No, but he had to play the Celtics and the Pistons. Most great players weren't drafted onto stacked teams. Even Magic Johnson joined the Lakers after they just posted a fairly pedestrian 47-win season. It's preposterous to suggest that somehow LeBron James had it harder than any other superstar who ever played. LeBron bolted for South Beach when he was 25 because he just couldn't chill the **** out and wait to have a decent team put together around him. It's hard to not have crappy talent around you when you're forcing your team to trade all your picks to get you help immediately because you believe yourself entitled to a championship at twenty-****ing-five.
https://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/CLE/draft.html
I mean, 5 of the 11 season LeBron played in Cleveland, they didn't have any draft picks! In other years, they simply traded guys away after drafting them. You can't really argue that the teams LeBron has been on have developed a single good young player while he was there. Or maybe I just can't remember one.
You know the kind of players Jordan played with when he was 25? Here's a sample of a starting lineup for the Bulls around that time:
Michael Jordan
Charles Oakley
Brad Sellers
Rory Sparrow
Mike Brown
That's a 4th and a 3rd round pick there. There aren't even that many rounds today! Brad Sellers was a lottery pick, but his 6.3 career PPG average tells you almost everything you need to know about him. You might argue that Oakley was a decent player who certainly had a very long career which included an ASG appearance(the year almost a dozen players made their only ASG appearance ever because the league was that bad), but at best, you could say that he was a player in Ilgauskas range. Borderline All-Star who was a decent defender but certainly nothing resembling a proper second option on offense.
Sure, Jordan would get better teammates later, but not the LeBron way. Grant and Pippen were both drafted by the Bulls. Hell, BJ Armstrong too, if you want to count him among "better teammates." They all had to be developed, nurtured. They had to be waited on. Or you can pressure your front office to trade everything even remotely resembling an asset to get Szczerbiak, Joe Smith, Ben Wallace, Shaq, and Antawn Jamison. All somewhere between 5 and 10 years past their primes.
Let's not pretend like LeBron's mediocre return on what it's supposed to be GOAT talent is all the result of bad luck, conspiracies, and other teams just plain being jerks. The man's patience is non-existent.
