LeBron’s hefty Lakers’ extension is all about winning, just not about winning games

In extending his time with the Los Angeles Lakers, LeBron James has likely committed to a level of short-term professional mediocrity that seems counterintuitive for an all-time ambitious superstar hellbent on passing Michael Jordan as the game’s greatest ever player.

Championships, we know, are the coin of the realm for the few basketball royalty like King James exceptional enough to vie for the Greatest Of All Time moniker. And LA, we also know, is clearly ill-equipped to provide their newly extended superstar a shot at another ring this year, or in the one or two additional years in which he’ll now continue as a Laker.

But the extension — which locks LeBron into Los Angeles at least an extra year, through the 2023-24 season, and which sources confirmed to CBS Sports includes that third-year player option for 2024-25 — fits perfectly with the fascinating place LeBron has reached in his career: Both an end-of-the-road great basking in the quality of life and personal advantages that come with life in Los Angeles, and a sly strategic wink to his career-long goal of besting Jordan in the public eye.

The strategy behind this new deal is equal parts personal over the profesional and long-term branding, and both point to a subtler, older version of James. He’s exchanged “not two, not three, not four” for future quality NBA time with his son, and the need to collect rings in the GOAT chase for something now more interesting and subtle.

Let’s start with the personal.

Those within the Lakers organization never doubted this would happen, pointing to the fact that, well, LeBron likes his life in Los Angeles. He’s happy there. He’s content. And while, yes, Russell Westbrook is the totem of the troubles plaguing the basketball side of things, there is life beyond work, something new and fascinating in one of the most driven and ambitious players in NBA history.

That there is life beyond work is true for me. True for you. True for the richest and poorest and most and least driven among us. This deal — the player option being key here — allows LeBron James to extricate himself from the Lakers in the summer of 2024 if, as expected, his oldest son Bronny James enters the NBA Draft.

That, too, is a quality of life factor that is much more about happiness than competitiveness, and a long-stated LeBron goal that sheds a light on his priorities — happiness over winning, at its most blatant…