LeBron's newest dramas are tired and self-inflicted. Yawn

We've seen this movie before. A few times. Let's move on.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

The Amateur, Edgar Degas, 1866

It’s 2022, and I just read three subscription-required stories about LeBron James’ newest drama, one in which he’s passive-aggressively praising other teams’ front offices in an apparent attempt to heap more pressure on the Los Angeles Lakers, who had a silent trade deadline amid a disaster season after purportedly meeting LeBron’s wild and counterproductive demands in the summer.

• Jason Lloyd of The Athletic wrote about how he got LeBron to talk about a potential return to Cleveland during All-Star

• Marc Stein looked ahead to the potential unwinding of the LeBron era in Los Angeles

• Brian Windhorst compared LeBron’s current status with the Lakers to his midseason “strike” against the Cavs in 2017-18

The short version of all this, through the fog: LeBron made some sort of push to trade for Russell Westbrook in the offseason; that acquisition has not helped the Lakers at all; the Lakers are again at risk of missing the playoffs; LeBron is mad about that and mad the team made no moves at the deadline to shore up the roster.

Here’s my thing: the Lakers aren’t that interesting, LeBron’s position in all of this is completely unflattering and this is deep on the undercard of what’s actually fun about the NBA right now. And trust me, no one finds Laker dysfunction more fun than me!

Windhorst compared this to late second-term Cleveland, and that’s right in this sense: LeBron’s position is that teams should sacrifice everything to give him all the tools necessary to win. In late second-term Cleveland, with LeBron refusing to commit long-term, the front office pointedly did not give up lots of future assets to shore up a repeat East champion. Remember the drama around the pick the Cavs received from Brooklyn via Boston in the Kyrie Irving trade? LeBron reportedly wanted Cleveland to trade it; Cleveland refused, instead trading their own late first pick in 2018. That pick became Collin Sexton, a good player who should net the Cavs something as a restricted free agent this summer even if the team doesn’t re-sign him.

The Cavaliers didn’t trade future picks that became Darius Garland (2019), Isaac Okoro (2020) and Evan Mobley (2021). They didn’t trade their 2022 pick to appease LeBron; instead they traded it in the first James Harden deal to land Jarrett Allen. Coming off three Finals, having won a championship for the city, with growing skepticism that LeBron would stay in Cleveland after having traded Kyrie and watching Kevin Love slip from stardom, the Cavaliers declined to freak out and do LeBron’s bidding. It paid off.

That was a LeBron on top of the world. He has fallen somewhat from that level, though he’s still performing better than 98% of NBA players and 100% of NBA stars who played this deep into their careers. As analysts have mentioned, he has both a ton of “Youngest Player To …” and “Oldest Player To …” records. He’s a top-10 player right now, maybe top-5. But that’s still a drop-off from 2017 or so, when he was No. 1 or 2 or 3, depending on who else was healthy.

Likewise, the Lakers are awful. Would you take the Lakers in a best-of-7 series against the Clippers, even with Kawhi Leonard and Paul George out? Anthony Davis is going to miss a month, Russell Westbrook appears no closer to fitting with LeBron than he did in preseason in October, basically none of the supplemental pieces have stepped, with a brief exception of Malik Monk and Austin Reaves here and there.

Based on current standings, the Lakers would have to beat the Blazers in an elimination game and then beat the loser of Wolves-Clippers in an elimination game just to make the playoffs, where they would no doubt get shredded alive by the Suns. Again. This team is just not relevant. They have the same record as the Washington Wizards, for Talen Horton-Tucker’s sake!