CLEVELAND -- Dating back to a “billboard battle” between cities during the regular season, there has been plenty of recruiting efforts for free-agent small forward LeBron James, and those efforts have only gotten bigger since he declined his $35.6 million player option to remain with the Cleveland Cavaliers Friday.
And those efforts have not been limited to teams in the NBA, as the Ultimate Fighting Championship sent out a tweet Sunday afternoon saying, “Think about it, King James” along with a picture of James wearing a championship belt around his waist.
At 6-foot-8 and 250 pounds, James would be in the heavyweight division, where currently, the top spot is held by another athlete with Northeast Ohio ties, Eastlake North High School graduate Stipe Miocic.
After his record-breaking third consecutive defense of the UFC heavyweight championship against Francis Ngannou at TD Garden in Boston on January 20, it took Miocic less than a week to get his next opponent, current light-heavyweight titlist Daniel Cormier.
Miocic and Cormier will meet in the main event of UFC 226 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on Saturday night, which will serve as the headlining bout of International Fight Week, the UFC’s premiere summer card.
Although the latest, the UFC was far from the first organization to imagine what James would be like in other sports.
Earlier this offseason, NFL Network’s Good Morning Football and NFL.com created a video about what the Dallas Cowboys could look like with James on the roster.
Last week, the league announced that James finished second to James Harden in the race for the 2017-2018 NBA Most Valuable Player Award, as the Rockets guard picked up 86 first-place votes and 15 second-place tallies on the way to 965 points. Conversely, James finished with only 15 first-place votes, worth 10 points each, to go along with 79 second-place and seven third-place tallies for a total of 738 points.
Despite being 33 years old and in his 15th NBA season, James played in all 82 regular-season games for the first time in his career, averaging 27.5 points, 8.6 rebounds, 9.1 assists and 1.4 steals over 36.9 minutes per contest.
Always one to pride himself on efficiency, James shot 54.2 percent from the field and 36.7 percent from three-point range. James’ shooting percentage from three-point range was the third-best single-season mark of his career.
By the end of the regular season, James extended his NBA-record streak of 10-point showings to 873 straight games.
James finished the regular season with 17 double-doubles of points and rebounds and 15 of points and assists, as well as 18 triple-doubles of points, rebounds and assists.
Over 22 playoff games this past spring, James registered four triple-doubles, four double-doubles of points and assists and seven double-doubles of points and rebounds.
