Paul George reportedly made it known previous year that he planned on joining the Lakers this summer, so the Indiana Pacers traded him to the Oklahoma City Thunder. His farewell letter from Monday, July 2 thanked James for ending the 52-year championship drought in Cleveland, and uniting “generations of Clevelanders, both living and passed” in the process.
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He spent four seasons with the Miami Heat before returning to the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2014.
It makes sense going to Los Angeles: He’ll be in movies and he can launch his own line of whatever he wants, while working out of his Brentwood mansion.
Ticket prices on StubHub jumped by over $2,000 just 20 minutes after James announced he meant to sign with the team Sunday night.
But no plans have been announced for what will go up next or when the banner will come down. The team was projected to have a little under $50 million to hand out.
Some think his four-year $153.3 million deal ($35.65M next season, then $37.43M, $39.21M and $41M in following years) was the overriding factor.
The Lakers had a large amount of cap space to work with.
The 32-year Chamberlain, a 10-year National Basketball Association vet, signed a then-record breaking five-year $1.25 million ($250,000 per season) contract.
Getting back to annual title contention, which is a given with James, will be hard. Later Sunday night, ESPN’s Chris Haynes reported that the Lakers agreed with free agent center JaVale McGee on a one-year, league-minimum contract.
Well, the Eastern Conference just got a whole lot easier. Leonard played just nine games last season due to injury but was worth approximately 17 wins above a replacement player in 2015-16 and 2016-17. James averaged 87.1 touches per game with Cleveland, the fifth-most in the National Basketball Association last season, and nearly certainly should take over the floor general responsibilities for Los Angeles: his points per touch were nearly triple that of Ball’s last season. “The odds have been stacked up against me since I was an adolescent”, James said at this year’s NBA Finals.
To that point, if you’re operating in the three-year window that you have LeBron guaranteed, can you really afford to waste one of those years with a roster that is probably, as now constructed, a lower-half playoff team in a loaded Western Conference? The Cavs became the first team to rally back from a 3-1 deficit in the Finals, and they did so against a team that won a league-record 73 games in the regular season. The Ceremonial Gold you brought Cleveland will forever be in our hearts.
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A couple years later, after word broke that he was leaving, he said goodbye on Instagram.
