If LeBron and Kyrie bolt and Giannis left because of how the organization is running itself (which is completely and totally theoretical regardless of what he’s saying in Manila — and what was the context of those quotes btw? It’s a Q&A tour), I’d hope it would make it clear to teams that they need to run a tight, high quality ship in the front office and in ownership, or risk not being a place stars want to be.
It’s not even small market so much. There’s, I don’t know, 6 or 7 teams that can be called large market, and then everyone else. When a player leaves a team, they’re almost always leaving a small market team, so it’s pretty easy to be like “all these players are abandoning small markets!” Hayward left because the first coach who believed in him as a young man just happened to end up as the coach of a team with a clear path to the conference finals with a solid enough chance to go further. That’s a crazy, fluke thing. KD left for a team that was being run EXCEPTIONALLY well. No one has wanted to go to the Knicks or Nets in awhile even though they’re in NYC because they’ve been run so poorly in recent years. Porzingis would probably be over the moon if he got traded to Memphis or Phoenix. Melo has wanted to stay because of family and it’s his hometown and people think he’s crazy. No one would go willingly to the Clippers for decades because they were run poorly. In the past few years the Lakers haven’t come close to talking anyone into joining up with them while their front office situation was shakey, and now that it’s stablized, it seems like that might turn around.