But isn’t this precisely the problem with Lebron? His short-sighted demands on team building have always led to overpaid role players, short benches, and poorly constructed rosters. He forces teams to go “all in” in a win-now mode, makes his roster demands public, and creates awful negotiating leverage in any potential deals.

Case in point: before moving to Cleveland, everyone knew the cap was about to explode; it’s why Lebron signed a two year deal in the first place to resign at the new supermax level once it kicked in. A smart GM would have kept Wiggins and waited for pending salary cap expansion to add 1–2 max or near max deals as more space became available over the ensuing years. Everyone acts like Golden State was the only benefactor of the jump in cap space; top FAs would have been more likely to go to Cleveland to get a ring if they were better stewards of their cap space. Instead, they traded away a young stud on a rookie deal at 1/5 the max price for an overpaid Kevin Love, then overpaid for Thompson and JR Smith, simply because they shared agents or were buddies with Lebron. Cleveland’s owner had no issue going deep into the luxury tax to buy a championship; their biggest mistake was going over the cap before it expanded, which took away their ability to add quality free agents.

I’ll be shocked if Lebron has learned anything from this in his next destination, though. If you want to win a championship, you need to draft well and sign unrestricted free agents. Trading 3–4 young pieces to clear bad contracts and add another rotation player are surefire strategies to ensure that your bench on the new team will be terrible.