Since linking up with your Los Angeles Lakers, All-NBA forward LeBron James has led the team to his record-tying 17th NBA championship (his fourth), and captained another solid team with the league’s best defense. The 37-year-old (who turns 38 tomorrow) has been named to four of his 18 All-Star teams in Los Angeles, with a fifth seemingly inevitable barring injury.
But for the second straight season, largely because of the $47.1 million albatross contract of a still-solid-but-totally-overpaid Russell Westbrook, the team is far below a .500 and seems likely to fall out of even the play-in tournament hunt.
Bill Plaschke of The Los Angeles Times thinks that James, and the team, should move on from each other, despite reaffirming their supposed mutual commitment during the offseason with a lucrative new extension. Plaschke notes that James’ heated comments following the team’s 112-98 loss to the Miami Heat on the road last night, in which he pointedly indicated he did not “finish my career playing at this level from a team aspect,” seemed to suggest that James is finally beginning to consider greener pastures.
James inked a two-year, $97.1 million extension with LA that runs through the 2023-24 NBA season, with a third-year option for 2024-25. He is unable to be flipped this year, but could be moved at the official start of the 2023-24 season next summer.
Plaschke writes that, in light of these new comments, the Lakers front office will be able to trade James without having to worry about the optics of their moving on from one of the best players ever. Now that James himself has stated that he wants to be on a championship-caliber team, and given that this Lakers club even with Davis is clearly far from that (thanks mostly to what the team sacrificed to add Westbrook), LA will be more free to move James and get back hopefully a king’s ransom of future draft equity for the King.
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