Brooklyn Bound

Training camp might have just started, but let’s jump ahead to the upcoming summer to look at what has been the most compelling storyline for the last few years. Will LeBron James leave Cleveland, why would he and where would he go?

If King James is a smart man, and he does appear to be a smart guy, he will get out of Cleveland while he can. Danny Ferry’s tenure as the Cavaliers GM has done nothing but produce short-cited moves and he continued that trend this summer. Ferry signed Anderson Varejao to what could potentially be a 5-year, $50 million contract. That is an enormous investment for a player whose best qualities are his hustle and energy, non-basketball skills that do not usually improve with age (see: Malik Rose). Varejao’s contract could take up as much as a fifth of the Cavaliers cap in 2014. This will prove to be a crippling move for the franchise and absolutely kill their ability to add better players to surround LeBron with in the future should he choose to stay.

Cleveland’s situation really has no chance of improving for the next few years because they have no attractive tradable assets that are not essential to the team’s success. Daniel Gibson and Jamario Moon are fine role players, but they are not going to bring back a major haul in a trade. Plus after this season both Zydrunas Illgauskas and Shaquille O’Neal become free agents, leaving the team without a starting center on the roster and no cap space to go sign a younger one.

The Cavaliers problem all along has been that James has had nobody to grow old with on the roster, no sidekick, no Pippen to his Jordan. Mo Williams is a nice player, but he is not a second banana on a championship team, he might not even be a third banana. Let’s not forget that Carlos Boozer could have been that player.

Despite all of the mismanagement on the part of the Cavaliers, James will turn 25 this December and has a chance to escape to a more attractive destination at a pretty ripe age.

The New York Knicks have long been the team rumored to be James’ eventual destination because of his aspirations of being marketed like a David Beckham, Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, but from a basketball standpoint this makes little to no sense for him. The Knicks would be a playoff team for sure with James, but it might take a few years before they became true contenders.

Instead, Lebron should be looking across the Hudson River at the New Jersey Nets. The Nets will have the cap space to sign King James and already have an all-star point guard, Devin Harris, and an emerging franchise center, Brook Lopez.

In contrast to the Cavs, whose championship window would only seem to get smaller as the years go by, the Nets are a team that will only get better. Plus the Nets will have the financial flexibility to build upon what they already have. Harris is signed for a very reasonable $35 million over the next four years and Lopez and Courtney Lee are not up for extensions until 2012. In addition to that the Nets will have “The Chairman” Yi Jianlian and rookie Terrence Williams, plus a lottery pick if they do not qualify for the playoffs this season. That is a core that James can grow with and win with now and five years from now.

There are even non-basketball-related incentives for James to sign with the Nets. His buddy Jay-Z is a minority owner. He is a Yankees fan. The team will eventually move to Brooklyn. The Nets will get a new arena in Brooklyn (ground is expected to be broken before the end of the year). Penny-pinching owner Bruce Ratner recently sold the team to billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who is supposedly like a Russian Mark Cuban. He would get to play in the New York media market. Where is the downside for James in this equation?

Here’s to hoping that LeBron will lead the Nets out of the swamps of New Jersey and into a new era in Brooklyn.