LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers are still in the thick of the NBA playoffs, but that didn’t stop New York Magazine from getting a head start on luring the player to New York to play for the hometown team, the Knicks. The magazine put James on the cover, along with a list of 14 reasons why the reigning league MVP should come to New York.NBA analysts have been looking forward to this and discussing it on television for at least the past three years, but New York Magazine has outdone them all in compiling perhaps the most complete and absolutely most outrageous overture to James. Most of the magazine’s 14 reasons are full-fledged articles that not only focus on basketball (reason No. 2: Of Course, Money Isn’t Everything: Six or Seven NBA Titles Would Be Nice, Too) but also on James’s financial goals (reason No. 1: If You Want to Make That First Billion Before You Turn 30, This Is the Place to Do It) and the benefits of being a star athlete in New York City (reason No. 14: If You Win Here, We’ll Name a Sandwich After You ). Depending on how you look at it, the magazine either did its homework or is really creepy; it consulted a pair of New York’s prominent real estate agents to pick out a house and an apartment for James, and the feature is filled with Photoshopped pictures of James in a Knicks jersey and a few New York-themed advertising mockups featuring James, including a six-frame storyboard for a potential Coca-Cola advertisement featuring the player. The entire series is so absurd, I can’t tell if the “LeBron in 2018” slide show is a joke, even though it features James winning 10 straight NBA championships with the Knicks, extorting a U.S. Senate seat by threatening to retire if not elected, and leading the United States to an Olympic gold medal at 38 as a player-coach-senator.
Lebron James / Knicks Fantasy Gone Wild
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