The Five Best Teams to Sign LeBron James, Based on Vibes

LeBron James told the Los Angeles Lakers today that he does plan to play his 24th season in the NBA, just not for them. This generation’s face of the NBA will be a free agent for the fourth time in his career, and a select few teams have entered the rumor mill as his next destination. One has emerged as the clear frontrunner, and they will be on this list, but the others won’t because all signs are he’s going to play next to Steph Curry next year. We get to enjoy a Decision once every presidential election, so I’m going to indulge the unhinged basketblogger part of my brain and let it get creative with the best ways to close the last chapter of LeBron’s career, based on the various vibes these Decisions may bring.

5. Washington Wizards

Oh you think the Michael Jordan-LeBron debate is interminable and pointless now? You think there’s already way too much airtime dedicated to a dated and circular argument with no clear answer? Well that’s on you for exposing yourself to the radiation of sports debate TV, and you along with this entire superficial enterprise must be punished for its sins. Let’s add another layer to this madness and see which late career GOAT can drag an absolute dogshit roster further in our nation’s capital for perhaps the NBA’s most hopeless franchise (non-Sacramento edition).

This holy basketball punishment would force Stephen A. Smith and the associated universe of talking heads who have ruined NBA discourse to watch more Wizards games in a month than they have ever watched in their entire lives. I want potentially the next Republican nominee for president and Kendrick Perkins to argue about Kwame Brown for hours on ESPN’s First Take, and get heated over how that generational bust compares to the modern-day Wizards rebuilding movement and what that says about which all-time great on tired legs is greater. I want ESPN and its entire LeBron-centric media operation to treat a Wizards 10 seed play-in game like the NBA Finals with a straight face. This is the fate they have earned for themselves in a just universe.

But we clearly do not live in a world where justice is a virtue, and LeBron would be crazy to do this, but if he wanted to exact punishment on all his enemies in the media, forcing them to care about the Wizards is one of the best ways to do it. 

4. Los Angeles Clippers

This is another one you won’t find on the basketball sites parsing the second-apron luxury tax rules and evaluating trade assets and using the logical parts of their brains, because the team that so desperately wants to take the Lakers’ exalted spot in the starfucker capital of the world is reportedly about to trade their superstar, and they already traded another in James Harden. Kawhi Leonard may be sent to Toronto by the time this gets published, removing the last logical reason to do this for a team entering a rebuilding era.

But why would you assume that the Clippers operate on logic? When have they ever? That is the entire point of the Clippers. As a matter of foundational principle, they do not make sense.

This is a team that somehow floundered in anonymity for decades in America’s second largest media market and finally became famous for having the one owner too racist for sports. They are now owned by Steve Ballmer, one of the richest and most awkwardly enthusiastic men alive who helped Pablo Torre win a Pulitzer Prize, getting his hand caught in the salary cap circumvention cookie jar once with DeAndre Jordan, and likely again by heavily investing in a salary cap circumvention scheme bankrupt carbon credits business under federal investigation that believed Kawhi Leonard was exponentially more marketable than Leonardo DiCaprio.

If Steve Ballmer thought that he had a real chance to win LeBron James’ heart with another defunct business paying him a lot more money than the NBA allows, he would reverse this rebuild and make the under-the-table agreement with LeBron right in front of federal investigators if he had to. This is the funniest possible outcome, the great evil empire of Los Angeles being humiliated and humbled by their desperate little brother and former tenant willing to cut any corner possible. As a born-and-bred Laker hater, this is my second favorite option. I would die laughing. 

3. New York Knicks

Okay let’s get serious about winning basketball games for LeBron now, the main reason he is leaving a team who fancies itself a contender yet can’t play defense. James Dolan, world-historic cheapskate and vibes ruiner, announced on the day of the Knicks championship parade that the Knicks will not keep the team together and spend into the second-apron that all NBA owners definitely are not colluding over and treating like a hard salary cap, so this is another possibility you likely will not see in the real basketball blogosphere.

But also, LeBron doesn’t need the money. There’s no reason he couldn’t sign for the mid-level exception or the veteran minimum. It made sense to not do it in previous contracts because he has the NBA Player’s Union to worry about and financial precedents to set for future superstars, but the best player of the 21st century’s last ride is a pretty good opportunity to take an extreme discount future teams will have a hard time justifying as a benchmark. Frankly, Las Vegas’ future owner can fit anywhere he wants to. Superstars like him have proven that when they want to go somewhere, alleged salary cap constraints magically have a way of working themselves out.

LeBron closing out his career trying to establish a dynasty in the mecca of basketball amidst star-studded Madison Square Garden crowds losing their mind is so perfect I can almost hear the hysteria of it in my mind’s eye. This would be a gift to the basketball culture, a celebration of it even, and it also may be the best situation for LeBron’s aging body. Between Jalen Brunson commanding primary ballhandling duties, to KAT being able to take point-forward responsibilities, to the trio of pterodactyls the Knicks have on the wings hounding the other team’s best players, the Knicks would allow LeBron to rest easy in the regular season and gear up for a dead serious championship run.

2. Denver Nuggets

Okay, now that you’re done rolling your eyes, let me defend my objectively correct subjectivity here. I am begrudgingly right about my beloved Denver Nuggets being a premier LeBron destination the same way I am begrudgingly right about market socialism being the only kind of socialism America is ready for. Once you block out all the media bullshit from the only people in the world who deserve the Wizards, this is clearly the Decision that neatly fits the narrative of the early 2020s. Nikola Jokic will be remembered by history as basketball’s first undisputed best post-LeBron player, and his ascension to the throne came through multiple battles against LeBron. If Denver was on the water, no one would doubt the wisdom of this point, but because I live in a mid-sized media market in America’s forgotten time zone, you all are booing me even though I am right. 

After the bubble Lakers taught the young Nuggets how to win in a Western Conference Final during LeBron’s lone Los Angeles title run, Denver repaid the lesson three years later in a 2023 Western Conference Final sweep en route to my hapless franchise’s first ever NBA title. The following season, the admittedly unearned “who’s your daddy” chants rained down on LeBron as the Denver Nuggets raised their first championship banner on opening night against the Lakers, and they followed him all year as he just could not beat the Nuggets. After not one but two Jamal Murray buzzer beaters ripped LeBron’s heart out in a five game gentlemen’s sweep the following playoffs, deafening well-earned “who’s your daddy” chants played over the sunset of the AD-LeBron Lakers era. Sign in Denver and I promise we’ll stop chanting it forever, LeBron.  

Not only would this tie a neat little bow on a seminal era of NBA basketball centered around the face of the league and the all-time great who succeeded him, but holy hell this team would be basketball nirvana. Plugging the LeBron supercomputer into the Jokic-Murray two man game is like giving Godzilla a lightsaber. Like the Knicks, the presence of Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, hopefully Payton Watson and of course the Serbian GOAT will take the weight off LeBron’s shoulders on each end every night for 82 games.

But like the Knicks, this is also never ever happening, mainly because we already know where LeBron is going.

1. Golden State Warriors

Draymond Green turned down his $27.6 million player option this week, clearing a lot of cap space for the team widely regarded to be LeBron’s final destination. They are also reportedly trying to free Anthony Davis from the basketball prison in Washington as well, and the Warriors seem to be gearing up to build an aging Megazord of 2010 superstars. They have reportedly told Jimmy Butler they are not trading him either (making the AD trade “unlikely” per NBA reporter Brian Windhorst), and I doubt that a petty psycho like Draymond Green would turn down all that money just to let himself get stabbed in the back. If the plan in motion works the way it seems like it is supposed to, the Warriors starting five next year will be Steph Curry, Jimmy Butler, LeBron James, Draymond Green, and Anthony Davis (the first four seem certain, at the very least). 

I could have written a less vibes-based article and more logical one around teams like San Antonio, Cleveland, Miami or even Minnesota who all make sense for LeBron to varying degrees and all have the best non-Warriors odds in betting markets right now. Cleveland and Miami would be funny just from a ‘guy who can’t stop going back to his ex’ perspective, but that story has been told once in Cleveland already and we’re bored with it. Teaching the pups in San Antonio and Minnesota how to win would be a fun challenge for LeBron, but if there’s anything the first Decision taught us, it should be that this guy likes to play with his friends he has made on USA Olympic teams, like Steph Curry. 

I’d bet that like with the 2008 Olympics leading to the 2010 Decision, the outline of this deal was negotiated within 72 hours of Steph rescuing his, Kevin Durant’s and LeBron’s last Team USA ride from Jokic’s clutches two summers ago. The writing has been on the wall for that iteration of LeBron’s championship hopes ever since Anthony Davis coined a simple phrase just before the Olympics that will reverberate throughout Denver’s history. It’s difficult to believe that like with past contenders LeBron played on whose time had clearly passed, he wasn’t spending his Luka Doncic years wondering what other sides of the NBA the grass may be greenest on, with Steph in his ear telling him the answer is obvious.

LeBron knows he has an unprecedented number of miles on his engine that would make Kareem Abdul-Jabbar feel gassed just thinking about it, and while he is still one of the five or so best players alive, he is not for 82 games anymore and he needs more help than two guys who love to chuck up threes. The age of superteams is not over, it’s just that the NBA’s new convoluted cap has made it more difficult than ever to build a big three on max contracts and have anything other than a bunch of guys playing for the minimum around them. Oklahoma City, New York and San Antonio have proven that depth reigns supreme in this post-LeBron, Curry and KD iteration of the NBA where no one can claim dynastic power, and it looks like Golden State is going to try to emulate that model, but with a bunch of aging vets gearing up for one last run against a new generation of NBA stars. If they can pull this off, even the biggest hater in me cannot deny that Steph chucking up 40 footers while throwing alley-oops to LeBron is both the best vibes-based and logic-based option here.