Transcription
Puppis, so I remember where I was when LeBron James decided in the offseason after the 2010 postseason that he was going to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and become a member of the Miami Heat. I remember the reaction and the response, not only of the NBA fans but also the insiders who covered professional basketball, whether it be in the mainstream liberal media or amongst the teams themselves. How they viewed LeBron James's decision, not only was shocked but also with disdain. And I remember thinking to myself, "Wow, I've never seen a person who exercised their free agency rights treated with so much vitriol." And one had to wonder why.
All right, I knew why. It was because he was a so-called black man who decided that he was going to understand how much he was worth, and he was going to stay in control over his life. He was not going to allow himself to be tied down to a franchise and used, basically, as a well-paid mascot and minstrel. And I always respected LeBron for his decision. Did he most likely not execute it in the right way? I think that there are ways to leave a person or any other entity. There are ways to handle things when you know that you're not one who deals with backlash as well. And LeBron is not someone who deals with backlash as well. He tried to embrace a darker side of his persona, of his being, in that 2010-2011 season, and it didn't work out because it wasn't him. He's not Kobe; he can't deal with being hated. He's not Floyd Mayweather; they can embrace that dark path because they're built for it. He wasn't.
And I remember many of the conversations that I had with people in my family or at my workplace, and I found myself not engaging in long conversations with them because I don't engage in long conversations with people whose mindset I see is set in a certain way, is calibrated a certain way. You can't change how people think. Maybe you can alter what they think if you can present enough empirical data. But I'm someone who believes that if you can convince someone within 10 to 15 minutes, you're wasting your time trying to go on for two hours. But I do remember telling certain people that if there was another corporation that wanted you, and they had a better location, better vacation plan, and higher pay scale, higher salary to offer you, you'd leave too. And it wouldn't be about loyalty. For some reason, because these sports teams represent cities, people start to align these athletes as property of the city. And I have no idea why they do that because when the teams trade these top-level athletes, nobody says, "Oh, why did you trade him?" Especially if they're getting back something better.
But anyway, Stephen Smith, Max Kellerman had a very interesting conversation pertaining to how LeBron's decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2010 offseason influenced and impacted the NBA, whether or not it was something that was beneficial or detrimental. So they're gonna talk about, "Well, ma, you clearly read that wrong because you said the same thing twice. The first thing he said was he wants to go to a place where he can win, and also he's going to factor in his family. Those are the two things that are of optimal importance to him." As they should be. Or hurt the NBA the way LeBron has been able to utilize his leverage. Let me say this first before Steven Naismith answers: Without a doubt, it has helped the NBA players. While we're talking about if LeBron James's decision helped the NBA overall, that's a whole other perspective because now we're getting down to certain logistical aspects of the league and whether or not they want players to have a mindset like LeBron James and be more willing to execute on their rights to mobility.
We all know that if you're a franchise like the Indiana Pacers and you have a Paul George, or you're the San Antonio Spurs, you have Kawhi Leonard, or you're the Oklahoma City Thunder and you have a Kevin Durant or Russell Westbrook, those are quote-unquote small market franchises. If possible, you want to limit the opportunity for mobility for those players because you're always concerned that the Miami Heat might be calling, the Boston Celtics might be calling, the LA Lakers might be calling, the New York Knicks might be calling. Those are locations that are considered more quote-unquote illustrious. So, there's definitely a certain element or component of insecurity amongst the smaller market franchises that may still be upset with what they think LeBron James started. But from a player standpoint, there's no doubt in my mind that they benefited from what LeBron James did because he had the courage to follow his convictions and to make a bold move. Like they say, fortune favors the bold.
It's not a popular position to take. I don't know if I've heard anybody take this, but Max, I want to be totally, totally serious here with you about what I know about this story. This is, and I want to preface my comments by saying, if LeBron James's friends, NBA people, are listening, I am not blaming LeBron James one bit. He has a right to be a free agent. He has a right to go where he wants to go, do what he wants to do, etc., etc. And he is not at fault. He's to be afforded the exercise and the business savvy that he has since exercised. But we can't ignore the fallout from it. Look at the timetable. Are you ready for this, Max? March 2010-2011. That's when LeBron James went to Miami for that season. Okay? So, in the summer of 2010, he announces he's taking his talents to South Beach. It enrages Dan Gilbert. A few months later, we have a situation. I'm sorry, a year later, we have a situation where we have a collective bargaining negotiation that's taken place. And in that collective bargaining negotiation, Dan Gilbert is dogged. He's got his cadre of owners who are dogged about never allowing this to happen again. We don't want these players moving around. We don't want these players running the asylum, to borrow a phrase from Texas owner McNear.
Not well. Not to cut off Stephen Smith, but what does a sentiment like that harken back to? I mean, let's be for real. It is very obvious that LeBron James's situation, his decision, and what is stipulated, it seems to activate a slave master component in many of these owners' quote-unquote DNA. There's no doubt about that. Once again, it would be a very interesting case study to see if LeBron had been a Caucasian player and he made that same decision, how it would have been covered by the media, much less received by the rest of the owners. As we all know, there's always a subtext of so-called black men making sure that they are the deciding factors in their own fate. People don't like that. And it's not just affluent Caucasian men who don't like so-called black men knowing their worth and making sure that they are the prime movers that decide what they do and how much money they themselves make. There are many other demographics who don't want the so-called black man to be the prime mover in his own life. And that's a major issue. And that is something that was made very plain when LeBron James made the decision that he made.
Why did they feel that way? Not just because of LeBron James's move, but because of how he handled it. Never picked up the phone to call Dan Gilbert. Never showed Dan Gilbert the courtesy or respect. Somewhat see them warming it extent to, etc. But it just, in terms of corporate America, business, and what-have-you, these are the kind of things that you have to worry about because these are the kind of things that who has to worry about. Stephen A. Smith, clearly LeBron James did not have to worry about it because he was able to go where he wanted to go. And this is what I, this is what I'm talking about when I tell you brothers, that you always have to look at yourself as an asset, a financial asset, because this is a corporate environment that we live in. Every decision that you make is a monetary decision that is going to affect your financial bottom line. You see how Stephen Smith is speaking? He's not speaking according to basketball. He's speaking according to business. And he's not overtly assailing LeBron for not only his decision but how he did it. But he is, he is assailing him in a subconscious way, in a subversive way, to let him know that not necessarily that it's your fault that the owners responded with such vitriol in the collective bargaining negotiations of the 2011 offseason, but you had something to do with it. The way that you went about it. Had you been more cordial with Dan Gilbert, there was no way that LeBron was going to break off the rapport, the connection that he had with the Cleveland Cavaliers, and it was going to end with both parties having good vibes about the other.
LeBron left Cleveland for a myriad of reasons. There was a lot going on in the locker room involving his mother. There were things going on in regards to how he felt the ownership was treating him. And I don't think that he felt comfortable opening up the lines of communication with any aspect of that organization. So I really can't blame him too much. I will say that he decided to grandstand in that interview, and that had reverberations all the way down to today and how he's viewed. But that's life. When you're the first to do something, you are going to take all the arrows because you got collective bargaining negotiations that's coming down to the wire. LeBron's gonna always give this money, but there's a whole bunch of players that's not. So what do they do? They can't get about limiting player movement. So all of a sudden, the super max deal comes into play for the negotiations. But you gotta do five years, you gotta stay with your same team. If you leave, you don't get the super max deal, and those five years get reduced to four years. So it involves player movement. The pie was shrunk at that particular moment of time. The players were getting 57% of basketball-related income. It dipped to 50%. Some owners wanted it to fall below 47%. But Commissioner David Stern, let's sit there saying, "Listen, we got to work with these players. Let's not completely pound him into the ground." We got the CP3 trade that was supposed to go. We was supposed to go to the Los Angeles Lakers. Commissioner's on the record at the time, there was no trade because he was the de facto owner of the New Orleans Hornets because the league owned the team because they were looking for new ownership.
Well, what happens at that particular moment? Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, who's now struggling, is stinking up the joint because LeBron is gone, makes sure to let his voice be heard. "Look, man, the deal," calling it an absolute travesty because Jim Buss was stupid enough to sit up big and get everything. Didn't throw anybody a ball. Not only did he get the best player in the deal, but he would have saved over $20 million in cap space and luxury tax dollars, or rather, in the process. All of those things, the focus and the attention and the ire of the owners, where you got basketball-related income shrunk, you have player movement that was limited to such a degree, you had the medium, the medium players to start the guy that could play but not necessarily start their dollars being ultimately compromised. Of course, the league is getting money and the players are getting money, but how it's divvied up was compromised to some degree. All of these things were residue from LeBron James not leaving to go to Miami, but how he handled his departure going to Miami, raising the ire and the end, the venom from the owners. And they never talk about it. Cuddly, but just the last point, Max, is I am not talking to you about an opinion. I am giving you what was told to me by many executives and several owners. Now, you can disagree with it, whatever. And I'm not taking a position of it. I am telling you what every word that I just said was totally out of that bottle. Folks, that's all.
Let me say this before Max Kellerman starts, because Steven, they said a lot there. And even though what he's trying to imply is that LeBron James leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers in the way that he did is the reason why the owners responded with such draconian measures against the players, to me, all that all the more accentuates is why it was important for LeBron to do what he did. Because what it did is it revealed how the owners truly viewed the players in the first place. We're willing to compensate you as long as you're willing to understand that you are our property, and we don't want you to move and do what's best in your view for yourself, only what's best for us. And I've touched on this notion numerous times in other videos. There are certain men who'd rather have a shack that they own than live on another man's property in another man's mansion and have to serve him, but live in very, very lavish quarters. LeBron James was able to assist the players in seeing things in another way, expanding their scope. And if, in the process, it may have cost them a percentage of the pot, that's okay. Because down the line, with the additional amount of revenue that the league has been able to take in due to the higher profile that the league has been able to embrace because LeBron went to Miami. And let's please understand that after LeBron left the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010 over to the Miami Heat, the NBA's ratings have incrementally gone up year after year after year after year. Because transitioning from the Miami Heat era to the Golden State era has been a major boon for the NBA. And that was all precipitated by LeBron James's move. So even though, yes, the collective bargaining agreement has caused players in regards to the percentage of the pot, the overall pot has expanded exponentially because of the mobility that LeBron James was able to employ. And also the attractive and captivating element of the Miami Heat, who pretty much became the rock star team of the 2010s. You would not have had that if LeBron stayed in Cleveland because the Kobe Bryant era was over after 2010, and certainly after 2011 when they got swept by the Mavericks. The Miami Heat were able to grab the proverbial bull by the horns. You had a team filled with stars in a very, very lush and marketable city. Miami is pretty much built as the LA of the Southeast. All that happened because of LeBron James's decision to leave. And then, of course, that allowed the Golden State era time to develop and eventually burgeon into what we have now.
Don't like it when a player empowers themselves and want to point the ways in which it's not good. I think though that them saying that is utter nonsense. Let's look at the facts. Starting, I wouldn't call it nonsense. I would just call it their perspective. I believe that they were given their testimony in regards to how they viewed the LeBron James decision to have reverberated into certain curtailing on the players' ability to earn their portion of the pot. Why they decided to take such a hard-line stance in negotiations. So, it means it's okay. Every time a separation occurs, both parties don't have to be mutually happy about it. Starting with the idea that there's no CBA, which it always is. NBA and NFL always beat the players in the CBA. It's one side wins, always the owners. The reason why the owners win is because they think cosmically. They think down the line. They're already discussing how they're going to negotiate with the players whenever this collective bargaining agreement expires. The players are not thinking like that. They're thinking about how many more cars and houses they're gonna buy for themselves or for their loved ones, and how many shorties they're gonna put up in apartments all around the city. Yes, unquestionably, it's growing. It's becoming more popular. A lot of that is due to LeBron James.
Going against that a second. First of all, the idea that they try to limit players. Let's see who's moved teams since they did. They limited player movement. LeBron James again, Kevin Durant. Those are, according to many, the top two players in the world. Chris Paul, James Harden. Look, some of these are in trades. Plant. And let me also say this, the players have pretty much outfought the owners because they, they believe the owners believe that with the new collective bargaining agreement, that would make the players more likely to stay with the team that they were drafted by. But what the players have done is they said, they've exhibited a higher willingness to go to a team that they believe would give them a chance to win by actually taking less money to go team up with other players on other franchises because they're making so much money off the court that they don't need to sign for the highest possible amount that they can sign for. They can actually go somewhere where they feel like they have a higher chance to win. So this is frustrated the owners a little bit more. And this, once again, is an offshoot of the LeBron James mentality where they're thinking more about winning on the basketball court and making up whatever money they may have lost in off-the-court endeavors. Which teams since supposedly the owners made it this team? Paul George, Carmelo Anthony, Bo Outlaw, a couple times, Kyrie Irving. But it's so, so, so like player movement is as healthy as robust as ever. That's number one. Absolutely, even more robust than ever. Because never in the NBA's history have you had this many stars moving to different teams in their prime.
Stephen Naismith has a quizzical look on his face. Why is that? Because he's trying to play both sides of the fence, as usual. Stephen A. is pro-owner, but he's trying to act as if he's not taking the side. But here's the big picture, really. Stephen A., LeBron James's career was being wasted in a small market in Cleveland with an incompetent owner. And Dan Gilbert, so incompetent, in fact, that he was a lottery team. That's how he got LeBron for the number one overall pick. LeBron left in three of those four years, they picked first overall, not on purpose. They weren't trying to. They just dunked. That's how incompetent Gilbert was. They stockpiled so much talent, even with missing with drastic Anthony Bennett with the number one overall pick, they actually got LeBron back because they were lucky that he happened to be from around that area. Absolutely. And beyond all that, I'm pretty sure that they had fielders play strategically around LeBron James just to get a temperature in regards to the likeliness of LeBron James coming back. And understanding that he wants to re-engage himself. Well, he wanted to re-engage with that area because he had a lot of business ventures that he was going to try to initiate after his retirement. One of them being, as I've said incessantly, the notion that he most likely wants to buy the Cavaliers after he's out of the league for a while. So he had to come back to the Cavs. It wasn't a matter of him particularly having a choice. He had to go back there because he had to make things right with his original love. They had a bad breakup. He went off and got him a big-titty, big-bowie, thottie that he laid down with for four years. He learned how to be a husband. He learned what he missed from his original woman. He went back, he got back with her, and he gave her the ring that he promised her. And now he's ready to move on to greener pastures. Confidence was, you know, basically resulted in the stuff that I just spoke about.
Hold on. I'm sorry. Stupid. Go ahead. Go ahead. What I'm saying is, working or without all. I want Max in full LeBron James stupor fan mode. I'm just messing with him. He's making good points. I wanted to say to you is this: None of those points are invalid. But what can't be escaped is the fact that we agree. Everybody agrees, if you know anything about sports, the owners may have bigger egos than the players. And so, if you are a player, if you're thinking about just yourself, not only do they have bigger egos, but they also usually hold the players' intellect and business acumen in very low esteem. They assume that the players are spending more money than they're making, but they don't understand how to budget themselves. And that's why they know that in any business standoff, particularly regarding labor negotiations, the players eventually gonna fold because there are very few players that are making enough money to maintain their lifestyle when they don't have consistent checks coming in. So if they're not getting pressure from the top-end players, they will start to get pressure from the lower-end players to end any type of standoff. You really can't do what you want to do. But when you think about everything else and the collateral impact that it may have, that's why there's no doubt. There's no doubt. That's my argument. A rising tide lifts all boats. What if LeBron's escaping the doldrums of Cleveland and the accomplice of Dan Gilbert resulted? First of all, the announcement when he went, "The Decision" was an enormous media event. Even though a lot of people got angry, a lot of people were excited, it put basketball on the front page. I was on CNN at the time talking about LeBron James and the NBA, like, high up in the show. LeBron James goes to a sexy market, Miami, winds up with his best friend, Dwyane Wade, and Pat Riley. Wins two championships, makes the finals every single year, and wins two championships as a result. He shows other players the way. Cade goes to the Warriors, makes the super team. Whether or not you think that's good or bad for basketball, hoop resulted in a rivalry, in a trilogy in the finals. I think that it was great for basketball because it brought more of a theatrical component to the NBA because, I mean, let's be for real, professional sports is basically a soap opera. I get brothers to come on my channel all the time worrying about how scripted and how everything is fixed and to what degree is everything rigged in professional sports. At the end of the day, the word "sport" means joke, it means entertainment. That's what it means. There are many things that you can learn from sporting events when you pay close attention. And depending on how your brain works, if you only see things from a two-dimensional level, then that's how you're going to view everything, and you're going to be worried about silly things and frivolity. But it's the same way like someone who could look at a painting and they can get a lesson about life from it. People can look at shapes in the clouds, and certain people just see a cloud. Other people can see things that may change their life. So, in other words, you have many people who strain at a gnat. So it's always a good thing, to make a long story short, when there is more freedom and mobility in your business because what that breeds is imagination and creativity, and that's what spurs things forward. In the conversation among many with Michael Jordan, the greatest of all time, if the result of his taking his destiny into his own register, the fact that the NBA has picked up every year since then, partly there are other factors, short, but partly it's LeBron James. The greatest player, there's no doubt about that. That the NBA ratings and interest started to incrementally and sequentially tick up after LeBron left Cleveland, went to Miami. He basically had the best player in the NBA go to a city that it was not the most lavish and illustrious city in the NBA. It's right after LA. So they were able to create a certain ambiance around that team that was very important in the aftermath of the fall to LA Lakers. They needed a team that was going to carry them through the 2010s until another team could develop and could be a suitable rival for LeBron James. And of course, that team ended up being the Golden State Warriors.
I don't think that Max's position is emotional. I actually think that he's providing a certain amount of empirical data to bolster his views. I actually think that you're trying to hide behind the testimonies of executives. You're trying to hide your own views behind that, Stephen Naismith. What I'm telling you is this: I'm not talking about the move. I'm talking about the manner in which he handled it. And as a result, how the owners reacted in kind. The reality is, is that even though they're making money hand over foot, even though the NBA is incredibly successful and players are benefiting, there is a degree to which they could have benefited that they're no longer kids because they lost 7% of basketball-related income, which amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions. So, sets are saying, "Less 7 fewer percentage points of a much larger pie is still more money for the players." I'm not saying the players got a great deal. You're answering a different question. You're arguing that LeBron diffused his leverage even better than he did. I'm not arguing that. I'm saying the way in which he used his leverage has been good for the NBA, not perfect for the NBA, but good. Better than had he not used it. I agree with you, Max Kellerman, because for all intents and purposes, I believe that the league has grown more than it ever would have grown if LeBron had not moved to quote-unquote greener pastures. So I think that it's very hard to quantify if the players would have been making more money with higher percentage points and lower ratings and lower interests than they are now with lower percentage points and higher interest. At the end of the day, I think that the greatest factor was LeBron James opening up the mind of these other players to help them understand how important they should view themselves and how many options they themselves have. Oftentimes, people don't understand how many options they have because they don't really believe in themselves. He believed in himself, and he bet on himself. Once again, fortune favors the bold.
I'm saying the leverage is one subject. I'm not debating the leverage. Yeah, I'm saying how you went about doing it. Compromise. Fallout. Fallout. That's what I'm saying. Coming up, I got it. To Stephen A. I got it. Bro, as usual, yeah, Max, you're acting as a proxy for the owners. I get it, bro. But it is what it is. That's why you have another collective bargaining agreement. Maybe they can help the owners forget about their ire for LeBron James's methods for leaving Cleveland all those years ago, and they can convince them to give them back some of those percentage points because they've been good little boys over the last few years. Who knows? To me, it really doesn't matter. You have to utilize your options. But anyway, peace.