The King went quietly in the night, trading one fiefdom for another. But make no mistake, LeBron James said plenty about the growth and popularity of the NBA without saying a word this weekend.
His agreement on a four-year, $154 million contract with the Los Angeles Lakers wasn’t announced in a prime-time television special this time. It wasn’t laid out in a magazine exclusive trumpeting his redemptive homecoming. This time, it was simply a one-sentence statement released by his agency, Klutch Sports, Sunday night, as James jetted off to Europe for a vacation with his wife.
And yet the shockwaves still reverberated far and wide, as the world’s greatest player joined one of sport’s most storied franchises in the second-largest U.