The Basketball Race For LeBron Gets Interesting

Rumblings have come about on Thursday morning that make it seem further possible that LeBron James will be coming aboard with the Knicks following this season.

When LeBron becomes a free agent after the end of the 2010 season, the Cleveland Cavaliers will end up in the best position to re-sign him. This is because of the Larry Bird clause, which allows a franchise to exceed the salary limit in order to extend their own free agent.

The New York Knicks will give James a huge contract, although they won’t have the talent to offer LeBron as much as Cleveland. So they got resourceful in the Giant Apple and found a way to get around that darned salary cap.

The buzz is that the Knicks will not only give LeBron a huge agreement, however additionally his own cable channel. As you may know, the Knicks are owned by Cablevision, a cable television network.

LeBron might get profits from the advertisers on his cable network. According to NBA regulations, the team might not be allowed to arrange these advertisements/advertisers for LeBron; he would need to handle that himself. However I think we might all concur that James has enough connections in the commercial sphere to make that happen.

Rumor is that the television network might show replays of New York basketball games (where the rights belong to Cablevision), in addition to other programming regarding LeBron, the Knicks, in addition to the league. Some are even predicting that Nike might seek to be involved and produce their own TV show.

The large issue is whether the NBA would permit this. It appears to be to be entirely within league regulations. The cable television network might be seen as having a tangential benefit of playing in New York, comparable to several other advertising benefits involved with playing in a certain city. The income would be viewed as non-basketball related revenue.

This is a new and out of the ordinary twist in the LeBron-to-be-a-free agent saga. The wide-ranging consensus has been that Cleveland is winning the stakes. Possibly that is starting to change?