NBA Bacchanalia ’19 will officially kick off Sunday at 6 p.m. Eastern, but of course, it’s a party whose actual start date came much, much earlier: July 8, 2010.
That was the day everything changed in the NBA, forever, and one man controlled it then, as he controls everything that is going to happen in the next frenzied two weeks of free agency: LeBron Raymone James. On that date almost nine years ago, he famously declared that he was “taking my talents to South Beach” to play for the Miami Heat, in a made-for-TV event that was properly bashed at the time, but whose impact was league-shattering.
Though still shattered almost a decade later, the NBA seems to be doing okay.
I still don’t know if folks fully understand the revolution that James unleashed that night, but the tide is still rolling out on it. There was everything that happened before James told Jim Gray and the world what he was going to do with the next few years of his career, and there…