All Ball Sports: Waiting for LeBron

Hermosa Beach Public Works employees Noah Narita, DJ Hodges, Brad Cocking and Rene Rodriquez were among two dozen City employees treated to lunch from Martha’s Restaurant on Thursday, July 9. The lunches were provided by Martha’s and Mark Paaluhi, whose Sand Court Experts set up over 60 volleyball courts on either side of the Hermosa pier last week for the 2026 Beach Volleyball Clubs of America (BVCA) National Championships. Paaluhi said the lunches were in appreciation for the city workers help in preparing the site for the tournament, which drew over 1,000 players. Pictured with the public works team are Martha’s Kevin Barry and Hermosa Beach Mayor Mike Detoy.

This week Paaluhi and Hermosa Public Works are working together again for the 33rd Annual AAU Hermosa Beach National Championships, being held through Monday, July 20. Photo by Kevin Cody

Waiting for LeBron           

by Paul Teetor

An Open Letter to LeBron James:
Hey Dude,
I hear you’ve left the Lakers after eight years for parts unknown. But you live in Beverly Hills and it’s not very far down the 405 to Manhattan Beach, so I still consider us neighbors.

I’d like to give you a little neighborly advice on where to go next on your basketball odyssey as you prepare for a record 24th NBA season. There’s still a debate about who was the greater player in his prime – I say Michael Jordan, plenty of others smarter than me say it’s you – but there is no debate about who has had the longest and most productive last third of his career: you have.

Every bucket you score increases your lead over Kareem Abdul-Jabber as the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, and every game you play increases your lead over Robert Parish for most NBA games played. You averaged 21 points, 8 rebounds and six assists last season and made the All-Star team yet again at age 41.

Simply incredible.           

But each of the three transitions you made in your hoops career was messy. Of course, that’s the nature of being a basketball mercenary – which you most definitely are.

Your motto should be that classic ‘60s western: “Have Gun, Will Travel.” 

This new transition has already turned messy, even before you know your destination.

The problem is that you’re taking too damn long to make a decision. The free agent signing period began more than two weeks ago, and you’re still deciding while your agent Rich Paul is going on podcasts to fuel the speculation by playing one team off against the other. On one podcast he actually held up a whiteboard with the names of ten teams under consideration to be blessed by your presence. 

Some fans say you enjoy the daily speculation about where you’re going. Others say you’re loving that your pending decision has knocked the World Cup off the sports pages now that the Trump jinx has knocked the USA out of the World Cup.

Looking back, your first transition was the most cringey. It was in 2010, and the hometown Cleveland Cavaliers – you grew up in nearby Akron — had failed to build a championship roster around you after drafting you in 2003. You got the seven-year itch, said the hell with this and took your talents to South Beach.

But you did it all wrong. 

At that time, you were the undisputed best player in the league, and speculation raged for weeks — just like it’s doing now but on a slightly lesser scale — about where you were going.

Finally, you staged a TV show pretentiously called The Decision to announce your move to the Miami Heat. Riots immediately erupted in the streets of Cleveland, fans burned your jersey, and Cavs owner Dan Gilbert wrote an open letter to you in which he called you a narcissist and described your departure to Miami as a “cowardly betrayal.”  For good measure he labeled your TV show “self-promotional.” And finally – and most absurdly — he famously guaranteed the Cavaliers would win an NBA championship before you won one with Miami.

Hell hath no fury like a basketball boss scorned.

You and the Heat lost in your first year in the NBA Finals, then won two straight titles. But by then Heat Boss Pat Riley was growing tired of your efforts to control the Heat roster and the big-foot way members of your posse were bossing around the Heat execs.

By your fourth year both sides were sick of all the friction and the petty mini-battles for control of the organization. When the Heat lost in the 2014 NBA Finals, you knew it was time for another change.

To your credit, you wanted to go back to Cleveland to fulfill your promise that you would bring an NBA title home for the Cavaliers. The first obstacle: you had seemingly burned your bridge to Gilbert, the Cavs owner. But Gilbert – who made his fortune in the notoriously cut-throat mortgage business — was savvy enough to know that he would have to humble himself to bring you back. You two had a mano-a-mano meeting in which he got down on his knees and apologized for his intemperate outburst four years earlier when you left.

So you were welcomed back to Cleveland. In your second year back, you fulfilled your promise to the fans there with the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history when you stormed back from a 3-1 deficit.

Between the Heat and the Cavs, you made the NBA Finals eight straight years – a record that will probably never be broken.

But in 2018 it was time to hit the road again, and you came to LA not so much because you wanted to be a Laker but because you wanted to establish a beachhead in LA for the media empire you were planning for your post hoops career. 

Space Jam 2 put a serious dent in those plans. Once again, you couldn’t quite match Michael Jordan.

Once in LA the familiar problems arose – you and your posse basically took control of the franchise – and when the Dallas Mavericks inexplicably gave Luka Doncic to the Lakers in February 2025 it was the beginning of the end for your reign in LA.

Now you’re looking for a new team. You say whatever money they can pay you is not as important as the chance to win another NBA title or two. I guess billionaires can afford to be generous once in a while.

With that criterion in mind, let me advise you in the strongest possible terms to do the opposite of what Horace Greeley recommended: go east, young man, go east. As long as San Antonio and Oklahoma City play in the Western Conference, for the foreseeable future one or the other will represent the West in the Finals. Golden State and Steph Curry are done as legit contenders, so don’t make the big mistake of going to NorCal.

That leaves three Eastern Conference teams as logical landing sports for you: in descending order of desirability, they are Cleveland, Miami and Philadelphia.

Cleveland would be the best story: the prodigal son comes home for the final round-up and gives the fans a parting gift. They already have one great player in dynamic shooting guard Donavan Mitchell, backed up by two elite big men in Evan Mobley and Jarrett Allen. Throw in aging super-scorer James Harden and you would be the final piece in a championship puzzle. They were going to erect a statue of you anyway, but this would just accelerate that process.

And since gambling has completely taken over sports, I’ll even set the odds of you going there: 5:1.

Miami would be another homecoming of sorts, but this time you would have to live with Pat Riley as the undisputed boss. Riley already has two great players in the Greek Freak, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Bam Adebayo, the rugged center who scored 83 points in a single game last season. Again, you would be the third piece of a championship contender. Odds: 2:1.

And finally, there is Philly, which made a big splash last week when they stole superstar Jaylen Brown from the Boston Celtics for washed-up, 36-year-old “star” Paul George. Oh, and they have an All-Star guard in Tyrese Maxey, the fastest player in the league, and he gets faster every year. But the third star, massive, agile, sharp-shooting center Joel Embiid, is always injured and can’t be counted on. You went through that experience with center forward Anthony “Street Clothes” Davis with the Lakers. And Embiid is even more fragile than Davis. Odds: 1:2.

There you have it. Cleveland is the smart choice, the sentimental choice. Miami would mean placing your faith in Pat Riley to quickly develop other NBA-quality players to replace the ones he had to trade for the Greek Freak. And as you surely remember, life in South Beach can be just as glam as life in Hollywood. And Philly would be a major gamble that you can’t afford to lose.

One final piece of advice: hurry up and make your decision already. Then let your new team notify the league and the media. And stay off social media for at least a week or better yet a month.

Training camp will be here before you know it and you will have a whole new town to conquer.

Have gun, will travel.

Good luck, Bro. 

Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. ER