LeBron James reportedly met with Nikola Jokić’s agent about a new league — so what does he have to gain?

If you’re an American basketball fan, you probably aren’t too familiar with the name Miško Ražnatović. In Europe, though, he is a very well-known agent and power broker. His agency, BeoBasket, represents a number of top players in their European dealings, and has a partnership with one of the biggest agencies in the United States, Excel Sports. Excel’s top client, like Ražnatović, is Serbian. That would be three-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokić.

The link to Jokić is part of what brought Ražnatović to the attention of American fans last weekend. On Saturday, Ražnatović shared a picture on Instagram of him on a boat with two of the most powerful figures in American basketball: LeBron James and his longtime representative, Maverick Carter. The caption? “The summer of 2025 is the perfect time to make big plans for the fall of 2026!” James, as has become well-known in light of his reported frustrations with the Lakers, will become a free agent in the summer of 2026.

Initially, that led to a wave of stories from American basketball outlets about a possible linkup between James and Ražnatović’s star client, Jokić. Yet such a pairing would be impractical, at least based on what we know at the moment. In all likelihood, Denver will only have a minimum-salary contract to offer in free agency next summer. It’s hard to imagine James taking so little to become a Nugget.

On Wednesday, Ben Horney, Daniel Roberts and Alex Schiffer of Front Office Sports offered some clarity on the meeting. The meeting was reportedly not about the Lakers or Nuggets. Rather, it regarded the international basketball league that Carter is currently involved with.

When Bloomberg initially reported on the concept earlier this year, the outlet noted, at least at the time, that James himself was not involved. Carter was described as an advisor to several investors. The concept for the league would differ significantly from the NBA model. Rather than planting teams in existing cities, it would travel across eight cities. There would reportedly be 12 teams, six for men and six for women. This would allow the league to limit overhead, as it could focus on spending a lot of money on big names without filling out 30 rosters with 15 players. 

Also notable: such a league would not necessarily have the same restrictions the NBA has when it comes to offering players ownership equity, nor would it would be limited in how much money it could take from sovereign wealth funds. LIV Golf, the competitor to the PGA Tour that sprouted in recent years, has used the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia to pay golfers enormous sums of money to play. At present, sovereign wealth funds can own only 5% of any given NBA team. Essentially, such a league would theoretically have the power to vastly outspend the NBA on top talent, as sufficiently gifted players could not only get equity in the league, but also potentially earn a salary above what is legally allowable in the NBA, which caps what individual players can earn through its maximum salary structure.

We must venture into purely speculatively territory here. We do not know explicitly what was discussed on this yacht meeting. But we can make a reasonable guess based on the context, and then, more importantly, try to figure out why this meeting may have actually taken place.

Would LeBron play in Europe?

Let’s imagine, given the caption Ražnatović used and the rumors that have surrounded James all offseason, that the possibility of James playing for this hypothetical league was broached. The theoretical appeal for both sides is obvious. If you were about to spend $5 billion launching a basketball league, as the investors are reportedly aiming to raise, you’d probably want a pretty famous face to launch it around. There is not a more famous active basketball player than LeBron James. He immediately lends the venture credibility. People will watch LeBron James play basketball no matter where he plays it.

There is obvious appeal to James on a number of levels as well. The potential financial rewards are considerable. Who knows how much that league equity could be worth. If they raise $5 billion, how much of it would they be willing to give to James? Even at 40, James is still a draw, and as a point of comparison, soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo, who is also 40, has earned hundreds of millions of dollars over the past few years playing for Al-Nassr FC, a Saudi team. If these investors trust James to get their league off of the ground, perhaps they’d be open to a similar payday.

There have been rumors about James eventually playing in Europe dating all the way back to his peak. In 2008, ESPN reported that James could consider it at a salary of around $50 million per year. Now, obviously, such salaries are commonplace in the NBA. James will earn $52.6 million playing for the Lakers this season. His earning power next year, however, is far less clear.

Reports have indicated that the Lakers are treating James as an expiring contract, and that their preference would simply be to let his contract fall off of their books after the 2025-26 season. At that point, James will be a free agent. There should be a bit of cap space on the open market. Teams like the Clippers and Heat have paths to significant offers. However, if James wants to get to a championship-caliber team, he’d likely have to take a significant pay cut. It would be hard to imagine his hometown Cavaliers, for instance, having anything more to offer than a minimum-salary deal. The Dallas Mavericks, a team he has reportedly held interest in joining, might have pathways to a mid-level offer, but certainly nothing close to the salary James currently commands. Even if the space exists, the 2026-27 campaign will be James’ age-42 season. It just isn’t clear what his best offers will be as a free agent. There is a world in which he is forced to take a substantial pay cut, something he has resisted throughout the second half of his career.

Potentially joining this upstart league could therefore be James’ best financial option, yes, but also a way to save some face. If James deems his NBA offers disrespectful to his stature within the sport or simply the caliber of player he still is, joining this venture could be a way for him to remind the rest of the basketball world just how much value he’s still capable of generating. It also puts pressure on any teams that intend to pursue him. It’s a message that he has a lucrative option elsewhere, so if they want serious consideration, they’d better come at him with a real offer as well.

All of this is straight out of the standard James playbook. He is well known for using the media to generate leverage with his teams. If he is using the idea of this international league as a way to reassert his value within the NBA, well, that would certainly track. However, there’s a bigger-picture issue we’ve yet to discuss. This might have less to do with the rest of LeBron’s playing career and more to do with what happens after he’s done.

How could ownership come into play?

James has made been very public about his goal of one day owning an NBA team. He’s even targeted a city: Las Vegas. He’s publicly lobbied for control of an expansion franchise in the desert for years, and for years, his odds of getting that team looked very strong. But two things have changed of late, and neither work in his favor.

The first is the explosion of franchise values. Consider the Phoenix Suns. Robert Sarver bought the team in 2004, one year after James was drafted, for a then-record $401 million. When he sold the team nearly two decades later, he did so at a valuation of $4 billion, ten times what he paid. Player salaries have obviously increased substantially at that period, but not at anything close to that rate. The salary cap in 2004 was just below $44 million. When the Suns sold in 2023, it hadn’t even tripled, as it was just below $124 million. NBA players are richer than ever, but with franchise valuations outpacing their own earning power, it has never been harder for them to earn enough money to actually buy a team.

James has an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion, according to Forbes. That’s enough to buy almost anything else, but as of Forbes’ most recent rankings, every NBA franchise is worth at least $3 billion. This isn’t insurmountable. James could obviously gather a group of investors to buy the team with him. A team’s governor needs only to control 15% of the team. James is already part of another ownership group, as he is an investor in Fenway Sports Group, which owns, among other teams, the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool FC. There has been speculation throughout the years about that group buying the Las Vegas expansion team with James attached as the governor.

But that takes us to our second problem. Even if James can gather the necessary investors, there’s no guarantee that the Las Vegas team even comes to be in the near future. Earlier in July, The Athletic’s David Aldridge and Mike Vorkunov reported that there “is not overwhelming momentum among governors to immediately expand past the current 30 teams.” Why? Because the current national media rights deal is so big that there are some owners who would prefer not to split it with two new partners. In other words, while a Las Vegas team may come eventually, it certainly isn’t the immediate inevitability it once seemed to be.

Further complicating matters is the NBA’s interest in expanding into Europe, not through new NBA teams, but an entirely new league. Adding new NBA teams would weaken such a league’s pool of available talent, and obviously, the more expansion the league is focused on at any given time, the thinner it will be stretched in managing that expansion. The NBA certainly could expand both domestically and abroad, but the odds would suggest that doing one at a time should be likelier.

From here, it’s not hard to put the puzzle pieces together. James would like to own an NBA team. But his path to becoming an NBA owner is more obstructed than it has ever been. Meanwhile, a new league is being formed abroad, one that would likely use cities that the NBA would also like to use in a potential European league. That league has the capacity to offer James equity. The NBA would probably prefer not to have James as a direct competitor to its European ambitions. 

That is true both because of what James can do directly and because of the legitimacy he would give the entire enterprise. The last thing the NBA wants is to have to compete with this international entity for top playing talent. This brings us back to Ražnatović, who represents so many great foreign players. The best of them, Jokić, conspicuously did not sign a contract extension with the Denver Nuggets this offseason. Now, there were entirely plausible motivations for that decision that have nothing to do with any of this. He can simply make more money by waiting to extend until next summer. But until he puts pen to paper, the investors behind this new league will surely at least consider throwing a massive offer his way when the time comes.

So perhaps this is a different sort of leverage play, one aimed not any specific team, but an entire league. The easiest way to remove the threat of James as a competitor would be to make him a partner. James has been very forthcoming about wanting that in the past. If meetings like this help him generate the leverage to make that happen, well, it would irresponsible of him not to at least take them.