You don't want to draft Lebron, he has zero loyalty to a team. You wouldn't be able to keep him after your first rebuild phase, which would be inevitable at some point. Maybe you'd get four or five years out of a freshly drafted Lebron before he bolted to one of the elite media markets that was better positioned to get him rings.
It's a lot easier to have loyalty to Chicago than Cleveland. MJ and Kobe would have done the same if they were drafted to a small market team (in fact Kobe made sure he wasn't drafted to a small market).
Lebron put in a long shift and went back to give them a title.
