The Humbling Of Basketball's King
The Los Angeles Lakers haven’t been in transition like this since before many of us were born: 1979. That’s when Jerry Buss bought them, and it was also the year that the franchise drafted Magic Johnson. The team had been in Southern California for about two decades, winning a single championship in 1972, with a squad led by Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, Jerry West, and Gail Goodrich. They had been good, and popular—enough so that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, with his pick of the litter, went there in 1975—but nothing like what they were about to become.
Buss, Magic, and Kareem led the Lakers into flashy, fabulous dominance over the next decade, collecting five titles and building a cultural ethos like no basketball team before them had. On the other side of the country, Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics were doing something similar, and the rivalry between the two organizations became a text that re-made the NBA, launching it into new television relevance. The league has been a financial rocketship ever since, with Buss passing away in 2013 and handing down to his children an entity roughly 150 times more valuable than it was when he bought it. What once cost $67.5 million is now price-tagged at $10 billion.
That’s the number that emerged from the Buss family’s recent sale of the team, to Mark Walter of the financial behemoth Guggenheim Partners. Buss was a chemistry professor who got enough money to grab a basketball team after he developed a knack for real estate; Walter’s trade is investment banking, which means that his company uses its nearly half-trillion dollars of power to leverage, mediate, purchase, and sell country-sized chunks of the global economy. The story of Buss-to-Walter is the story of the NBA’s growth well past mom-and-pop territory, and its immersion into the big nasty arbitrage between the true kings of the world.
Partially as a result of all this, LeBron James is now becoming an afterthought. He is better at basketball than any 40-year-old man has ever been, and his career is arguably the best of any player’s, ever. But new ownership is demonstrating little desire to massage the final years of his run into further glory. This summer, for the first time in James’ NBA life, he was not offered a long and lucrative contract extension by a team in a position to give him one. That spot’s being saved for Luka Doncic, whose next deal will pay him more per year than Buss originally paid for the Lakers in total.
James has been the closest thing the NBA has had, since its 80’s and 90’s days, to those Magic/Larry/Michael Jordan levels of pop-culture mythology. The rivalry between his Cleveland Cavaliers and Steph Curry’s Golden State Warriors, who met in the Finals for four straight seasons, is the peak attention point for the sport in the 21st century. James and Curry remade the NBA’s image, helped guide it into its current largesse. But even as the best old NBA player of all time, James’ previous levels of value—as calculated, coldly, by Guggenheim Partners—were inherently tied to his being the very best player alive, which he is not anymore.
From the outside looking in, it would appear that he’s having a hard time accepting this message. Any human who’s enjoyed his levels of success would. But James is not just any human—not as an athlete, and not as a communicator either. Long notorious for playing games in the swirling messaging world made up by media, front offices, and agents, his latest rhetorical offensive has been the image of a man running out of negotiating power. Through a series of statements and gestures, he’s made it—sort of?—clear that he’s unhappy with the Lakers’ lack of respect. Not only are they not knocking on his door with the biggest possible bag of money, but they’re not using up their roster-building resources with any speed either. They are, as many have said, on Luka’s timeline, not LeBron’s.
James’ humbling is, in some sense, a decision he made. By refusing to take less money, he has tested the endurance of his NBA value, and it seems that he doesn’t like the results of that experiment. And at this point, he cannot both earn as much as he historically has and liberate himself for his final years—because he’s looking at an increasingly tight salary landscape. And the king cannot take a buyout, and be doing what Bradley Beal and Deandre Ayton are doing. That simply isn’t royal. So he’s stuck where basically every other player is: taking what he gets, without the power to make his franchise do whatever he wants it to. From 2003 through 2024, he was so good that he had that power. He’s not, anymore, is what he’s being told.
LeBron’s legacy is forever. He’s done things that the world’s financial chessmasters never will—the kinds of things that truly stir and excite humanity, more than any amount of someone else’s money can—which is why you’ll always know his name, while having to look up theirs every once in a while, just to remember them. But as James becomes more physically mortal with every year, he has finally become their chess piece. And they’re restricting him to his square.
