King James has irritated a lot of people over the past few years as he ventured out of his area of expertise and tried his hand at being a political influencer of sorts. In doing so he made a lot of people dislike him, with some publications calling him the 'most hated professional athlete in the world."
Combine this social justice warrior attitude with the fact that he basically refuses to discuss anything about China where actual social justice discussions need to be made and we have a guy who is picking and choosing what he thinks is important in the world. To be fair to James, nobody else in the NBA talks about China either, which to me suggests that they must be contractually obligated to keep their mouths shut about it all.
All that aside, we need to look at the fact that Lebron is 37 years old and is performing much better than most of the other people on the court. Although the Lakers had a rather lackluster season, James was almost the highest scoring player in the league.
When I watch him play he still has the magic left in him for sure and honestly, I can't tell any difference between Lebron now and Lebron 10 years ago. He is still a dominating presence on the court and I feel as though he still has a few years of elite level play left in him. However, he also comes at a very high price tag at nearly $40 million a year. If I was Lakers management, I would be thinking about how that money very likely could be better spent on getting several other players instead of Lebron.
James has stated that he wants to continue playing with the Lakers and wants an opportunity to win another title with the LA squad. There hasn't been much information about whether or not the Lakers feel the same way though. If LA was to not offer a contract extension, where would he go? There aren't many teams out there with 40 million lying around and I believe that LeBron's ego is big enough that he wouldn't budge on this payout for anyone that might be thinking of picking him up.
If you look at the above chart you will see that there are very few times where his salary decreased year-by-year and I can't really imagine Lebron being cool with that changing when he is still playing in top form.
There are other aspects of LeBron that should also be considered and one of the big ones is that he basically tries to run every team that he is on including bossing around the coaches and even the owners of the teams. They tolerate this because he is still performing, but this reputation is going to make it so that other teams might be very hesitant to take him on as an addition to their team.
While LeBron maintains his outward appearance of confidence that the Lakers will re-sign him, I'm not so sure if that is really the case. We'll find out later in the summer around July or August. If it was up to me I would release him and use that money to get more team-oriented players and rebuild the dynasty. If the Lakers continue to spend so much money on an aging legend, they could find themselves in a really bad way should James get injured which as you know, becomes more and more likely the older a person becomes.