Michael Jordan or LeBron James? It is one of the essential questions in the modern era of sports fandom, encompassing facts and biases, statistics and anecdotal evidence, and the ever-shifting barometer of cultural relevance. It turns friends into foes, barbershops into the site of parliamentary debates, and the Super Bowl LII champions into bickering schoolchildren. The question of Jordan or LeBron may live on for longer than they do. So, before we fully gear up for what should be a frenzied second half of the season, why not celebrate and examine the impact of two of the most influential players in basketball history?

Welcome to Jordan-LeBron Week.

Remember when Roy Hobbs finished The Natural with a majestic home run that exploded the lights? Michael Jordan nearly pulled that off in real life. Trailing by three points in Utah, with 41.9 seconds remaining and a dangerous Game 7 looming, Jordan casually shredded three Jazz players for an easy layup, stripped an oblivious Karl Malone on the other end, then drained an iconic jumper in Bryon Russell’s tumbling mug to swing the 1998 Finals. No other Bulls player touched the ball.

I repeat: No other Bulls player touched the ball.

We already thought Jordan was the greatest … and then he did THAT? Even if the Delta Center’s lights never showered everyone with sparks, those 41.9 seconds reside on a different planet — like Tiger prevailing at Torrey Pines on a busted knee, or Ali pouncing on Foreman during the eighth round in Zaire — when we already believed someone was truly great, truly different, truly special, and then they delivered again anyway. When that happens, it’s almost eerie to watch. It’s the final level of everything.

I caught Game 6 in a disbelieving bar in Boston, where we had only recently waived the white flag on our increasingly pathetic “Larry was bettah than Michael!” stance. By 1998, Jordan had evolved into our country’s one-man 1980 USA men’s hockey team, our generation’s answer for the Beatles and Ali. It’s fair to argue about the start-to-finish careers of Jordan and LeBron, but LeBron will never surpass Jordan unless he reaches that specific point. In the past 50 years, only Jordan, Ali and Tiger were so transcendent that everyone rooted for them during their primes. They unlocked the following achievement: unanimous approval.

We respect LeBron. We revered Jordan. When he retired from basketball seven months after Game 6 in Utah, it felt just as heartwarming as Roy Hobbs playing catch in the cornfield with his bastard son. What a way to go out. THE END.

(30 for 30 narrator voice coming …)

But … what if I told you that Michael Jordan wanted to come back, only he couldn’t find a team? 30 for 30 presents … GOAT Without a Team, directed by Jason Hehir.

Let’s travel back to the fall of 1997, back when Chicago was churning out two compelling dramas: Season 4 of ER and Jordan’s final Bulls season. Jordan loathed Chicago’s paranoid general manager, Jerry Krause, who had been aggressively planning for the imminent departures of Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson. The problem with Krause, as columnist Phil Rosenthal told David Halberstam in Playing for Keeps, was that Krause “deserved more credit than he got but wanted more credit than he deserved.”

Imagine HBO’s president seething about David Chase and James Gandolfini getting too much credit for The Sopranos, then spending Season 7 openly searching for a new showrunner and star. This was worse. Krause constantly bristled about getting credit for the Bulls dynasty, and when he couldn’t get it, he effectively detonated it. Maybe they should have written that on his Hall of Fame plaque last summer.

The other problem: Miserly Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf paid record-breaking money to his meal ticket, Jordan, but he wasn’t obliging for Jordan, Jackson and Pippen. Ever the opportunist, Jackson nicknamed that season “The Last Dance” and motivated his tribe accordingly. I reread all the Jordan books recently; 20-plus years later, it seems impossible that Krause and Reinsdorf underestimated Jackson’s connection with Jordan that badly. Even worse, everyone even knew that Krause planned on replacing Phil with a college coach named Tim Floyd. You know, because any time you can jettison Phil Jackson for Tim Freaking Floyd, you have to do it.

Meanwhile, a sulking Pippen headed into the final year of his (criminally underpaid) contract determined to get paid — and not by Chicago, the franchise that had duped him with lowball extensions not once but twice. Scottie headed into The Last Dance as a top-10 player and future Hall of Famer … and the NBA’s 122nd-highest-paid player. Even Jackson’s finest Zen Master tricks couldn’t soothe Scottie’s bitterness. He rested an ailing left foot all summer and screwed the team by waiting until October for surgery, losing another three months and leaving Jordan to carry everything (which, of course, he did). Not helping: their third wheel, the increasingly erratic Dennis Rodman, who was Charlie Sheen–ing his way out of the league. The finish line was coming.

Near the end of Part 1 of Alison Ellwood’s incredible documentary about the Eagles, as the band’s members slowly grow to despise one another, everyone expects them to break up until it finally happens — in Long Beach, in 1980, with Glenn Frey and Don Felder nearly brawling on stage as the band implodes. The Bulls never had their Long Beach moment, just a drama-filled final season that became its own farewell tour. They shook off an 8–7 start and a slew of “Is Chicago done?” think pieces by ripping off an astonishing 51–10 stretch, fueled by (as always) the homicidally competitive Jordan.

I know Jordan’s GOAT résumé kicks off with six rings, the Dream Team, the ’93 Finals and the Roy Hobbs game. But for me, Jordan’s greatness resonated the most during those boring nights in Jersey or Charlotte or Sacramento, anytime he took offense to something — a heckling fan, a dopey foul call, an opponent’s sneer, whatever — and immediately transformed into basketball’s John Wick. Everyone else wanted to win; Jordan wanted something else. By the mid-1990s, coaches were warning their players not to trash-talk, eyeball or provoke him in any way.

Keep your head down, shut up, don’t give him any reason to get going.

We didn’t have League Pass for those mundane MJ nights, just SportsCenter (and those 11 p.m. highlights with Stu Scott narrating, “MJ had 12 points at halftime, but in the third quarter, Jayson Williams gave him a hard foul, and lemme tell ya, my man MJ did NOT like that”) and morning box scores (when you glanced to Page 4 of USA Today’s sports section and said to yourself, “Jesus, MJ had 49 against the Clippers? I wonder who pissed him off”). Every night, this stubborn lunatic searched for a reason to demolish his opponent. When he couldn’t find it, he made one up. They stacked the deck against a 35-year-old legend during that final Bulls season and it didn’t matter. 62 wins, 20 losses.

Jackson gathered players, coaches and trainers for a special meeting before the 1998 playoffs, asking everyone to write a message about what that final season meant to them. A poem, a sentence, a song, whatever. It had to be 50 words or fewer. Everyone obliged. They went around the room reading their messages, even Jordan, and when they finished, Jackson burned them in a coffee can. All the chaos and dissension burned away with it. They banded together for eight weeks and prevailed again, for a lot of reasons, but mainly because they employed the greatest player ever.

Jordan finished his Bulls career by winning three straight titles, playing 304 of a possible 304 games and logging an incomprehensible 11,786 minutes, opening the door for an understandable “He’s just spent” narrative. Jordan Rules author Sam Smith later wrote that Jordan “couldn’t stand playing with Scottie Pippen anymore,” and that Jordan was “sick and tired and burned out, just like in 1993.” Throw in Jordan’s hatred of Krause and that’s why Jordan walked away after that sixth title.

Or, that’s just the story we always believed.

This happens sometimes — a story emerges and takes hold, when the truth was much more complicated. The Eagles broke up because they hated each other. That’s easy. Jordan retired that second time, still the best player in the league, because he had nowhere else to go. That’s complicated. And also, perplexing.

Former Jordan teammate B.J. Armstrong told me that Jordan walked away in ’93 because he was completely spent, both physically and mentally, and that he returned only 17 months later after noticing how dramatically expansion had diluted the league. Jordan realized he could steal a few more titles, Armstrong believed, without the schedule and an unforgiving talent pool draining him too badly. The second three-peat finished him once and for all. Ask Armstrong about Jordan’s second retirement now and he’ll scream, “HE WAS DONE! HIS BODY WAS DONE!”

Others from Jordan’s orbit believe that mitigating circumstances played a bigger role. A damaging lockout followed the ’98 Finals, with owners intent on repairing a broken salary structure that empowered younger stars in ominous ways. Turned off by Latrell Sprewell choking his coach, two unlikable Dream Team sequels, the rise of a polarizing Iverson/hip-hop generation and a slew of overpaid lottery picks wasting their talent, fans (especially older ones) had openly rebelled against on-court behavior and skyrocketing ticket prices. “Life After Jordan” became the scariest words in basketball. The man bumped TV ratings by 25 to 30 percent, generating more attention and adoration than every other superstar combined. Without Jordan, the league’s business model was broken.

David Stern knew it. The commish spent seven months playing chicken with the players association, desperate to rebuild a suddenly troubled league. He grew a Dr. Richard Kimble beard and played up the gravity of the situation, speaking to reporters in the weightiest of tones, exploiting the scars of 1994’s still-incomprehensible baseball lockout. We’re ready to throw away the season like baseball did … and if you don’t believe me, check out my beard. Only when the lockout stretched into the holidays did everyone start believing him.

You know what didn’t happen during that stretch? Michael Jordan never retired.

You know why Jordan never retired? (Dramatic pause.) He never WANTED to retire. He just didn’t have a team.

Over the months and years that passed, we came to believe a story that, like a handful of other moments in Jordan’s career (cough … baseball … cough …), never really added up. Jordan left basketball on January 13, 1999, only a few days after Stern’s menacing promise to cancel that season broke the players (and spawned a new collective bargaining agreement). If it seemed like Jordan waited until the last possible moment to leave, that’s because he did. He handled it beautifully, telling 800 reporters in the United Center that, “Mentally, I’m exhausted, I don’t feel I have a challenge. … Physically, I feel great. This is a perfect time for me to walk away from the game. I’m at peace with that.”

To recap: The most homicidally competitive athlete quit basketball not once, but twice, at the peak of his powers.

(What???)

Remember, every Competitive MJ anecdote describes his pathological need to conquer others, to wager against them constantly, to search for victories big and small, ranging from “let’s play HORSE after practice” to “I bet my luggage comes out before yours does.” The man was consumed by competition. You don’t shut that off. It’s not a fucking faucet. At age 35, we were expected to believe that Jordan found … serenity?

Adding to the mystery, we learned that week that Jordan had recently sliced his right index finger on a cigar cutter. Jordan claimed that he couldn’t have played basketball for two months, anyway, and yet he played golf in the Bob Hope Classic with Charles Barkley the next weekend. By November, when Skip Bayless (!) wrote about Jordan embarrassing Corey Benjamin at a practice and mentioned Jordan’s nagging finger injury, a convenient backup narrative had emerged: If Jordan had never sliced that finger, maybe he would have come back.

Nope. One of Jordan’s closest friends told me recently that, had the Bulls brought Jackson back after the 1998 Finals, Jordan absolutely would have stayed. That’s how much he respected Jackson. Once it became clear that Krause and Reinsdorf were nudging Jackson out, that flipped Jordan’s stance — now, he had to leave Chicago out of loyalty to Phil (and also because he didn’t want to start over with anyone else). Krause underestimated the MJ-Phil connection so egregiously, and in such a damaging way to Chicago’s future (and NBA history, too), that it’s difficult to recall a bigger misread in the seven-decade history of the league. It’s completely indefensible.

Unfortunately for Jordan (and us), no other late-’90s franchise was savvy enough to realize, “Let’s hoard our cap space in case Jordan decides to jump teams!” Who created that idea? The Orlando Magic, when they cleared the decks in a heroic effort to land Tracy McGrady, Grant Hill AND Tim Duncan after the 1999–2000 season. In 1997 and 1998, nobody thought that way.

Once the lockout mercifully ended, the new CBA favored teams keeping their own free agents, which, of course, spawned some of the dopiest contracts ever. Class of ’96 stars like Kobe Bryant, Allen Iverson and Ray Allen signed $70.9 million max extensions, but unfortunately, so did Shareef Abdur-Rahim and Zydrunas Ilgauskas. The Nets splurged $86 million to keep Jayson “The Future Accidental Chauffeur Killer” Williams. Atlanta and Golden State locked up Alan Henderson and Jason Caffey for a combined $80 million. And the Knicks spent $56 million to keep Charlie Ward and Chris Dudley, or as they’d later be known, Charlie Ward’s Expiring Contract and Chris Dudley’s Expiring Contract.

Maybe 25 percent of the league possessed real cap space. The Kings smartly spent theirs on Vlade Divac and a six-year supply of Marlboro Reds for $62.5 million. Six other teams landed “marquee” free agents who flopped or eventually flopped: Phoenix (Tom Gugliotta: $58.5 million), Denver (Antonio McDyess: $67.5 million), Charlotte (Derrick Coleman: $40 million), Philly (Matt Geiger: $51 million), Chicago (Brent Barry: $27 million) and Detroit (Loy Vaught: $23 million). And Donald Sterling’s Clippers didn’t spend any of their cap space, as usual, although they probably spent a corresponding amount on NDAs.

Our seven contenders for that goofy lockout season were San Antonio, Portland, New York, Indiana, Houston, Utah and the Lakers. Only one had cap space: the Rockets, who landed Pippen in a sign-and-trade for $67.2 million. Nobody else could have afforded Jordan, coming off a record one-year salary of $33 million, unless he played for a truly seismic discount.

I ask you again … what was Michael’s move?

Create an Old Guys Team with Pippen, Barkley and Hakeem in Houston?

Team up with Duncan and Robinson and live in … San Antonio?

Slum for a seventh ring in a small market like Portland, Utah or Indiana?

Join forces with Kobe and Shaq and play for (gulp) Magic’s team?

Please. Only New York loomed as a possibility; if you remember, the Knicks traded Chris Mills and two contracts (John Starks and Terry Cummings) to Golden State for Sprewell only eight days after Jordan retired. Could they have remodeled that package as a sign-and-trade for Michael? Would Krause have sold out Jordan’s Chicago legacy for a pupu platter package and a couple of picks? This was Jordan’s only real play unless the Lakers hired Phil Jackson … and unfortunately, that didn’t happen for another six months.

Did the league inadvertently checkmate its greatest player? Actually, yes! That’s what happened. And that’s how Michael Jordan ended up extending his own bizarre record: “Most times that the GOAT retired on top as an NBA Finals MVP: Two.”

He skipped the lockout season and returned in January 2000, joining Washington as a part owner and president of basketball operations. In September 2001, Jordan stunned everyone by deciding to play basketball … for the Wizards. An astonishing 39 months had passed since the Roy Hobbs game, a stretch that included the Monica Lewinsky scandal, “The Real Slim Shady,” Sosa vs. McGwire, “Bye Bye Bye,” “Oops! … I Did It Again,” the Bush-Gore election, Kurt Warner’s Rams, the premiere of The Sopranos, the first internet stock boom, the Rock–Stone Cold feud, Belichick jumping to the Pats, Chuck Noland mourning a volleyball, “Who Let the Dogs Out,” Y2K, Y2J, two more Jay-Z albums and (gulp) three more Yankees titles.

Jordan announced his return two weeks after 9/11, later promising to donate his salary to families of the victims. The country was reeling. None of it felt right. Those two Wizards seasons played out like a reunion concert tour — and even if we knew the band had already peaked, we didn’t care. Just play the hits, Michael. Many nights, he couldn’t do it. A couple of nights, magically, he did. But Jordan’s creaky body couldn’t hold up. Michael Jordan waited too long to return. Really, he never should have left.

Two decades later, we’re watching LeBron James creep toward the same “man without a team” situation. The 2017–18 Cavaliers generated as much early drama as Jordan’s final Bulls season, as our relentless 24/7 hot-take cycle made Cleveland’s locker room seem like an ongoing Anchorman brawl. When a team breaks during the NBA Twitter era, you feel it in real time. Cleveland broke over a five-week span that included LeBron, for the first time, noticeably checking out during games.

Uh-oh. We nearly overheated the Trade Machine before a barrage of Woj Bombs on Deadline Day left everyone reeling: multiple trades and four new rotation guys for Cleveland, not to mention owner Dan Gilbert sacrificing a first-round pick, taking on two more horrifying salaries, and heading toward an excruciating $300 million payroll next season (including luxury tax). Next year’s Cavs team might cost more than Black Panther II. They did everything short of dealing 2018’s Brooklyn pick, their only remaining prize from last summer’s calamitous Kyrie Irving trade, as well as their one trump card for this summer’s looming stay-or-go staredown.

Hey, LeBron — if you promise to stay, we’ll trade the pick for more help. But you have to tell us right now.

The barrage of trades woke up LeBron, a better outcome than anything else that Cleveland received. Maybe Pre-Apex LeBron (2009), Apex LeBron (2013) and Post-Apex LeBron (2016) came and went, but 2018 LeBron (if engaged) remains the league’s most devastating offensive player. Here’s what else we know about LeBron after 15 years …

1. In 2014, he promised to bring Cleveland its first title in 50 years. It happened two years later. He’s immortal in Cleveland now. All Decision-related debts have been covered.

2. That means he can leave again. (If he wants.)

3. By signing only short-term deals during his second Cleveland stint, LeBron effectively extorted his owner/nemesis, Dan Gilbert, into a gotta-win-now strategy of paying the repeater tax, shipping away draft picks, re-signing Kevin Love at a gigantic number and comically overpaying role players like Tristan Thompson, J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert. Earlier this month, Cleveland could improve only by giving away ANOTHER first-round pick and taking on even MORE money. It’s like watching a drunk guy play Jenga. This isn’t team-building; it’s team-surviving. It’s not sustainable. (Hold this thought.)

4. Our safest 2018 bet: LeBron throws on his Superman cape and drags Cleveland to the Finals in a feeble conference, then gets annihilated by the Warriors or Rockets. What then? LeBron reached similarly bleak career points in 2010 and 2014, and both times, he pressed “Reset” and found a more appealing basketball situation. In 2010, Wade and Bosh trumped any other alternative. In 2014, Kyrie-Love–Dan Gilbert’s blank checkbook trumped Aging Wade–Aging Bosh–no cap space. In 2018 … (Hold this thought.)

5. Last summer (whether LeBron knew or not), Cleveland circled a four-team trade that shipped out Love, Kyrie Irving and at least two of those aforementioned bad contracts and yielded them Paul George, Carmelo Anthony AND Eric Bledsoe. Kyrie found out and the rest was history. The biggest prize from the ensuing trade, Brooklyn’s 2018 lottery pick, won’t yield anyone who could help LeBron right away — unless they flip it, with other pieces, for an impact star like Anthony Davis, Damian Lillard or (name any other stud who’s probably not available). One problem: Phoenix, Boston, Denver and the Lakers have stashed better assets for a mega-trade. Sure, it’s a sweet pick. I just don’t see how it helps LeBron this decade. (Hold this thought.)

6. If LeBron wants to grab GOAT status from Jordan — and by all accounts, he does — then he can’t topple Jordan with anything other than rings or math. He’s already played more games and minutes than Jordan ever did. He’s played in more Finals. He’s exhibited an astonishing, almost baffling level of consistency and durability, and unlike Jordan, he never disappeared during his prime. Since 2003, LeBron showed up, night after night after night, for one year longer than the entire run of Grey’s Anatomy.

Barring injury, he could retire as the all-time scoring king AND the first member of the 40k-10k-10k Club (40,000 points, 10,000 assists, 10,000 rebounds), which 15 years ago seemed about as realistic as LeBron growing a third arm out of his forehead. He’s creating a legitimate “Jordan’s peak was greater, but LeBron’s career was greater” argument. It’s in play. He wins with math. (And he knows it.)

7. Unlike Jordan or Magic, LeBron has been blessed with every conceivable training, dieting, equipment, conditioning and recovery innovation. Along with Tom Brady and Roger Federer, he has demolished the parameters of an athletic “prime.” Federer won last summer’s Wimbledon at 35 and January’s Australian Open at 36. Brady pulled off the greatest NFL comeback ever at 39 and threw for 505 yards in a Super Bowl at 40. You know how Brady wants to play until he’s 45? I keep hearing that LeBron wants to play until he’s 40 — at least — with the dream of finishing his career as the Senior Griffey to his son’s Junior Griffey. That’s seven more years. (Hold this thought.)

8. LeBron’s basketball situation matters most, but he adores big-picture narratives nearly as much. During those first few Cleveland years, he thrived on spurning traditional basketball-business structures and building something with his high school buddies, positioning themselves as the real-life Entourage. He spun 2010’s watershed free-agency tour into a thought bubble for new beginnings and player empowerment — culminating in the widely reviled Decision special — when really, all he wanted was to spend his prime in South Beach building a dynasty with Wade and Bosh.

In 2011, he hired a media strategist right around the same time we started hearing about LeBron’s business partner, Maverick Carter, as everyone started writing favorable pieces about their ambitious multimedia plans. In 2012, he ditched CAA for his buddy Rich Paul’s brand-new agency — which he’s, um, involved with — becoming the first modern superstar to achieve professional autonomy from the traditional business world. And 2014’s carefully orchestrated, beautifully executed “I’m coming home!” narrative masked the undeniable fact that (a) Miami was washed as a true contender and (b) Cleveland offered a better chance to keep winning titles.

I repeat: LeBron loves narratives.

And that’s what makes the summer of 2018 so confusing. The simple move would be staying in Cleveland … where LeBron came within one fortuitous nut-punch of losing three straight Finals, where his relationship with Gilbert has been described as “fractured” and “nonexistent” in recent weeks, where he doesn’t owe anyone anything and where he’s surrounded by his least inspiring supporting cast since the Antawn Jamison–Doughy Shaq era. Only another title or the NBA fixing the lottery for Cleveland again could convince LeBron to stay. (Just kidding.)

Meanwhile, jumping to Golden State or Houston on a minimum deal would make LeBron look weak and desperate, and if you don’t think he noticed the constant barrage of shit heaped on Kevin Durant after his Warriors move, you’re crazy. As for New York, the Knicks don’t have any cap space. Miami makes no sense. San Antonio made a little sense before Kawhi Leonard started reenacting the end of Bill Walton’s Portland career. Boston or Toronto can’t happen. Or Washington. FYI: We’re running out of contenders.

There’s been some growing “LeBron to Philly” buzz for four reasons: the Sixers have enough cap space and trade assets to accommodate LeBron and the likes of, say, PAUL GEORGE; Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid are two of the league’s best under-25 blue-chippers (young legs!); Klutch represents LeBron and Simmons (hmmmmm); and NBA insiders have been gossiping about an increasingly cozy Philly–LeBron’s circle connection since November. You want a quality narrative? What about this one:

In 2018, LeBron James signed with Philadelphia to build one last mini-dynasty with Embiid and Simmons. He vowed to play seven more years, until he turned 40, and vowed to make it his last stop. Just as important, he wanted to be closer to New York City and to his goal of becoming the first active billionaire athlete, with an eye on building his business empire and eventually owning an NBA franchise.

That’s not bad. Flip that script into first person and you can imagine the Sports Illustrated cover (“PHILADELPHIA FREEDOM”), the “As told to Lee Jenkins” byline and maybe even a picture of LeBron standing on the Rocky steps with 200 kids behind him. But if you’re LeBron, would you wager the last stage of your career, as well as your only real chance of grabbing the GOAT horns, on Embiid’s remarkably talented, remarkably fragile body? Check this out.

Player A: 76 games, 2,201 minutes

Player B: 57 games, 2,109 minutes

The first player? Joel Embiid’s career numbers through four seasons.

The second player? LeBron James … this season.

At the All-Star Game on Sunday, Embiid emerged as the night’s single biggest revelation for me. Maybe 11 players belonged out there at crunch time; Embiid was unequivocally one of them. He’s magnificent. But a Philly jump would ignore the durability lessons of every injury-prone, a-little-too-tall center we’ve ever had: Bill Walton, Arvydas Sabonis, Rik Smits, Yao Ming, Shawn Bradley, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, Greg Oden … it’s a terrifying list. Does Embiid’s overwhelming upside matter more than those sobering red flags? Embiid has missed 226 of a possible 302 NBA games so far. That’s 75 percent of his career. Jumping to Philly, by far, would be the biggest gamble of LeBron’s career.

Of course, we’re ignoring months and months of breadcrumbs leading to Los Angeles, a rumor that swelled during last year’s Finals and never really calmed down. The Lakers cleared cap space for him with the Russell and Clarkson trades, creating two max-free-agent slots this summer. He bought a second $20 million house in Brentwood. His media business runs out of Hollywood and Burbank, paving the way for home run projects like Space Jam 2 (which they haven’t developed for four astonishing years, but still).

And by the way? It’s the Lakers.

Believe me, I hate admitting this … but the Lakers, Yankees and Cowboys are the only three American sports teams to achieve perennial resonance. They always matter, regardless of whether they’re winning or losing. The NBA’s biggest star in 20-plus years jumping to the NBA’s biggest franchise … I mean, that’s something. You want a great narrative? Try this one. (Feel free to steal this, Lee Jenkins.)

I know people will say I left Cleveland again. I don’t look at it like that. My heart will always belong there. We brought them Cleveland’s first title in 52 years. We’ve done an unbelievable amount of charity work for Akron and Cleveland and the surrounding areas. Cleveland will always be a part of me. But I don’t want to be defined just by sports. This is the last chapter of my basketball career; I want to play seven more years, I want to play for the greatest franchise in any sport and I want to build a billion-dollar business in the entertainment capital of the world. My whole life has been building to this moment. I want to carry the torch from Mikan, Baylor, West, Wilt, Kareem, Magic, Shaq and Kobe. I want to learn from Magic Johnson, and I want to follow in his footsteps as an influential African American business icon. I want to use my platform to continue to speak out and prove that athletes shouldn’t just shut up and dribble. It’s time for the next chapter of my career. It’s time for me to move to Los Angeles and play for the Lakers.

In that “Coming to L.A.” piece, LeBron won’t mention the team’s ample cap space and budding war chest of youngsters, nor will he predict the Wigginsesque Lonzo trade that will yield another chess piece (and, more importantly, send the Ball family packing). As a basketball situation, 2018–19’s pipe dream of LeBron, Paul George, Brandon Ingram, Kyle Kuzma, Lonzo Trade Asset X and Two Smart Bench Signings isn’t any better than 2018–19’s pipe-dream roster in Cleveland. But it’s competitive enough. It’s one of the three greatest players of all time saying, I couldn’t find the perfect basketball situation, so I picked the perfect life situation.

And guess what. It’s still a better choice than anything Jordan had 20 years ago. Jordan’s era offered a relentless pounding and a primitive level of player movement. LeBron’s era offers undeniable advantages: better science, better training, flagrant foul calls, restrictions against hand-checking, advanced analytics, shorter contracts, fully empowered players, way more franchises planning ahead. When LeBron sours on a situation, he packs his bags and seeks a better one. Michael Jordan never had that luxury. After Chicago’s front office screwed things up for him, Jordan grabbed the halo of that Roy Hobbs game and drifted into the sky.

People have been chasing him ever since. LeBron could patch together a GOAT résumé hinging on math and fame and the 40k-10k-10k Club and Finals trips and rings/awards/trophies and generational impact and social media and a business empire and the stupefying concept of an elite athlete excelling, without an injury or major speed bump, for 20 solid years. The totality of LeBron’s career could become as unbelievable as Jordan’s extended apex. But that’s not an unassailable argument. We could always poke holes in it.

If LeBron wants to grab the GOAT horns, he needs to keep piling up Finals trips and maybe even one or two more rings. He needs to put himself in position for his own Roy Hobbs moment (even if The Block in Oakland wasn’t too shabby). He needs to get lucky and have a 7-foot-2 superfreak unicorn defy the odds and stay healthy. He needs to buddy up with his favorite Klutch client, a mirror image of himself physically, and play the “I’m gonna teach Ben everything I know” card. He needs to move his business to Manhattan. He needs to recruit the hell out of another A-lister like Paul George. He needs to roll the dice with Philadelphia.

It’s the second-best narrative with the absolute highest ceiling. And you know what else? Don’t laugh … but it’s the one move that might make Michael Jordan nervous. To be continued.