The Warriors are not trading for LeBron James

Despite ESPN devoting a full segment to speculation about the Warriors adding James to play with Steph Curry, it’s extremely unlikely that a trade sending LeBron to the Bay Area is going to happen

Shams Charania says the Golden State Warriors are star-hunting. Michael Wilbon thinks the Dubs should make a deal with the Los Angeles Lakers for LeBron James. But as much as that might delight ESPN, Warriors fans, Draymond Green, TNT, and the hot take industrial complex, it’s hard to see LeBron taking his talents to San Francisco Bay.

The rumor mill started with a report from the ESPN’s Shams Charania, their official Newsbreaker-In-Chief, breaking the non-news that the Warriors want to add a star next to Steph Curry. Which is what the team has been trying to do since June, when they unsuccessfully tried to trade for Paul George, or later in the summer, when they unsuccessfully tried to trade for Lauri Markkanen.

In response to this report, Michael Wilbon declared on “NBA Today” that the star that the Warriors should trade for should be LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers.

Wilbon’s case was that Steph Curry and Draymond Green are no longer young (true), the Warriors would be more willing to wait on young players if they were (also true), the Lakers stink (harsh, they’re just mediocre), the Lakers are going nowhere (depends on if you consider the play-in tournament “somewhere”), and that Curry and James made a good team at the Olympics (true).

But there are some problems. And the biggest one, as Brian Windhorst pointed out, is that LeBron James has not shown any interest in joining the Golden State Warriors. The Dubs inquired about trading for him before last season’s trade deadline, and James declined. In the months following that aborted trade attempt, the Los Angeles Lakers drafted LeBron’s son and gave him a guaranteed four-year NBA contract. They hired a man with zero coaching experience to lead their team, because he did a podcast with LeBron where they drank wine and broke down film.

But the biggest reason not to believe in a potential LeBron trade to the Warriors is that James was an unrestricted free agent this summer and never considered another team. Yes, the salary cap/luxury tax situations for both teams would have made that signing complicated, which would also make a trade difficult, but this is the NBA. If someone like LeBron James wants to change teams, the front offices can figure it out.

There’s simply no indication that James wants to play with Curry in a non-Team USA situation. He’s faced the Warriors in the playoffs in five different series, plus a play-in game. When Kevin Durant joined the Warriors in 2016, they’d just played each other in the conference finals, but there wasn’t any particularly rivalry between the Warriors and the Oklahoma City Thunder beyond that series.

James has been trying to — and often succeeding at — beating Curry and the Warriors for over a decade. It’s not even just the playoffs, which totals 29 games. There’s been four Christmas games, plus another in three weeks. Curry and James have even been on opposite sides in the All-Star Game most seasons. In fact, you could argue that the NBA switched to a draft format in order to make sure Curry and James were still playing against each other, even when James moved to the Western Conference.

If LeBron James is going to set aside his rivalry with the Warriors, something has arguably defined the entire second half of his career, is he really going to do it for this Warriors team? There are definitely NBA teams for whom James would be It’s hard to say that the Warriors are even definitively better than this year’s Lakers, at least when Austin Reaves and Jarred Vanderbilt get healthy. Especially when Curry and Green have each missed more games than Anthony “Street Clothes” Davis this season.

The Warriors may well add another star this season. They also may well be content with stories about how they really wanted to add another star. But that star is not going to be LeBron James.