For most of NBA history, free agency for the league’s best players barely amounted to the freedom to choose your own destiny. Even after players gained the right to unrestricted free agency in 1988, the price they generally ended up paying for individual agency was their reputation. Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf essentially accused Horace Grant of faking injuries after signing with the Orlando Magic. Former Los Angeles Clippers head coach Mike Dunleavy accused Elton Brand agent David Falk of using his influence “to poison him” against returning to the team in 2008.
The very idea of free agency offended the sensitivity of fans accustomed to the one-sided idea of loyalty in professional sports. Players were expected to dedicate their entire careers to any team that recruited them, their own interests would be condemned. A famous 1996 Orlando Sentinel poll had more than 91 percent of fans against Shaquille O’Neal receiving a $ 115 million contract. Fans would welcome players, but only on their own terms, and players would consider themselves selfish if they found greener pastures elsewhere. Tellingly, the second line of the Associated Press story about Shaq’s signing with the Los Angeles Lakers includes the words “O’Neal declined to speak about the deal.” How often does Shaq refuse to speak his mind?
It was a condition of pre-Decision world stars like the ones O’Neal occupied. Free agent ads have not always been shows. Originally they came in the form of team press releases, and later, in the early days of the Internet, reporter stories linked to the website. Stories revealed by traditional media led to traditional reactions. The teams, through direct dating or strategic media leaks, controlled the messages behind the decisions made by the players. When a player had access to their own traditional means of communicating with fans through press conferences and access to the game, it was usually too late to influence public sentiment.
Of course, old habits take time to die. When LeBron James attempted to bypass traditional media channels with ‘The Decision’, fans were practically programmed to reject him. James drew perhaps the biggest backlash any athlete has ever received for changing teams, beginning with an infamous, sourceless comic letter from Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, mocking James’ choice. As unhappy as people were with fate, much of the criticism was based on the method he used to announce it. The old guard stated that he did not have classes to broadcast a television special in which he left the team from his hometown. To some extent, it could have been. The delivery was messy, but the method was a necessary radical change.
James opened the door for athletes to tell their own stories instead of undergoing a system designed to mistreat them. He harnessed his own star power on a platform that athletes have been using ever since. Fans were so desperate to hear his decision that they had no choice but to hear him explain it in his own words.
The first draft came out cruel enough to scare players for the next few seasons, but James mastered the form four years later with his now-famous Sports Illustrated letter to the city of Cleveland. The tone changed, and James rightly praised his humility and kindness, but the broad strokes were the same. The best basketball player had no intention of letting anyone else tell his story.
The trend spread like a forest fire in the subsequent summers. Kevin Durant and Gordon Hayward used first-person trials to announce their free-agent moves to the Golden State Warriors and Boston Celtics, respectively. Others who lacked the cache to get such audiences out of their free agencies adopted the form on a smaller scale simply to tell their sides of the story. No report can better exemplify who Dion Waiters is than the incredible story he published in The Player’s Tribune in 2017. On a smaller scale, players do this on social media every day.
It is the quietest element of the player empowerment movement that James started. Their decision to join the Miami Heat may have empowered players to take control of their careers and actively seek their preferred destinations, but ‘The Decision’ empowered them to control their narratives. There will always be consequences when a player leaves his original team for something new, but a decade after the fact, the world at large has become much more receptive to the “agency” element of free agency that players have to take control of. your own team. stories. No owner in their right mind would accuse a player of faking injury after leaving in 2020. No coach would suggest that someone needed to be poisoned to leave their team.
Players, like anyone else, are human beings free to decide for themselves where they would like to work. He shouldn’t have taken a television special to remind people of that, but it was such a heavily accumulated PR campaign against players for so long that someone had to take an active step if it was ever to change. That is the enduring legacy of ‘The Decision’. LeBron stepped into the firing line, and in doing so empowered an entire generation of gamers to shape their own racing stories.
