Advertise with NZME.<\/a><\/p>\nIt was billed as the \u201cdecision of all decisions\u201d, fuelling speculation of a potentially seismic announcement which left the basketball world on tenterhooks and sent Los Angeles Lakers ticket prices soaring.<\/p>\n
\n But LeBron James\u2019 cryptic video released on Monday, which set the Internet abuzz. turned out, after all, to be
\n a marketing gimmick.\n <\/p>\n
The so-called \u201cSecond Decision\u201d, hyped in a 10-second video posted to the NBA star\u2019s social media channels, was in fact a public relations strategy to announce James\u2019 partnership with a leading cognac brand due to go on sale in October.<\/p>\n
Monday\u2019s teaser video was a clear reference to James first famous choreographed \u201cDecision\u201d in 2010, when he stoked anticipation about his future before announcing he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to join the Miami Heat in free agency.<\/p>\n
Amid speculation that Tuesday\u2019s announcement could be to confirm his retirement at the end of the season, ticket prices for the Lakers final home game of the 2025-2026 campaign skyrocketed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AFP 7 Oct, 2025 04:45 PM2 mins to read Subscribe to listenAccess to Herald Premium articles require a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63861,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[5263,46794,9344,26568,21715,14134,16639,19060,14054,52041,52038,101,111,139,69,1118,36200,1030,12937,8209,13743,42370,9871,213,52039,52040,10507,5977,377],"class_list":["post-63860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-all","tag-angeles","tag-announcement","tag-basketball","tag-billed","tag-decision","tag-decisions","tag-fuelling","tag-james","tag-lakers","tag-lebron","tag-left","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-potentially","tag-pr","tag-prices","tag-seismic","tag-sent","tag-soaring","tag-speculation","tag-sports","tag-stunt","tag-tenterhooks","tag-ticket","tag-which","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}