Late Thursday night, a New York-based advertising company called NYC Ads Co. put up a giant banner featuring a hypothetical LeBron James Knicks jersey above text reading, “King of New York? Prove it” and “#KingJamesNYC18.” In one of the company’s four Instagram posts displaying the signage, it offered the following message: The @nyknicks haven’t hired the right team to recruit the King so we took matters into our own hands.
With the banner, New York joined a growing list of cities attempting to woo LeBron ahead of his approaching free agency by plastering giant messages across town. First, Philadelphia parodied the movie “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” with a trio of signs encouraging LeBron to sign with the 76ers. Then Cleveland responded with an image of a crown flipping off the city of Philadelphia and the hashtag #TheLandoftheKing. Next came two Los Angeles billboards with the hashtag #LABron. And then one in Portland, of all places, that (jokingly, we assume) read “LeBron, Dame needs a third option.”
Well, to all of those cities and every other one plotting some fresh signage, we have some bad news: LeBron James is not going to make his decision based on a billboard. You can stop now.
Yes, yes, we know this might come as a shock to all the people paying good money to appeal to The King through billboards. But history tells us that LeBron makes decisions based on factors such as the opportunity to win a championship and the opportunity to build his legacy. Not, you know, who puts up the biggest sign. In fact, displaying massive banners has proven to be a good way to lose his services, not gain them.
And yes, the advertising companies that have put up these billboards are probably interested less in actually attracting LeBron and more in getting their own names out into the world. Even so, we feel it is our duty to inform all those cities out there currently drawing up their billboards that they can probably put the money and the ad space to better use.
