The NBA’s Prometheus

Sometimes a player is so good at something—so dependable, so versatile, so influential—he can be punished for it. Tuesday night, with Isaiah Thomas out with a lingering hip injury and Derrick Rose down with an ankle sprain, LeBron James played point guard for the Cavaliers. He scored 34 points to go along with four rebounds and 13 assists, and the Cavs beat the rudderless Bulls, 119-112. James has had to do this before. In his first stint with Cleveland, he was officially listed as a point guard on February 3, 2005, in a blowout loss to the Heat. Unofficially, he ran the point during a particularly injury-plagued stretch of the 2009-10 season. “It’s not something I always want to do because running the point guard is like playing quarterback,” he said at the time. “I decided not to play quarterback in high school. I’d rather play wide receiver and get out in the open.”

Cleveland’s break-in-case-of-emergency point guard is the best player of his generation. He’d just rather not do it unless he has to. This is the LeBron story: You change the way people think about basketball, and then you have to adjust to the new reality you've created. This is something any true superstar has dealt with. George Mikan, professional basketball’s proto-superstar, was so dominant that the league changed the rules—creating the goaltending call and widening the free throw lane. He was the first NBA star to be marketed independently of his team. Wilt Chamberlain’s Bunyonesque combination of size, skill, and athleticism was viewed as an existential threat to competitive balance. He snatched shots out of the clear-blue sky, dunked from the free throw line, and owned the paint like a Cerberus. The league answered with an even wider lane and changes to rules governing goaltending, free throws, and inbounding.

Players can bring about more than just rule changes. The rivalry between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird was the modern game’s Big Bang. Together they dragged the sport out of its coked-up, tape-delayed purgatory. The 2-3-2 Finals format was created specifically to make life easier for the players and coaches, not to mention the migrating herds of media members and hangers-on, shuttling between Los Angeles and Boston at the end of the playoffs. When the Celtics seemed in danger of losing free agent Larry Joe Bird to the despotism of the newly instituted salary cap, the league created the so-called Bird exception out of whole emerald-green cloth. Ever since, teams have been able to go over the cap to sign players whose Bird rights they retain.

Michael Jordan revolutionized the way athletes pitch products and reconfigured an entire generation’s concept of what true greatness looks like into a single-minded, domineering, near-pathological obsession with winning.

LeBron James changed the game, but in a different way. James isn’t just his era’s defining superstar—he’s his generation’s Prometheus. Like stealing fire from the gods to give it to humanity, the changes James wrought became tools that others have wielded. And while James hasn’t been sentenced to an eternity of having his liver devoured by an eagle, he has to play the Warriors in the Finals every year. So it’s almost the same thing. And the worst part about it? He’s the one who created the mechanisms his opponents have used to defeat him.

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It was the summer of 2006, and Team USA was on its way to an embarrassing third-place finish at the FIBA World Championships in Japan. Meanwhile, the cream of the storied 2003 draft class—LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh—was using the proceedings as an impromptu planning meeting. The trio, already among the brightest stars in the game and clearly the future of the league, were on the cusp of their first contract extensions. The scheme that emerged, reportedly at LeBron’s behest, was groundbreaking—James, Wade, and Bosh would sign shorter deals for three years (with a fourth-year player option) instead of the standard five, allowing all three to hit free agency at the same time in the summer of 2010.

This increased pooling of bargaining power set off a frenzy of activity. Teams—most notably the New York Knicks and Miami Heat—scrambled to create cap space, now more precious than ever. Creative Artists Agency, the Los Angeles–based super-agency, decided to get involved in basketball, bringing James, Wade, and Bosh (among many others) under their formidable aegis. And as the calendar crept closer to the summer of reckoning, LeBron’s every utterance—every gesture—was magnified by a quickly developing social media culture and dissected by amateur Kremlinologists for hidden meaning.

Then there was The Decision, LeBron’s televised announcement that he was joining Wade and Bosh as a member of the Miami Heat. Forget how callous it was—like watching someone announce their divorce live on television while his spouse and extended family watched helplessly. What matters is the mechanism. By controlling the message, the delivery system (ESPN), and the setting (the Greenwich, Connecticut, chapter of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America), James was essentially seizing the means of content production, presaging the trend that would ultimately result in outlets like The Player’s Tribune and LeBron’s own Uninterrupted. Over the years, LeBron has grown into the role of the game’s shadow imperator. It’s jarring to consider the breadth of subjects he’s asked to comment on. He’s organized protests, called the president a “bum,” adjudicated in the case of Warriors rookie Jordan Bell’s pass-to-himself dunk against the Mavericks, scouted Lauri Markkanen (“A very confident kid, shoot the heck out of the ball. He’s going to continue to get better.”), and shit on the aptly named Cleveland Browns.

These are LeBron’s twin innovations: the strategic use of contract length to maximize leverage and a comprehensive media strategy that takes player content directly to an audience. In a sense, both devices flow from the same impulse: to control the narrative. But there’s only so much story-shaping one person can do. To be considered a great, LeBron would need to win titles.

For almost two decades, Charles Barkley getting roasted in front of a national television audience for not winning a championship has been one of the sport’s touchstones. Whether you’ve been following basketball for 20 days or 20 years—whether you saw him lace them up or only know him from TNT—you know two things about Sir Charles: (1) he was a great player, and (2) he never got a chip. That information is just part of the atmosphere. This is the context in which today’s stars and superstars were raised: Don’t be Barkley.

“I knew that if people put good players around me, that I could make a team win. They tried to give me a bad rap in Philadelphia. I actually started believing it for a little while,” Barkley said to Charlie Rose in 1993.

When James realized that Cleveland likely could not assemble a championship-caliber team around him, he took matters into his own hands, inadvertently kicking off the superteam era.

Now LeBron’s innovations are being used against him. Kyrie Irving’s demand to be traded out of Cleveland was effective because of the structure of LeBron’s deal. The one year (plus a player option) remaining on the King’s deal with the Cavaliers gives James maximum leverage. But it also means a smaller window for contention. LeBron and the Cavs had no choice but to deal Irving.

Around the league, shorter contracts and player movement are now the norms. In the pre-LeBron years, a franchise player might change teams when it comes time to chase a ring before the clock runs out. Barkley won an MVP in Phoenix, but didn't leave Philly until he was 29. Karl Malone was 40 when he joined Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal in Los Angeles. But LeBron was 26 when made his decision and he’s now on his second go-round with Cleveland. Carmelo Anthony was 26 when he strong-armed his way to the Knicks; he’s now on his third team. Dwight Howard was 27 when he burned bridges with the Magic. Kevin Durant was 28. This summer, Chris Paul, Paul George, and Melo, with 23 All-Star selections between them, changed teams. No one wants to be Charles Barkley. And thanks largely to LeBron, taking steps to avoid the Chuckster’s fate is both more possible and more socially acceptable than ever.

In July 2016, Kevin Durant followed LeBron’s example and joined the already historically great Golden State Warriors, winners of a record-setting 73 regular-season games. Sure, a few disgruntled fans burned his jersey. Yes, he was mercilessly (and possible offensively) heckled on his first return to Oklahoma City. Of course, Russell Westbrook has taken—and continues to take—variously veiled shots at Durant. But the Warriors won the title last season, besting LeBron’s Cavaliers in five games.

Post-Jordan, the pursuit of greatness has mainly been portrayed as suffering in the service of murderous dominance. Kobe wanted you to see the pain—wanted you to watch as he hoisted grim, penitent jumpers in the wake of defeat. Tim Duncan was an implacable, unsmiling, soft-spoken low-post terminator. Shaq was gregarious off the court, but his on-court approach was dictatorial (“Give me the ball and let the big dog eat”) and thrillingly violent.

Via his social media accounts, LeBron celebrates the journey to greatness as a destination unto itself. Gleefully snarling in his over-the-top-extra workout videos. Rapping in the car on the way to the gym. Lifting weights in the predawn gloom with his bestie Dwyane.

Maybe that’s why the video of Steph Curry mocking LeBron’s workout videos felt so cutting. LeBron remade the game in his image. But in doing so, he gave his opponents the ammunition to define themselves against him and the mechanisms to defeat him.