LeBron James Is The NBA’s Highest Paid Player After Signing New $100m Deal

How do you get yourself into a position where you can ask your boss for ridiculous amounts of cash and they’ll give it to you without asking?

Single-handedly bringing a professional sports championship to the city of Cleveland is apparently a pretty damned good start.

LeBron James became an unrestricted free agent (again) at the conclusion of this year’s NBA season, after steering the Cleveland Cavaliers to a historic and somewhat unlikely NBA Championship.

Though the chances of LeBron leaving Cleveland again were about as close to zero as you could ever possibly get, this morning’s announcement of a new deal for James comes as a bit of a shock simply because of the terms of the deal.

James announced he’d be re-signing with the Cavs in a short video message posted by Bleacher Report‘s ‘Uniterrupted‘ video series early this morning:

LeBron’s new deal is reportedly a 3-year contract worth around $100million. ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS.

That means LeBron’s salary for the 2016-17 season will net him a cool $33million, making him the highest paid player in the NBA for the very first time in his illustrious career.

The length of the deal is also a curiosity, given conventional wisdom had speculated James would continue signing single-year deals with the Cavs, in order to keep the Sword of Damocles that is free agency dangling over organisation management’s head, which in turn would force them to make personnel decisions to the King’s whim in order to keep him happy.

The 3-year deal keeps him off the open market until 2019, and certainly lifts a great deal of weight off the Cavs’ front office shoulders.

The Cavs are yet to retain free-agent point guard J.R. Smith, a personal favourite of LeBron, but with James signing a deal of this nature, you’d imagine Smith returning to Northeast Ohio is now a matter of when.