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Imagine my disappointment when I woke up this morning and found out NBA free agency began at midnight, but players can't sign until July 8. It had been my sincere wish upon retiring for sleep last night that when dawn rose, LeBron James and rest of his NBA peer group would all have found new or their old employers and I wouldn't need to hear or read about them until a more suitable time, such as basketball season.

In philosophy "Free Agency" means the capacity to employ free will. This free agent will employ said will to ignore those taller free agents. While the gang has only two NBA titles between them (one for Dwyane Wade, one for Paul Pierce, who is not my shit list, for reasons to be explained further down), they are unsurpassed in creating the tedium only the truly self-centered can generate.

Oh, I think I'll be a Net, or a Bull, or a Heat. New York's my favorite city, and of course, I've always loved the fans here in the town whose franchise I'm holding over a barrel even as I speak.

Terrific, buddy. So pick one, will ya? Text message your flighty pals and tell them to get off the pot as well. If you want to remain the Main Man with your current team, good on you. If you want to ruin some franchise by creating an alleged Superteam with three NBA megastars on the starting five, go for it. You might want to watch the season highlight films of the 1977, 78 and '79 Philadelphia 76ers first, though.

But whatever you do, do it. Stop the tweeted rumor mill and the ESPN TV specials (the panel discussion broadcast on this issue Monday night was the worst thing the network ever did, "Playmakers" included). Because while I love basketball, and James, Wade, Chris Bosh and the rest are gifted basketball players, that does not mean I love them. It does not mean I even want to think about them until it's watch them play.

I will exempt veterans such as Pierce and Dirk Nowitzksi from this critique. They have become free agents as an act of financial self-protection, an understandable decision given their ages and the vagaries of sports labor relations. I would be shocked if either man wasn't with his former team next season.

But the guys in their prime are doing something that alienates almost everyone who experiences it. They are flaunting their good fortune to be able to capture a perfect wave of opportunity. They are reveling in a situation where more than one basketball franchise has taken the very real risk of becoming a 13 win team next season for the chance of signing one or more of them, behaving more like coquettish high school girls than serious businessmen or even professional athletes looking for their best chance of winning. It's not a pretty sight. It's not the act of mature men. Frankly, were I an NBA owner, it would make me very, very leery of placing my destiny in any of their hands.

Here's a guess, based on a complete lack of inside information and boredom with the outside information I possess. Come October, almost all of LeBron and Pals will opt to remain right where they are. Better to rule in a first-round playoff loser than to serve on an imaginary 75 win powerhouse where attention and (most important) the basketball must be shared on an almost equal basis. Money, even these guys must have noticed, spends much the same in Cleveland as it does in New York.

Here's a better guess. My first guess won't be proven true or false until the free agents milk their situation for all the fuss they can wring out of it. It's just as much fun as it was being recruited for college in high school, because it's the same experience. Rich men in suits adore me! Oh, life is good!

The only difference is, they'll have to declare the money they're being offered as taxable income once they take it.

posted by Michael Gee @ 3:53 PM