LeBron James took part in his first meeting with the NBA player's union after being elected executive vice president back in February over the All-Star break. Joe Vardon at Cleveland.com grabbed some great quotes from NBA players who were impressed with LeBron's presence in the meeting:
I'm jokingly saying this because I'm his boy, I'd never seen 'Bron at a meeting before. It was good to see where he's at and the value of him being there as a union.
-Drew Gooden
We have a lot of voices, a lot of people were vocal, but he talked about what it takes to get to the next level as a union. It wasn't anything specific, but he was very vocal.
-Stephen Curry
I think we're in a really unique position right now as a union, with the growth of this league and all the money coming in to increase our significance in this collective bargaining situation with the NBA.
Going into the last lockout, I felt like that was a big issue for us. The more unified and the more significant that we are, the more money we have coming in and the more streams of revenue we have, the better off we are going into negotiations.
A lot of the meeting was geared toward how do we do that? There were a lot of good ideas. I think LeBron made some good points about kind of our strategy going forward with that.
-Lou Amundson
[LeBron] pretty much helped the players understand things about backing the union. And letting them know we should have faith in some of the decisions they made. He did a great job for his first time. He understands it well, he broke it down well for guys to understand. Chris (Paul) did a good job also. He (LeBron) did what all great rep leaders do, he broke it down for us so we can understand and make decisions and pass it on to our teammates for votes.
-Danny Green
LeBron James continues to evolve as a person, and hopefully the NBA follows suit in its evolution too.