It’s hard to believe, but LeBron James — basketball legend, all-time NBA leading scorer, face of the Los Angeles Lakers — may soon be officially diagnosed with most dreaded disease to befall professional athletes not named after Yankees’ sluggers: Kaepernick Syndrome.
You know the signs and symptoms: Exaggerated performance compared to perceived influence. Reportage non-commensurate with one’s importance to their team. Incontinence of the mouth, particularly when it comes to political issues. Acute entitlement. Distraction from the actual business of professional sports, which is winning.
The disease is often confused with Tebow Syndrome, a similar disease in which the hullabaloo surrounding a player’s presence outweighs his athletic value to the team. A simple differential diagnosis can tell the two apart, though: Can you bear to listen to them for more than 30 seconds on something that doesn’t involve their chosen sport?
If not, I regret to inform you: It’s Kaepernick Syndrome. Median career survival rate is 1-3 years, with diminishing quality of life in end-stage KS. The only cure is retirement and entering a monastery.
This doesn’t seem to be an option for LeBron. King James’ extra-roundball political activism was indulged when he was dominant on the court — amplifying false media narratives in flashpoint cases, deciding people were guilty seemingly based on their race, and other fun stuff like that — but age remains undefeated, and LeBron is 40, which means it’s time to move on.
James has never played a full 82-game schedule with the Lakers. When he’s been healthy, his numbers were good, but on the decline, and he was only in the top five in the league in two categories: blocks and steals per game. And, perhaps more importantly, Los Angeles got the steal of the decade by acquiring Luka Dončić, another guard who happens to be 14 years younger than LeBron, from the Dallas Mavericks.
Now, ESPN reports, the Lakers are trying to delicately break it to King James that he has early-stage Kaepernick Syndrome.
A Friday report about how that tricky process is playing out began with laying out the scene: a dinner with team power players at a celebrity haunt on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. If you don’t want to be seen, you can enter through the back, as the principals did. They didn’t exit that way:
On May 3, four days after the Los Angeles Lakers were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by the Minnesota Timberwolves, Craig’s reserved a booth for four VIPs: the Lakers’ new superstar point guard, Luka Doncic; his longtime manager, Lara Beth Seager; Lakers general manager Rob Pelinka; and coach JJ Redick.
Do you watch the NBA?
LeBron James, the centerpiece of every Lakers decision and strategy for the previous seven-plus years, was not in attendance … all four exited through the front door, where a crowd of paparazzi and fans spotted them and took videos that were immediately uploaded to TMZ and social media. Doncic even stopped to sign a few autographs before leaving.
The purpose of the meeting was as clear as their choice of door: Doncic is the face of the franchise now, and the Lakers wanted him — and everyone else — to know it.
Well, that’s a heck of a way to say it, but it needed to be said. Just a year earlier, the Lakers — desperate to keep their aging meal ticket happy — drafted his thoroughly useless son Bronny in the second round just to keep the nepo-daddy happy. That didn’t quite work out well for the team, mind you; in 27 games with the team, James fils averaged 2.3 points per game with a woeful 31.3 shooting percentage.
And while James picked up the option for the final year in his Lakers’ contract, worth $52.6 million, his agent made it clear that he may be taking his diminished talents elsewhere.
“We understand the difficulty in winning now while preparing for the future. We do want to evaluate what’s best for LeBron at this stage in his life and career,” Rich Paul said in a statement before they picked up the contract.
“He wants to make every season he has left count, and the Lakers understand that, are supportive and want what’s best for him.”
ESPN, ever perceptive, noted that this bit of sayonara, you jerks agent copy “read like a goodbye letter” and “suggested a larger plan or strategy was afoot.” You think?
This has prompted any number of “trade rumors swirl!” headlines, but no actual legit trade offers as of yet.
Golden State was rumored to be interested, although why a team whose three highest-paid talents are over the age of 35 would want a 40-year-old with diminishing returns is beyond me — and apparently behind Warriors brass, because they’re not biting.
The Miami Heat are also supposedly interested, according to Athlon Sports, and feel that they can put James in a position to win another title on his way out the door.
In more proof that God has a hearty sense of humor, the Dallas Mavericks — you know, the team that gave up Dončić for practically nothing (except for the Cooper Flagg frozen envelope if you’re a conspiracy theorist, which I would never endorse, cough cough, wink wink) — is also interested in James, although the Mavs have the same chance of winning the NBA Finals as they do the Super Bowl. (They do, however, somehow have a better chance of winning the Super Bowl than the Dallas Cowboys do.)
And, if James really wants to end his career in ignominy, the cross-town Los Angeles Clippers are also interested. Considering that the team’s owner seems to brag more about the toilets in his team’s new arena than its on-court performance, that’s about the worst prognosis you can get for early-stage Kaepernick Syndrome.
But how did James expect this would end? Yes, we live in the age of Tom Brady, where medical miracles extend a player’s longevity and usefulness a few years beyond where it used to fall off — but only a few, and those diminishing returns become a lot more problematic when your off-court antics make you a liability.
James could get away with being Temu Muhammad Ali when he was the face of the league, but aside from residual name value, he’s not even top 10 anymore. And while his play has faded, the impression he’s left as a political firebrand has not.
The lefties who cared about what he had to say because he used to be dominant have moved on. Conservatives who rooted against him because of it, meanwhile, retain their prior animus unabated. And on top of that all, he seems to resent that the Lakers are moving on from him because he’s neither their future nor their present. He’s a distraction, and one that the NBA’s premier franchise can’t afford.
Sure, this may be early-stage Kaepernick Syndrome — but the diagnosis seems solid, and the Lakers would be well advised to quarantine him before the malaise spreads to the rest of the team.
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