When free agency begins at the end of June, a probably significant number of NBA teams will reach out to superagent Rich Paul and register interest in LeBron James. Even at 41, he remains one of the very best players in basketball, and after more than two decades of dominance, the league has grown used to pursuing the most dominant player of this era.
James has changed teams three times in his legendary career. The Miami Heat in 2010, Cleveland Cavaliers in 2014 and Los Angeles Lakers in 2018 were lucky enough to be his landing spots during those moves, but they were far from the only teams to pursue him.
In truth, we'll never know just how much effort has gone into trying and failing to acquire LeBron James. There is plenty of informal trade talk in the NBA. Most of it never reaches the public. But given LeBron's outsized impact on the past 23 years in league history, there have probably been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of phone calls made with the intent of trying to secure his employment. We'll never know about most of them.
But we do know about a handful of them. So, with James set to explore free agency yet again (and the Warriors already circling), let's take a look at some of those many teams that took a stab at landing arguably the greatest player in NBA history. This is an incomplete history of teams that failed to acquire LeBron James.
Jerry West's near miss
Tanking existed in 2003, but it wasn't nearly as expansive as it would later become. Ironically, the one team to draw widespread tanking accusations would be the team that actually drafted James, the Cleveland Cavaliers. The 2001-02 Cavaliers were bad, but standard bad. They won a respectable enough 29 games.
But in the 2002 offseason, they traded away their top three scorers: Andre Miller, Lamond Murray and Wesley Person. John Lucas, who was fired as head coach after starting the 2002-03 season 8-34, would later accuse the team of tanking, and the interim coach who replaced him, Keith Smart, reportedly got "cussed" out by a team attorney for winning on the last day of season and putting the Cavaliers in a last-place tie with the Denver Nuggets for the NBA's worst record.
The lesson, apparently, is that tanking sometimes works. But we're not here to talk about the team that did land James. We're here to talk about the ones that didn't. As the Cavaliers tied with the Nuggets for the NBA's worst record, their lottery odds were identical. Cleveland was assigned a lottery combination that easily could have gone to Denver, but the Nuggets didn't pick No. 2. They fell to No. 3. The 2003 NBA Draft Lottery is remembered, first and foremost, for Jerry West's heartbreak.
In 2002, the Grizzlies hired West, arguably the greatest executive in the history of basketball, to run their team after a legendary run with the Lakers. The team he inherited was predictably weak. The 23-win group he took over added five wins in 2003, but the sixth-worst record in the NBA still placed the odds squarely against the Grizzlies in the most important lottery in NBA history. That had less to do with the team West built than it did with a trade he had nothing to do with.
In 1997, the Grizzlies traded a conditional first-round pick to the Pistons for a 35-year-old Otis Thorpe. The Grizzlies literally played in a different city when they made that trade. The people who made it, and the owners of the team at the time, were all gone by the time the Grizzlies were trying to establish themselves in Memphis in 2003. But that pick still hung over their heads. It was top-1 protected. The Grizzlies beat the odds and jumped into the top three. When Denver's logo came out at No. 3, the Grizzlies had a 50-50 shot. They would either get LeBron or they would get nothing. Scroll ahead to the 17:10 mark of the 2003 lottery broadcast if you want to know what heartbreak looks like.
Kobe for LeBron in 2007
James was no longer a prospect by 2007. He had just led the Cavaliers to the NBA Finals for the first time, where they were swept by the San Antonio Spurs. If James wasn't the NBA's best player by that point, his only peers were Tim Duncan, the leader of the San Antonio team that had just beaten him, and Kobe Bryant, the only player in the NBA with a proven track record against the Spurs in the playoffs. Duncan, obviously, was not available. Bryant, on the other hand, had just asked the Lakers for a trade after a handful of disappointing seasons following the Shaquille O'Neal trade.
Bryant had a no-trade clause and a wishlist of teams he was interested in joining. The Lakers cast a wider net, doing their due diligence across the league. One call they made, according to ESPN, was to Cleveland. It was, as one source told ESPN, the only call any team ever made trying to acquire James, whom the source called "the ultimate untouchable."
The Cavaliers declined the overture. They then offered to trade Los Angeles anyone else on the team for Bryant, but were predictably rebuffed. It was all moot anyway. "I never would've approved it. Never. The trade to go to Cleveland? Never," Bryant told ESPN. "That wasn't one of the teams that was on my list. It was Chicago, San Antonio (or) Phoenix."
We know how the story went. The Lakers agreed to a trade with Detroit. Bryant elected to stay. The Lakers started the 2007-08 season hotter than expected. They landed Pau Gasol, won two more titles, and Bryant retired in purple and gold. James would later make his way to Los Angeles more than a decade after that initial conversation.
Even if a trade was never realistic, it is notable in the annals of league history as the only moment in which two teams are ever known to have discussed swapping arguably the league's two best players. It's not as though there were serious "Magic Johnson for Larry Bird" talks in the 1980s. It's hard to imagine the Denver Nuggets calling up the Oklahoma City Thunder at last year's deadline and dangling Nikola Jokić for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. It was as close as the NBA has ever come to swapping its two best players for one another, which is memorable even if that still wasn't very close at all.
The 2010 meetings and the failed sign-and-trade pitches
Preparations for the summer of 2010 began as early as 2008. Teams began frantically shedding salary with an eye on pitching King James when his rookie extension ended and he became an unrestricted free agent. Some of the destinations were obvious: both New York-area teams, for instance, with James stoking flames for both of them by calling New York his favorite city, but Brooklyn his favorite borough.
Less remembered: when the Detroit Pistons disastrously swapped Chauncey Billups for Allen Iverson in 2008, there was some thought that they did so, in part, to prepare for a pursuit of James. This was before market considerations were as prominent in the NBA, and the Pistons had just made six straight Eastern Conference Finals appearances. Detroit ultimately spent its cap space a year early on Charlie Villanueva and Ben Gordon. It didn't go well.
When 2010 finally arrived, six teams were ultimately granted meetings: the Cavaliers, Knicks, Nets, Clippers, Bulls and Heat, and several of them became spectacles. Jay-Z, then a part-owner of the Nets, attended their meeting. The Cavaliers reportedly spent $300,000 making a "Family Guy"-esque animated video for their pitch, which has sadly never made its way into the public domain. Fortunately, New York's "Sopranos"-based recruiting video was released by Pablo Torre in 2024.
Two more teams are known to have tried to get into the mix through sign-and-trades, though. The Dallas Mavericks at one point believed they would be the seventh team granted a meeting with James. However, knowing their odds were low, they elected not to make the pitch. On the day of The Decision in July of 2010, then-Mavericks owner Mark Cuban released a lengthy blog post urging James to re-sign with Cleveland if he was going to "make the mistake of not coming to the Mavs." Though never quite realistic, I never tire of sharing this song first aired on the Ben and Skin Show on Dallas sports radio: "Come on LeBron, put your Mavericks jersey on!"
The other potential suitor was much subtler and thinking much bigger picture. The Lakers had just won their second consecutive championship. They had no cap space and weren't eager to break up their team. But then-owner Jerry Buss still wanted a meeting. "It'd be good to know that guy," his son, Joey Buss, would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Jerry said. "LeBron was always somebody that he was interested in," Jeanie Buss added. The Lakers didn't get that meeting, and Buss died in 2013, but his dream would eventually become a reality five years later. He just didn't get to see it.
One of his former employees, however, did manage to secure James' signature in 2010. When Heat president Pat Riley walked into his meeting in Cleveland, he famously dropped his seven championship rings on the table as a way of showing James he knew what it took to win them. James would join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in Miami and win his first two championship rings with the Heat. However, only four years later, he hit the market yet again.
The entire league tried in 2014
Who tried to sign James when he returned to free agency in 2014? Everyone. The answer is literally everyone. From "Return of the King," written by Brian Windhorst and Dave McMenamin on James' return to Cleveland: "After midnight on July 1, 2014, Rich Paul's phone went hot with calls and texts. Within a few hours, all thirty teams had made contact, letting him know they were interested in his client."
Obviously, sitting down with all 30 teams would have been impractical, so James granted meetings, for the second consecutive free agency, to six: The Heat, Cavaliers and Bulls returned from the 2010 list, and the Mavericks, Lakers and Suns joined them. James was far more hands-off this time around, leaving the initial meetings up to Paul and Mark Termini. On July 6, James would hold a clandestine meeting with Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert in Miami before relocating to Las Vegas for the remainder of his free agency.
This time, Miami was on the back foot, and the Heat seemed to know it even before those meetings began. Before the NBA Draft, James had expressed his fandom for UConn guard Shabazz Napier, who had just led the Huskies to a national championship. Sure enough, the Heat traded up to No. 24 in order to secure him and James shared his approval on social media by calling Napier his "favorite player in the draft."
Nonetheless, by the time James met with the Heat in Vegas late that July, a return to Cleveland seemed inevitable. Miami-based radio host Dan Le Batard, known for being close to Riley, would later say that Riley was offended that a World Cup game was on the television in the suite in which the meeting took place and it didn't seem as though he had everyone's full attention. On July 11, James announced that he was coming home.
Philadelphia's 2018 meeting, and Denver's desperate bid for one
Rumors about LeBron's eventual move to the Lakers started as early as the 2017 NBA Finals. Once Kyrie Irving moved to Boston, it felt almost inevitable. When the Cavaliers asked James to commit for an additional season as they pursued a Paul George trade in the summer of 2017, no deal materialized. When the Cavaliers shook up their roster at the 2018 deadline, they elected not to trade Brooklyn's valuable 2018 first-round pick, which could have gotten them an impact player but would have left them barren in the event that James left.
The Lakers may have been the favorite, but other teams certainly tried to get into the mix. The Rockets, who employed James' close friend Chris Paul, hoped to pursue an opt-in-and-trade after losing the Western Conference Finals to Golden State. Once James opted out of his contract, though, those dreams died. The Philadelphia 76ers, loaded with assets after their years-long tanking Process, were ultimately granted a meeting, but only Paul attended, not James.
One other team is known to have tried to secure a meeting, but ultimately didn't, and it's one of the most fascinating "what ifs" of LeBron's career. The Denver Nuggets, according to Sports Illustrated, pushed hard for a meeting and the chance to pitch James on a partnership with rising center Nikola Jokić and recent top draft pick Jamal Murray. James declined the opportunity, but in hindsight, that choice probably cost him several championships. Had he gone to Denver all those years ago, it's possible he'd still be contending today. James acknowledged his friendship with Nuggets owner Josh Kroenke later, but said that he "didn't give it much thought." Jokić wasn't quite Jokić yet, and James went west to Hollywood.
Golden State couldn't convince LeBron to leave L.A. in 2024
James won his fourth championship in 2020, but his Lakers tenure went south the moment he pushed for them to acquire Russell Westbrook in the 2021 offseason. The move fully broke up the 2020 championship team, but more than that, it reportedly changed the relationship between him and the team. The Lakers grew a bit more hesitant to make all-in pushes to acquire big-name veterans after that, and though they'd make it to the Western Conference Finals in 2023, they would never again reclaim their status as a championship favorite.
That seemed to irk James. He did a fair bit of flirting with other teams at All-Star weekend in 2022, calling Thunder GM Sam Presti "the MVP" and acknowledging that "the door's not closed" on a potential return to Cleveland. He conducted a postgame interview at Madison Square Garden in 2024 with a Knicks towel draped around his shoulders as the Lakers considered whether or not to make a big trade at that season's deadline. Notably, the Knicks are run by his former agent, Leon Rose, who had just squashed a longtime beef with his former protege, Paul, who had obviously been James' agent for more than a decade by that point.
The Warriors, meanwhile, were in the middle of a decline of their own. Golden State won the 2022 championship, but the Lakers knocked them out of the second round in 2023. By 2024, they were a Play-In team desperate to reinvigorate the roster before the end of Stephen Curry's prime. So they reached out to the Lakers about a James deal, according to ESPN. The talks reached the ownership level before the Lakers reached out to James and asked if he would be interested in joining the Warriors.
James ultimately passed on the opportunity. He remained with the Lakers through the end of the season and then, when he became a free agent that summer, even offered to take a pay cut if the Lakers could use the money to make a meaningful upgrade. They couldn't, so he re-signed at close to his max.
Trouble in paradise in 2025?
Everything changed for the Lakers in 2025, when they traded longtime James friend and teammate Anthony Davis to get Luka Dončić from the Dallas Mavericks. The deal made the Lakers a better team, but it also reset their timeline. Suddenly, winning right away wasn't a necessity. The Lakers could be patient with the younger Dončić and Austin Reaves as their new centerpieces.
This struck James the wrong way, so when he opted into the final year of his contract early in the 2025 offseason, he did so with a passive-aggressive message. "LeBron wants to compete for a championship," Paul told ESPN. "He knows the Lakers are building for the future. He understands that, but he values a realistic chance of winning it all. We are very appreciative of the partnership that we've had for eight years with Jeanie (Buss) and Rob (Pelinka) and consider the Lakers as a critical part of his career.
"We understand the difficulty in winning now while preparing for the future. We do want to evaluate what's best for LeBron at this stage in his life and career. He wants to make every season he has left count, and the Lakers understand that, are supportive and want what's best for him."
What exactly Paul meant was never quite clear. Was he pressuring the Lakers into making win-now trades? Or did he want the Lakers to trade James to a better team? James had an option. He could have used it to become a free agent. He just wouldn't have been able to get paid appropriately if he'd done so. No obvious championship contenders were sitting on piles of cap space. Therefore, he'd have to force a trade if he wanted to play elsewhere and still make close to max money, but that money also made the financial component of a blockbuster trade nearly impossible. As far as we know, no team got close to trading for James.
Paul told ESPN that four teams reached out to him about possibly trading for James after that statement, but those teams have not been publicly identified. The most commonly speculated destination was Dallas, given his ties to Anthony Davis, Kyrie Irving and Nico Harrison, whom he knew through his time at Nike, but making the money work with two other max contracts on their books would have been difficult. The Warriors were gossiped about as well, though their deadline deal for Jimmy Butler went quite well and it seems unlikely that they would have moved him for James. Cleveland was so far above the second apron that a deal would have been impractical. In all likelihood, we'll never know how close anyone did or not come to getting LeBron in the summer of 2025. He played out the year for the Lakers with no serious trade talks seeping into the season.
What's coming in 2026 free agency?
Now, coincidentally for the fourth time in a Winter Olympics year, James is an unrestricted free agent yet again. The Lakers are viewed as the favorites to retain his services. They have his Bird Rights, and therefore the ability to pay him anything up to the max. He is not the best player in the world anymore, but he remains a very valuable veteran for a Lakers team that wants to compete next year.
If talks break down between James and the Lakers, the Warriors appear ready to swoop in with an offer at the $15 million mid-level exception. If James is willing to take an even bigger pay cut, the Cavaliers would surely welcome another reunion at the veteran's minimum. The Knicks were viewed as a sleeper before winning their championship. Now, that appears to be unlikely. The Clippers, based simply on their potential financial flexibility and geographic convenience, make a bit of sense. Maybe the Nuggets make another call. Maybe the Spurs get aggressive after their Finals loss.
Until he retires, there will be teams that want to employ LeBron James. We probably only know about a handful of the ones that have tried to make that happen. Maybe, when he retires, he'll let us behind the curtain on all of the others.
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