No matter how passive aggressive he’s been about it, it certainly seems as though LeBron James will play for the Los Angeles Lakers this season. He picked up his $52.6 million player option in June. He has a no-trade clause, so the Lakers cannot move him unilaterally. Yet at that $52.6 million figure, he’s almost impossible to trade to the sort of championship contenders he’d actually like to play for.
The Lakers have no reason to consider buying him out. Even if they are planning around the longer term, they do need to win this season in order to keep up appearances. And hey, they have LeBron James and Luka Dončić. Even if they don’t trade away future draft capital or add players on multi-year deals, they’re going to be pretty good. The two sides are therefore stuck together for the time being.
However, the way this played out guarantees one thing: James will be a free agent in the summer of 2026. He is not extension-eligible, as he signed his current contract only a year ago. He could have re-signed for multiple years had he opted out this summer, though there is no indication that the Lakers were ever willing to give him those years, and Rich Paul has claimed that he never asked for them. James, right now, is on an expiring contract. Nothing can change that. He will become a free agent next offseason.
What James will want next summer, we can only guess at. Reporting for years has suggested that he would like to retire as a Laker. Is that still true? Does he want to keep playing at all? How much of a pay cut is he willing to take to get to the right team? Is the right team a familiar one, like the Cavaliers or Heat, or is he willing to put on a fourth uniform?
While we can’t say anything for certain about James and his preferences, we can at least lay out the landscape. Let’s assume for the time being that James plays out the 2025-26 season as a member of the Lakers. When that season ends, he will have six options as to how he’d like to proceed. We’ll push retirement aside for today and focus on the other five:
James could…..
