LeBron James comes to town with the Cleveland Cavaliers to face the Sixers on Friday night, and it could be his last visit with the Cavs.
James will be playing elsewhere next season, and exactly where I cannot tell you because I do not know.
I have been sitting on a pinned tweet since Aug. 16 of last summer, and it remains atop my Twitter feed -- where it will stay until the second week of July when James chooses his next team.
I provided a little intel into where this information came from in Wednesday night's post following the Sixers' 12th straight win, 115-108 over the Detroit Pistons, and I will delve a little deeper.
When the information was given to me, my source said: "The entire NBA knows it. The only people who don't are the media."
And as I mentioned in that pinned tweet, the reason for James' pending departure is a relationship with ownership that is beyond repair.
So let's take a look at what each of these guys stands for, put it together with the polarized political climate in the United States, and provide some additional clarity to skeptics, trolls, the NBA intelligensia, et al.
The No. 1 reason why this is going to happen is because Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is a huge Trump supporter; LeBron is not.
It is a matter of public record that Gilbert donated $750,000 to President Trump's inauguration fund. Quicken is now the largest mortgage lender in America, and according to Fortune's real-time wealth calculator, Gilbert woke up this morning with a net worth of $6.3 billion.
James, meanwhile, in currently engaged in a back-and-forth with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who said a week ago that James that should "shut up and dribble." Last Friday, James issued a response in the form of a photo uploaded to his Instagram account that read "I am more than an athlete" and included the hashtag "#wewillnotshutupanddribble."
So this divide between James and Gilbert is political, cultural and economical. If you have ever engaged in a political argument in this day and age of extreme polarization, you probably have an idea of how combustive opinions can become. It is no different in the sports world.
Ingraham's attacks were made in response to a recent video podcast that featured James and Kevin Durant. The podcast's host, Cari Champion, asked the two players how they would describe the current climate for politically engaged athletes.
James, who last year called the President a "bum" on Twitter, said the climate "is hot." Going a step further, he said Trump is "someone who doesn't understand the people -- and really don't give a [expletive] about the people."
That comment angered Ingraham, who called James' view a "barely intelligible, not to mention ungrammatical take on President Trump."
James has told reporters that any decision on his future will be made in the postseason, which is brilliant both for its subtlety and its substance. James is one of the most media savvy athletes in professional sports, and he knows how to get the media to back off. He does not want to be asked about next season in the middle of this season.
Furthermore, James' next decision must be made in the offseason, but not until then will we know if he made it to an eighth consecutive NBA Finals, which teams will have cleared the cap space to go after him, and which franchises will have the ability to allow him to continue playing into mid-June as he does every year.
A lot will change on the NBA landscape between now and the start of free agency on July 1, and it would be disingenuous for anyone to predict with any degree of certainty where he will play next.
Fans in Philadelphia are wondering whether the 76ers might be his next landing zone, but do they really need him? The Sixers are the hottest team in the NBA, they have Magic Johnson 2.0 playing the point, they are eventually going to get Joel Embiid back from a fractured eye socket (not that they've missed him while he has been out), and they will have the No. 1 pick in the draft for the third consecutive year if the Lakers win the lottery.
After nearly two years outside of the mainstream media, I chose to cover the Sixers for NJ.com because I was waiting for the right opportunity to find the perfect LZ of my own.
I have never backed off my LeBron tweet, just as I did not back off my James story in 2014 when I had it nailed 48 hours before anyone else. And because memories are short, I was pretty damn sure James was headed to Miami in 2010 before he went on TV with Jim Gray on ESPN and announced what has come to be known as "The Decision."
I would provide you with a link to the 2010 article on ESPN.com, but the Worldwide Leader has unpublished it.
It looked like this:
So enjoy LeBron's visit to Philly on Friday night ... and let's hope it is not his last in a Cleveland Cavs uniform. As much as every Sixers fan wants to see their team avoid the Cavs in the postseason, there are some of us who live for drama. In this case, we could be looking at a matchup of the guy who has been to seven straight NBA Finals against the team that could go to the next seven NBA Finals. - NJ
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