THE coronation of King James—as LeBron James (pictured, centre) calls himself on Twitter—was delayed, but in the end not denied. By common consent the world's best basketball player, Mr James was drafted with the first overall pick by his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers—he grew up in nearby Akron, Ohio—shortly after he graduated from high school in June 2003. He has been a star since his very first game in the National Basketball Association (NBA) as an 18-year-old, and won three Most Valuable Player awards. But just like Michael Jordan before him, who did not win a title until his seventh season in the NBA, the sport's ultimate achievement long eluded him. Mr Jordan's Chicago Bulls struggled early in his career. After three losing seasons, they advanced deep into the playoffs in 1987-88 and 1988-89, but lost in both years to the tough and balanced Detroit Pistons. Mr Jordan could not win a championship on his own. Fortunately for Chicago fans, the club eventually acquired a Robin to his Batman in Scottie Pippen. In 1990-91 Mr Pippen emerged as a star in his own right, and the duo eventually won six titles together. In contrast, the Cavaliers were never able to offer Mr James much of a supporting cast. They made the finals once in 2006-07, but lost. Rather than wait to see whom the team might eventually pair with him, Mr James took matters into his own hands. When his contract expired in 2010, he reached an agreement with two other free-agent stars, Dwyane Wade (left) and Chris Bosh (right), that the three would all sign with the Miami Heat. He announced his choice by declaring he was “going to take my talents to South Beach” on a special programme broadcast on ESPN called “The Decision”. Mr James's handling of his free agency was widely panned, both as a betrayal of his Ohio roots and as an admission that he could not be the leader of a championship team. In an open letter to fans, the Cavaliers' owner, Dan Gilbert, called Mr James “narcissistic”, “selfish”, “cowardly”, “disloyal” and “heartless”. Mr Gilbert's sports memorabilia company even reduced the price of some memorabilia featuring Mr James to $17.41, the birth year of Benedict Arnold, a notorious American traitor. But many of the sport's eminences also criticised Mr James, even though they had no reason to feel personally jilted by him. Mr Jordan himself said there was “no way, with hindsight, I would've ever called up Larry [Bird], called up Magic [Johnson] and said, ‘Hey, look, let's get together and play on one team'…I was trying to beat those guys.”

The Heat instantly became the favourites for the 2010-11 championship, and the bête noire of virtually all basketball fans outside of southern Florida. They cruised through the regular season and the first three rounds of the playoffs. But in the finals they ran into a veteran Dallas Mavericks team, and Mr James all but disappeared. In the series' final four games he averaged just 15.8 points (compared with 27 during the regular season). He was particularly absent during the final quarters of close contests. In the tight fourth quarters of the third, fourth and fifth games, he made just two of eight shots—neither with the game on the line—while missing one that would have put Miami ahead with five seconds left on the clock. He also committed six turnovers, repeatedly handing the ball over to Dallas in the games' critical moments. The Mavericks won, four games to two.

Mr James's vanishing act seemed to satisfy NBA fans' desire for schadenfreude. This season the Heat were seen as just one of many strong contenders for the title. They finished with the league's fourth-best record, and needed the full seven games to dispatch a creaky Boston Celtics squad in order to reach the finals. Their rivals in that series, the Oklahoma City Thunder, were a young, dynamic, athletic team with nearly as much star power as the Heat. After the Thunder had, well, thundered past the San Antonio Spurs, winning four straight games against the club with the league's best record, most analysts thought Oklahoma City had the edge.

This time, however, Mr James had other plans. He dominated in all five contests, averaging 28.6 points per game, and showcased his versatility with impressive averages of 10.2 rebounds and 7.4 assists, earning him the finals' Most Valuable Player award. After losing the first game, the Heat romped to four straight wins, giving Mr James his first title—at the same an even younger age, 27, that than Mr Jordan was when he secured his first championship. “It's about damn time”, Mr James proclaimed following the victory.

Mr James still has a long way to go to catch up to Mr Jordan's six titles, not to mention the 11 attained by Bill Russell, who embraced Mr James after the game. But the oldest of the Heat's trio of stars, Mr Wade, is only 30, meaning that the three should have plenty of time to fill up their trophy case. Once the euphoria of Miami's title wears off, the grumbling about its perceived inauthenticity due to the 2010 pact between Mr Bosh, Mr Wade and Mr James is sure to resume.

On the surface, the widespread resentment of the three stars seems inconsistent. Few such complaints were heard in 2007 when the Celtics traded for Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to play alongside Paul Pierce, and promptly won a championship. The implicit double standard is that team owners can freely determine who plays where at their whim, whereas players who choose their own place of employment are criticised. In a league fraught with tension between mostly white owners and mostly black players, it was inevitable that race would be invoked in the reaction to Mr James's decision. Responding to Mr Gilbert's letter attacking Mr James, Jesse Jackson, a former presidential candidate and influential black leader, accused Mr Gilbert of seeing “LeBron as a runaway slave”.

A more charitable interpretation of the outrage over the Heat's signings is concern over competitive balance. A league in which there is little doubt over who will win—as many fans presumed, incorrectly, about the 2010-11 season once Miami acquired Mr Bosh and Mr James—is a league destined for irrelevance. Moreover, teams have little incentive to invest in savvy management or analytics if the outcome of the league is likely to be determined by where free agents happen to want to play.

Paradoxically, it is one of the very methods the NBA has deployed in an effort to improve competitive balance that led to Mr Bosh, Mr James and Mr Wade uniting in South Beach: the maximum contract. After Mr Garnett signed a six-year, $126m contract extension in 1998 at the age of 21, the NBA's team owners became newly determined to institute additional restraints on the growth in salaries. They locked out the players at the start of the 1998-99 season. Among the concessions they extracted in exchange for allowing play to resume was the establishment of an absolute limit on the dollars and years that could be paid to any single player. The ceiling was set far below the actual economic value of the game's superstars, and the gap between the maximum contract and the market value of elite players has only grown since then. Strangely, that has made the sport's best players also its best buys: this estimate suggests Mr James is worth about $30m per season, almost twice his 2011-12 salary of $16m.

The reason we don't see “package deals” like that of the Heat's stars in, say, baseball, is that baseball players are free to follow the money. To be sure, baseball teams can and do buy up bevies of expensive free agents at once. But they have to win a bidding war to do so. In contrast, the NBA's maximum contract prevents teams from competing for superstars on price. That leads such players to choose their employers based on other criteria. Those include state income taxes—Florida does not have one, making the take-home pay of a maximum contract in Miami 15% higher than that of one in New York City—and a team's likelihood of winning a title, which might be worth an extra $10m to Mr James in endorsements.

There is little justification for the individual contract limit. The players' overall take of the NBA's income is capped by an escrow system, and each team's expenditure is limited by a salary cap and luxury tax. The maximum individual contract simply redistributes income from the game's superstars to its upper middle class, distorting the labour market and making “manipulations” like that of Mr Bosh, Mr James and Mr Wade far more likely. If the NBA wants to encourage star free agents to re-sign with their own teams—which it now does by letting their previous employers offer bigger contracts than any new suitors—it could accomplish that just as easily by exempting part of such offers from the salary cap or luxury tax.

Unfortunately, the maximum contract limit was retained in the collective-bargaining agreement (CBA) that ended this year's lockout. Expect to see more groups of sought-after free agents who cannot receive close to their fair market value meeting in back rooms to determine the next season's champion—at least until the current CBA expires in 2017.