes because our mere presence boosts the local economy. If they taxed us less, we’d argue, we could spend more at the local pet store.
And those proposals would resonate with local officials the way Lonzo Ball’s declaration — that his son Lonzo preferred Phoenix as a trade destination — did with Lakers decisionmakers. Which is to say, they wouldn’t.
If the NBA were the regular world, James would be Amazon, whose fame and clout win him favourable deals. Ball’s the individual citizen, who might wish for Amazon-type perks from the local government but never get them. If the Lakers want to trade Ball to Toronto, that’s where he’s going.
But James plays by rich-guy rules, and is beckoning Davis to join the club with this latest power move.
Discussing trade destinations in public earned Davis a $50,000 fine from the NBA, but the league also benefits from the drama.
Few storylines in mainstream North American sport could have competed with football for attention during Super Bowl week. Even the ongoing saga of unsigned baseball superstars Bryce Harper and Manny Machado remained a small subplot in comparison.
James and Davis managed it, though, grabbing headlines from the Super Bowl and winning the league untold sums in earned media, a metric marketers use to measure the dollar value of media exposure.
Last summer, Recode reported that James generated $21 million in earned media exposure for Goodyear because the company had its logo on his Cleveland Cavaliers jersey.
That James and Davis share an agent — Rich Paul of Klutch Sports — matters, but not in the sense that a potential trade to the Lakers represents a conflict of interest. Though James’ friendship with Paul dates back to the basketball star’s adolescence in Akron, Ohio, James does not have an ownership stake in Paul’s agency.
All three men exist in an ecosystem where players, coaches and high-profile broadcasters all have representation, so agent overlap is inevitable. But if James and Davis wind up benefitting from their shared connection with Paul, is that nepotism or networking?
Either way, we shouldn’t be surprised at a rich and powerful public figure making a deal that helps both him and his friends.
In that sense, nothing unfolding among Paul, James and Davis is dissimilar to everyday corporate life.
The difference is that James is now hip to the privilege other mega-rich people exercise every day, and he’s availing himself of it to acquire the teammates he wants instead of waiting for the ones management forces on him.