Games. Accolades. Trophies. Dollars. Instant Twitter hordes. Probably the ratings battle in his personal TV time slot for the second Thursday in July.

Those are things LeBron James has won.

Championships. Rings. New fans. Renewed fans. Admiration. Hearts. Minds. Respect.

Those are things LeBron James still needs to win, or win back, if he's going to come out of this with more than a guaranteed contract to play basketball for the next five or six seasons for $99 million or $128 million, respectively.

Some might say there's no coming out of this, period. Not really. Not without some residue, some taint, some permanent damage done from a process so relentlessly modern and joyless and narcissistic. What began a week ago in the most low-key way will have morphed over 189 hours -- from 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on July 1 to 9 p.m. ESPN time on July 8 -- into something overblown and embarrassing, silly and unnecessary. Cleaning that up is only the first of the chores James faces going forward.

Granted, short of signing paperwork at the stroke of midnight on Day 1, there really was no elegant way for James, the summa cum laude designate of the NBA's 2010 free-agent class, to be recruited by ambitious NBA teams. Had he privately jetted from city to city, a market's worth of media affiliates chasing his limos at every stop, James would have looked like a globetrotting dilettante, orchestrating coverage across the nation. By parking himself and his advisors in an office suite in downtown Cleveland, he looked instead like a stay-at-home dilettante, summoning billionaires and lifelong NBA executives to appear before him like so many court jesters.

At least James, while handling the week in his own not-great way (T-shirts? sweat pants?), didn't pop up on YouTube via local TV truck feeds or tweet his itinerary and his regal, chin-stroking impressions the way some of his free-agent buddies did.

This week, though, the little bubble of good will that James retained seemed to burst. His newly active Twitter account and a resuscitated Web site felt too calculated, too convenient, too clever. Then came the TV show, or rather "The Decision," in the grand labeling style the networks so love.

Leak his choice of team to a favored reporter the way some players do? Let the club announce the news and schedule the media event? Nah, not LBJ. He had to go prime time and block out an hour on ESPN, which the sports network immediately treated like the Super Bowl by clearing three hours in advance of "The Decision" for its pre-announcement show. The ratio seems about right: 60 seconds of information blown up to fill 240 minutes of air time.

Reaction has been swift, strong and largely unfavorable to the gifted 25-year-old forward, inside and outside the league. Oh, traffic on NBA Mobile and other league digital operations, including this Web site, is up dramatically in page views and visitors. Other national sites have experienced similar usage bumps, sports-talk shows are dominated by pro basketball buzz in the thick of summer and even Roger Ebert is tweeting about LBJ, so the James-Dwyane Wade-Chris Bosh tide truly has lifted all boats.

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