Other NBA executives don’t believe LeBron James will actually retire

If LeBron James was looking to bluff anybody around the league with his talk of retirement, it’s one that everybody has called. The further removed from his comments, the more everyone seems to believe LeBron was not being serious, whether deliberately or not.

In all likelihood, he was simply a very tired person speaking some unfiltered thoughts about how exhausting this season was after a very long seven months. Whatever the intention of the comments were, those around the league aren’t buying it as a legitimate threat to retire.

In a piece by Eric Pincus of Bleacher Report, anonymous NBA executives believe LeBron’s comments were a bit of a diversion tactic.

“He’ll suit up next year,” one Western Conference executive said. “He just changed the conversation. Now we’re not talking about a sweep; we’re talking about LeBron and retirement. He loves to control the narrative.”

You could understand why the Nuggets executives anonymous executives would feel this way as the conversations in the hours and days after the Lakers exited the playoffs were entirely about LeBron’s future. It’s pretty much entirely up to how you interpret the meanings of the quotes and whether or what the ulterior motives were.

There might be a little bit of truth to everything, to be fair. Those comments didn’t have to be entirely for one reason. There was a little bit of everything, ranging from being a little bit serious to wanting to apply a little bit of pressure to the front office to wanting to take a little bit of focus off the Nuggets sweep.

Call it a bit of veteran expertise. LeBron became the center of focus for the last week. It certainly doesn’t seem like he’s retiring and fans don’t believe he is, but we’ve now spent a week discussing it and very little about the Lakers being swept out of the playoffs.

If nothing else, he’s delayed those discussions for a while. LeMind Games.

You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude.