LeBron James has spent twenty-three NBA seasons being careful about which cities he criticises publicly. The 41-year-old Los Angeles Lakers star clearly decided this week that he had earned an evening off.
Sitting down with the viral YouTube duo Bob Does Sports for a long-form chat that has since rocketed around basketball social media, James went out of his way to take a sledgehammer to two NBA markets he plainly has no interest in ever playing for — and floated a city that does not currently have an NBA franchise as somewhere he would happily have suited up.
The first target was Milwaukee, a franchise James has played dozens of regular-season nights against during his career.
"Random Tuesday in Milwaukee standing at the at 41 years old," James said, deadpan. "You think I want to do that?"
The second was Memphis, which the laughter from the room only barely cut through.
"Being in Memphis on a random Thursday — I'm not the first guy even talked about in the NBA," James said. "Like, we all — like you guys have to move."
Bob Does Sports has built its audience on coaxing relaxed, post-shift honesty out of pro athletes, and the back-and-forth on LeBron's preferred NBA destinations was always going to be the moment that travelled. James did not stop at writing off the two markets. He proposed an alternative.
"Let's go over to Nashville," he said. "You got Vanderbilt over there. You got the NASCAR. You got a stadium. Don't they got a hockey team, too?"
Nashville, home to a Predators hockey team, a successful NFL franchise, and recurring NBA expansion talk in recent years, has been floated repeatedly as a likely market for a future expansion or relocated franchise. James clearly likes the idea. The fact he is sketching it out, on camera, while still under contract to the Lakers, will not be lost on commissioner Adam Silver's office.
He even let the audience inside the alternate-universe version of his career. Asked what he would have done if a draft lottery had sent him to a market he did not want to play in, James reached for one of the NFL's all-time precedents.
"Give me that," he said. "And I might have pulled an Eli Manning and not showed."
Manning, famously, refused to play for the San Diego Chargers after they took him first overall in the 2004 NFL Draft, forcing a trade to the New York Giants. James, who did not have that option as a Cleveland-bound No. 1 pick in 2003, was in effect joking that he might have engineered something similar in the NBA if he had been drafted to the wrong city.
The pundit-and-host duo on the podcast took the punchline to its logical conclusion. "Doesn't look like LeBron's going to be on the Grizzlies anytime soon," one of them quipped. "So Grizzlies fans out there — yeah, they know their only chance was in 2003 if they would have won the lottery."
It is, on one level, a throwaway viral clip designed to drive impressions and out-of-context outrage. On another, it is a 41-year-old player approaching what is genuinely the last stretch of his career making it clear, in no uncertain terms, which NBA markets he believes have failed to keep up. The Memphis Grizzlies, currently rebuilding, and the Milwaukee Bucks, deep in a Giannis Antetokounmpo era that has fascinated and frustrated in equal measure, did not need this from LeBron James this week.
They got it anyway.
