It was a good deal, but it went against things Stern said he had accomplished, that could not be allowed to happen, not involving a team that Stern functionally ran. Stern’s gone though, and the league isn’t currently running any of the teams, and nobody seems to have picked up Stern’s parity torch. Of course the Lakers are in self induced cap hell, so they aren’t in the LeBron market anyway.
Parity my ass; maybe Stern picked up on that idea later in his tenure. But one of his early acts was to make sure Patrick Ewing landed in New York and not to a small market team, like the Pacers.
I do not forget the “bent envelope.”