Yes, the "Cleveland Curse" was lifted on Father's Day, as LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers ended the city's 52-year sports championship drought by beating the Golden State Warriors in Game Seven of the NBA Finals.
The celebration three days later took over five hours to complete because of the 1.3 million people who flooded the streets of downtown Cleveland. James dropped multiple "four-leggers" when the team finally gathered at Mall C, after a six block parade took three hours to complete.
However, the most important curse is that James is no longer being underpaid.
Now, I can see you already scratching your head with this. How can a 12-time All Star selection, four-time league MVP, three-time champion (winning the MVP award all three times), three-time Olympic medalist as part of Team USA, five-time All Defensive Team selection, and has a 10-story banner facing the Quicken Loans Arena be underpaid?
After signing a three-year, $100 million dollar contract extension on Thursday, the 31-year-old James is now only the fourth player in league history to earn more than $30 million in one season. (The other four being Kobe, Michael, and current Memphis point guard Mike Conley.) James has never been the highest-paid player in the league. For all of his great accomplishments, the ransom note that is this contract should be nothing that should be faulted on James, or Cavalier owner Dan Gilbert.
Gilbert paid out more than $54 million last season in luxury tax, after the Cavaliers spent more than $94 million on player salaries last season. As a native Clevelander, I will attest to Gilbert making statement that he would pay any level of fine, as long as it brought Cleveland a championship. Gilbert also owns the Lake Erie (now Cleveland) Monsters, a top-tier minor league hockey affiliate of the National Hockey League’s Columbus Blue Jackets. The Monsters capture the American Hockey League’s Calder Cup championship just over a week before his Cavalier franchise did the same. For a city so starved with sports champions, Gilbert will have two trophies on display in his office when his teams resume play in October.
When James left Gilbert and the Cavaliers behind in 2010, it became the catalyst for the celebration that is still ongoing in Northeast Ohio, just days shy of two months later. If James does not leave, the Cavaliers do not finish poorly enough to get into the top three of the 2011 NBA Draft Lottery. While Cleveland ended up with the fourth overall selection (used to take Tristan Thompson), they obtained the rights to the Los Angeles Clippers first-round pick earlier in the season. All the Cavaliers did was use that eventual top overall pick to draft Kyrie Irving.
If the Cavaliers do not finish poorly enough in Irving and Thompson’s rookie season, they do not draft Dion Waiters fourth overall in 2012. Waiters was part of the trade that brought J.R. Smith, Iman Shumpert, and Timofey Mozgov to Cleveland two years later. If the Cavaliers do not end up with the top overall pick in BOTH 2013 and 2014, they do not flip Anthony Bennett and Andrew Wiggins (respectively) to Minnesota, and Kevin Love does not walk around an entire week between Oakland and Cleveland with two WWE championship belts.
James signing for three years is also closure for Cavalier fans. Each contract James has signed since returning to Northeast Ohio, the contracts were always two years--the second year being a player option--and him optioning out each time. Now he is guaranteed to remain a resident of Akron, Ohio for at least the next 24 months.
Could this also be James’ final NBA contract? He will be 33 when the final year before the player option is ongoing, and will have passed 30,000 career points, barring injury. When James eclipses 30,000, he will be only the sixth player to do so, after Dallas Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki only needs 509 points next season to get there himself.
James has more miles on him at 31 than Kobe may have ever had. For the first time in his career, James had actual assistance when his team got to the NBA Finals. The cupboard was bare in 2007 during his first trip with the Cavaliers, and he largely carried the load during all four trips with the Miami Heat. In 2015, he almost single-handedly got the Cavaliers to the promised land after losing Love (shoulder) early in the playoffs, and Irving (knee) after Game One of the finals.
Should LeBron James opt out and leave Cleveland again after the end of the 2018 playoffs, could he land in New York? Will he go to Los Angeles, just so he could say he was there (and if so, which one)? We know with Dwayne Wade now in Chicago, and the strain his relationship with Pat Riley took when he announced he was going back to Cleveland, would a similar return to Miami happen? What if the Cavaliers win another championship in the next two years? Could he decide the best way to chase down Michael is to go play for Michael in Charlotte, whose Hornets appear to be knocking on the door to becoming legitimate contenders themselves?
With all the talk of Stephen Curry being the next face of the NBA, he still has to take a backseat to anything associated with LeBron James. If either Love or Irving were healthy in 2015, Curry would likely still be chasing his first ring, as a glorified street-baller nonetheless. Curry may still go down as the greatest pure shooter the game will have ever seen, but his “let’s chuck up a three-pointer from some random spot on the floor, and hope it falls” mentality sure worked out great in the Finals last season, didn’t it?!
Whether the new James contract helps or hinders the Cavaliers chances of hanging a second (or third) championship banner from the rafters of the Q by June of 2018 remains to be seen. It still does not mean Dan Gilbert is through writing him checks, after the next one will likely be a revenue-sharing check as a minority shareholder of his franchise by the close of this decade.
-JC24