Said one front-office rival from a playoff team: “I think it’s an aggressive chess move by the Cavs that, if nothing else, shows LeBron that they are willing to get creative. It’s a win for the city from a perception standpoint. For years and years and years, small-market teams have expected the worst. They [presume] that unless we get really lucky, our star player is going to L.A. or New York or Chicago. Maybe this flips it.
“The Cavs were lucky enough to draft an asset like LeBron. And now they’re saying, ‘If the kid doesn’t play in a world market, let’s bring a world market to the kid. Let’s bring a world market into our own backyard.’”
It continues:
Yet for every around-the-league admirer of what Cleveland is attempting to do with its prospective new partners, there are skeptics who caution that it’s easy to overstate how much a minority ownership group from China will sway James, either this summer when the Cavaliers offer him a contract extension on the first allowed date (July 18), next summer when he’s eligible to become an unrestricted free agent or the following summer when his current contract expires.
One of the league’s top power brokers pointed out that “access to China isn’t limited to one person or company” and that James already has Nike pushing him hard in Asia. Another rival executive, while saying he sees “more positives than negatives” to the idea, wondered whether the full scope of possibilities from the proposed alliance with the group led by Huang and Cheng will be known by the time James is projected to hit the open market on July 1, 2010. Yet another asserted that James has to win a ring in the near future or at least land a prominent Chinese teammate if he “wants to really conquer China.” There also are likely to be teams this summer that will protest Cleveland’s making this move on the basis that Chinese marketing opportunities that arise for James in the wake of this alliance will represent money earned via salary-cap circumvention.
Stein also grabs some interesting insight on the NBA’s global appeal from super agent Bill Duffy, who represents Steve Nash, Carmelo Anthony, Brandon Jennings, and Yao Ming, among others.
