Part of the negative reputation LeBron James has in some NBA circles is his tendency to recruit other superstars to play with him in order to form superteams and stack the deck heavily in his favor.
He got Chris Bosh to go with him to the Miami Heat and team up with Dwyane Wade, and soon after he relocated to the Los Angeles Lakers in 2018, he was joined by Anthony Davis, who, like him, is represented by Klutch Sports Group. Of course, one of James’ such attempts backfired when, in 2021, he was the impetus behind the Lakers trading for Russell Westbrook, a trade that became a disaster in more ways than one.
Kevin Durant seemed to use the James playbook when he left Westbrook and the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2016 to sign with Stephen Curry’s Golden State Warriors, a team that had just won a record 73 regular-season games and lost in Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
It was later revealed that James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, who defeated the Warriors in that seventh game for the world championship, made their own push to land Durant. Former NBA player Rashad McCants dug up that old news and used it to troll James on X (formerly Twitter).
While many have criticized James for such attempts to team up with other elite players, others have praised him for doing so and have credited him for starting a trend they call “player empowerment,” a trend Durant has obviously picked up upon.
It is one of the things James does that has made him one of the more polarizing and intriguing personalities in all of sports.
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