No way LeBron walks away
On the matter of the athletic mortality of LeBron James, let’s just say we’ve arrived at a consensus.
Call it the sports-betting lock of the century. James’s Monday-night insistence that he will contemplate retiring in the off-season, this after his Lakers were swept from the Western Conference final by the Denver Nuggets, was about as convincing as one of his signature flops. The idea that basketball’s selfanointed king would walk away from the sport without fanfare while still operating at an all-NBA level seems beyond unlikely. As former teammate Kendrick Perkins put it on ESPN on Tuesday: “It’s not happening.”
The counter-argument, of course, is that there are health concerns, and maybe more than we’ll ever know. James, who’ll turn 39 in December, spent considerable energy battling a tendon tear in his right foot this season that may or may not require off-season surgery.
And it’s not that James, who’d be walking away from nearly $100 million (U.S.) in guaranteed salary, needs more money. He’s already earned an estimated $430 million in career salary.
No one is saying James isn’t within his rights to decide how and with whom he spends his time. And hey, in a season that saw him pass Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, maybe there’s a case to be made that he has little more to accomplish as a player.
Even still, given that his final game of the season saw him deliver a breathtakingly well-rounded performance in which he reeled off 40 points, 10 rebounds and nine assists while committing just one turnover and playing all but four seconds of the 48-minute duration – well, unless he’s of the mind to shock the world and hang up his Nikes at something at least resembling the top of his game, it’s hard to fathom how he won’t be back in an NBA uniform next season. Would a player who has defined himself by team success seriously consider allowing his last series as a pro to be such a one-sided failure? Even Lakers coach Darvin Ham, unfailingly deferential to his star by necessity, couldn’t help but have a laugh at James’s retirement musings.
“Coming off a tough loss like that, the work we’ve put in this season, I think I was ready to retire after last night, too,” said Ham, cracking a smile, as he met with reporters in L.A. on Tuesday.
Would a player who has never shied away from being the centre of attention allow his last moment on an NBA floor to consist of a quick congratulations to the Nuggets and a quicker walk to the locker room? It seems a stretch.
Said Perkins, speaking on ESPN’s “NBA Today”: “We all know this: LeBron James is not going out without one of those tours — those farewell tours.”
Indeed, if there’s an art to inserting oneself into the centre of the North American sports conversation, James is among his era’s Picassos. As gifted and dedicated as he is an athlete, he’s an equally deft selfpromoter. Which no doubt displeased the Nuggets, who, on the night they advanced to their first NBA finals in franchise history, became a relative sidebar to provocative stories speculating on James’s career plans.
Not that the Nuggets hadn’t grown accustomed to the feeling. As Nuggets coach Michael Malone said earlier in the series: “You win Game 1 of the playoffs, and all anybody talked about was the Lakers. The narrative wasn’t about the Nuggets. The narrative wasn’t about (Western Conference final MVP) Nikola (Jokic). The narrative was about the Lakers and their adjustments. So you put that in your pipe, and you smoke it.”
To be fair, there’ll be plenty of time to discuss the impressiveness of the Nuggets. The NBA finals don’t begin until June 1. Still, it’s not unfathomable that, on the slow news days between now and then, speculation on the future of James could upstage even the league’s championship series.
Certainly the threat of retirement could be used by James as leverage. This wouldn’t be the first time, with a potential exit on the horizon, his employer is on the clock to make the requisite moves to put a championship-worthy roster around him.
With that in mind, there’ve been rumblings James might encourage the Lakers to spend the off-season acquiring big-name talent. That Kyrie Irving, James’s teammate during a 2016 championship run in Cleveland and an impending free agent, sat courtside in L.A. for Game 4 only fuelled such speculation. Still, L.A.’s salary-cap sheet would require significant renovations to make it work. Irving’s highmaintenance presence had led to the opposite of success in recent stops in Dallas and Brooklyn. And on Tuesday Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka didn’t exactly give off the vibe of an executive inclined make such a radical move, speaking of the importance of maintaining “continuity,” especially given how the Lakers, who bounced back from a 2-10 start to advance to the league’s final four as the West’s No. 7 seed, had just lost to a Denver squad whose core has been together for years.
Would James really walk away because he didn’t get his way? Perhaps not when you factor in his long-stated desire to play in the NBA with his eldest son, Bronny, who recently committed to play college basketball at the University of Southern California. To make that dream a reality, James will need to be in the league until at least 2024-25 — not next season, but the season after that. And even then, there are no guarantees Bronny has what it takes to be a top pro — or that, as LeBron acknowledged this week, Bronny has any interest in the spotlight that would come with teaming with dad.
“Just because that’s my aspiration or my goal, doesn’t mean it’s his,” the elder James said of his son this week. “And I’m absolutely OK with that.”
Perhaps that’s true. Perhaps he’s finally realized he’s saddled his son with an unenviable heap of pressure and needs to lighten the load. Or maybe he realizes it’s in his interest to leave the door open to an impending retirement, even if everyone knows it’s not happening, even if everyone knows he’s still too just too good to go away.
As James also told ESPN on Monday: “I’m still better than 90 per cent of the NBA. Maybe 95.”