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6 year oldLebron James' decision to leave the Cavaliers for the Lakers isn't surprising — but his 2010 move changed the NBA forever
Eight years ago, LeBron James, granted his freedom to choose his NBA employer for the first time in a career that had already earned him two MVP awards and that had energized the previously moribund Cleveland Cavaliers, announced that he was leaving Cleveland and joining his friend Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat. Or, as James put it at the time, “taking my talents to South Beach.”
It is difficult to recall a bigger public relations fiasco for a superstar athlete that didn’t involve a felony charge. James was vivisected by Cleveland fans (who burned his jersey in the streets), by then-NBA commissioner David Stern (who called the decision “ill-conceived”), by Michael Jordan himself (who mocked James by noting that he’d never join up with his rivals; he’d try to beat them) and by essentially every sportswriter on the planet, to whom James had just handed an easy half-decade of hot takes. One of these sportswriters was me, who wrote that what became known as simply "The Decision" “treated the millions of people watching like stupid, mindless consumers, empty lemmings ready to follow Sport into the abyss.”
The reaction so far to James’ Lakers deal is more muted, for sure. Part of this is because it’s not much of a surprise — once a leaver, always a leaver, particularly when the Cavaliers looked so feeble around him during the 2018 NBA Finals. But there’s also a sense that during the better part of the last decade professional basketball has changed a lot. And James himself is the primary reason for that.
In the eight years since James’ decision, the idea of athlete autonomy has caught on in the public consciousness.
Indeed, in the eight years since James’ decision, the idea of athlete autonomy — of a player having more control and power over his or her own career, of not just being an employee of an owner who is not the one out running and dunking — has caught on in the public consciousness in a way it had failed to before. James’ move was the instigating act.
When James went to Miami to create his superteam, it led to other superteams, some successful, some not. (Derrick Rose at one point thought his New York Knicks were a superteam, which just makes you sad). It led unquestionably to the Golden State Warriors, the true dynasty of this era. Without James’ move, it’s unlikely that Kevin Durant, perhaps the game’s second-best player, would have ever gone to the Warriors — a team that had already won one championship, a team that is renowned for its chemistry and faith in its players rather than an utilitarian top-down system, a team with a coach who will tell anyone who will listen that it’s a player’s league, not a coach’s one.
The NBA union has also grown more powerful since The Decision, and, tellingly, the NBA itself has ceded to athlete empowerment, selling individual players rather than teams and encouraging players to express themselves both on and off the court. The NFL will fine players who don’t stand for the flag; the NBA’s biggest star can call the president of the United States “U bum” on Twitter, and be praised almost unilaterally among NBA circles for it. (It even shut Trump up.) The NBA is a player’s league now, and it’s better for it.
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