Steve, I think the leaving money on the table thing is overdone. Lebron & Co. took less money from the Heat in order to play together. But they’ll make so much money off the court that the money they left on the table is better thought of as an investment than a sacrifice: If they win, there will be even more money in endorsements, appearances, etc. (Michael Jordan and Joe Montana will be making commercials forever, but, outside of Chicago, has anyone seen Ernie Banks in one lately?)

I don’t begrudge those guys going off to play together. I will root against them, but I’m a Knick fan, so I would have done that anyway. I never thought Lebron raised the play of the players around him, like a Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Jordan or Kobe Bryant (and I grew up watching the likes of Bill Russell, Walt Frazier, John Havlicek, and Bill Walton, for whom that was what the game was about — making the whole greater than the sum of the parts). If Lebron’s going to win, he needs other great players around him, and now he may have them. (Dwayne Wade is already a great player; I’m not sure Chris Bosh is, but he may be.) You’ve got to give Pat Riley credit for having the Heat in a salary-cap position to pull this off. The Knicks have been run so badly for so long that it’s taken a couple of years for them to shed the bad contracts so they could pursue good free agents — and, speaking of leaving money on the table, signing with the Knicks means New York taxes, which puts a bad team at even more of a disadvantage in the competition for the best free agents.

The shift from the owners to the players is interesting. As a long-suffering Met fan, I’ve grudgingly admired the way Steinbrenner always plowed money back into the team. In the late sixties, the Yankees were drawing less than a million fans a season. Steinbrenner made them interesting again and was obsessed with winning. Because they spent to win, rather than just treading water like the Mets often do, Steinbrenner’s de minimus investment to buy the Yankees almost 40 years ago left him worth probably over a billion dollars — with a team that draws more like 4 million fans a year and owns a big chunk of its own TV network. The salary cap in basketball doesn’t let an owner do what Steinbrenner did, but I think the players are doing it. Lebron effectively plowed the millions more he could have gotten someplace else into his best chance of winning. If it works, like it did for Steinbrenner, he’s going to make a ton more money than he would have as the star player who can never get it done on a so-so team.