Still, it's not about the Nets or Knicks becoming a realistic destination for LeBron. It's about the fact that James, who this past season averaged 30/7/7 on a bare-bones team
at age 23, could hit the open market. Fine, Kobe won't be the greatest player ever until he wins another three rings. James could never even make the Finals again, and if he keeps up like this, any rational person would stick him in that conversation.
Talk about a cosmic event—with that summer in sight, cap space isn't just a number. It's currency that, however indirectly or improbably, links an organization to a truly Association-altering possibility. Without any definite sense of where James would go, or how he might fare there, we're left with the mere symbolism of it: A basketball player whose abilities strike fear and awe into all, and who has only just begun to define himself, will suddenly hover over us mortals and make a decision. A decision that, coming from him, has all the weight of passing judgment upon the earth.
On the court, LeBron is already the worker of miracles, the angry god of the Old Testament, the mortal with divinity in him. Symbolically, he's the Messiah for this sport, the Chosen who has made a special pact with the basketball gods. The increasingly vague and fiery allusions to 2010 paint him in another role: The Apocalyse itself. Take it from someone who has watched all of
Left Behind at least three times, and read a few scholarly studies of the End of Days.
The way in which all teams seem trained on this future, where the liberation of LeBron looms like a Bibical prophecy that predicts great upheaval and uncertainty, merely reinforces his larger-than-everything standing in the league. Kobe, for all his mastery of the game, remains just the league's best player; when he appeared to be on the move, all you heard about was how fucking good he was. LeBron is something bigger, possibly unknowable, and truly awesome in the minds of all but the dumbest, deafest, and blindest basketball observers.
If you think I'm overreacting, or mischaracterizing, tell me: Why does everyone want to get under the cap for 2010, even if they don't have a prayer of landing LeBron? It's because, even if they're not Cleveland getting its sports life set back 2,000 years, or a major market team with a real hope of luring him away, all teams can feel it in the air. It's their duty, their fate, to get their affairs in order and stand in line, so great are his powers on and off the court, so potentiall transformative of all they survey.
Most likely, nothing will come of it. But the shiver that "LeBron: Free Agent" sends through the league works on a far deeper, more primordial level than the reality in which they typically operate. 2010 is The Reckoning, when for a month or so one man will be bigger than any team, franchise, or even the entire league. That's something only MJ can claim to have done, and he never had this kind of leverage or limitless at his disposal.
