LeBron James’ ‘The Decision,’ 15 years later: How one night redrew the NBA map

Fifteen years ago this week, the NBA changed forever. In a July 8 televised ESPN special dubbed “The Decision,” LeBron James declared that he was taking his talents to South Beach to join Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh with the Miami Heat. 

The announcement LeBron delivered during The Decision sent shockwaves through the NBA, reshaping not only the next few seasons but the entire landscape of professional basketball for the decade and a half that followed. A single choice about where he would take the next stage of his career triggered a chain reaction that rippled across the league and beyond.

Those aftershocks reverberated both on the court and off it, touching nearly every player, team, executive and franchise—and influencing the broader culture of sports itself. On the 15th anniversary of one of the most consequential moments in sports history, we’re revisiting the 15 most significant ripple effects, legacies and lasting changes sparked by LeBron’s decision.

1. The ‘Player Empowerment’ era is born

Easily the most long-lasting effect of The Decision, and of the entire lead-up to James’ free agency to begin with, is player empowerment. We are still living in the player empowerment era to this day, with guys dictating their landing spots in free agency and trades and trying to put pressure on their teams to get them more help or even angle their way to specific destinations on draft night. Some of these efforts are obviously more successful than others, but there is no doubt that it remains the players who hold the most significant power in the league today.

This really started with the two years leading up to the summer of 2010, when several teams began angling to generate as much cap space as possible so that they’d have a chance to sign LeBron. The Knicks basically tanked two full seasons just to make sure they didn’t add any salary to their books beyond 2010 so that they could sign James free and clear if he decided to go to New York. Contracts that expired in 2010 suddenly became massively valuable, and teams would give up draft picks to acquire them and ditch some long-term money. 

Once LeBron narrowed down his list to six teams, he decided to take meetings with each of them — the Nets, Knicks, Heat, Clippers, Cavaliers and Bulls, in that order — during the first few days of July before taking another few days to make his decision. But instead of visiting the teams in each of their cities, LeBron brought the teams to him and took meetings at his business offices in Cleveland. 

That was one of the first signs that this was very different. That he then took nearly another full week after the meetings was another sign, and that he decided to announce his decision in a televised prime-time interview on ESPN was obviously the single-biggest one.

Once LeBron wielded his power in this way, so many players followed suit over the years. (There have even been other Decision-esque processes with a series of meetings in a location of the player’s choice, albeit not with a TV special at the end, because everyone agreed that that part was a mistake). Free-agent lists, trade demands, preferred destinations, weighing in on roster and coaching decisions, even things like where and when teams practice (or don’t), how they travel, where they stay, who works for the team behind the scenes (whether that be assistant coaches or trainers) … the players have the power to determine almost everything these days, and they use it at just about every opportunity. And why wouldn’t they? 

LeBron himself has taken player empowerment to perhaps the highest of heights, spurred at least in part by his experiences in Miami. He, Wade and Bosh each took slightly less than the maximum salary so that they could team up and leave enough room for Miami to re-sign Udonis Haslem and bring in Mike Miller. James was angry when the Heat used the amnesty provision to get out of Miller’s contract a few years later, and he spent the next decade-plus since then exerting even more power over his teams. It was perhaps a lesson he learned from his first stint with the Cavaliers, when an inept front office could simply not supply him with a second banana worth a damn. 

During James’ second time back in Cleveland, he routinely signed one-year deals with a player option for a second season so that he could pressure the Cavs into doing things his way — making win-now moves, bringing in his preferred role players (Miller, James Jones, J.R. Smith, Kendrick Perkins, Chris Andersen, Mo Williams, Derrick Rose, etc.), hiring or firing specific coaches (ahem, David Blatt and Ty Lue) and more. He relinquished a little bit of that control with the Lakers but still exerted his influence to get them to trade for Anthony Davis and to draft his son, Bronny, and routinely puts pressure on the front office with statements and subliminal messages about how the team needs to be making moves to prioritize his window to win. He has notably not taken anything less than the max since his return to Cleveland. 

2. The ‘Scoops’ era arrives

One of the most memorable parts of Decision week was following the entire thing on Twitter. It was even briefly news that week that LeBron himself joined Twitter, at the urging of Chris Paul. It’s easy to forget, but we didn’t always have notifications set for Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania tweets. We weren’t always hanging on a thread for every single bit of transaction-related breaking news. 

That era really started with the blow-by-blow reporting of LeBron’s various meetings with teams and how they supposedly went, which teams were in or out of the mix, and who thinks what about which city and whether or not they want to team up there. 

Woj and Brian Windhorst, in particular, have credited — or blamed — The Decision for creating the scoops era of NBA media.

“I think I was the beneficiary … of timing,” Wojnarowski said. “2010, LeBron James going to Miami with Chris Bosh, the internet at Yahoo!, and then Twitter comes along and I start posting on Twitter. There was a perfect storm of interest in the NBA, and then I think 2010 changed interest in free agency. That became its own thing, the trades, the deals, the buildup to the deals.”

Sometimes it now seems like scoops are the entirety of the NBA media landscape. The competition is perhaps not as fierce with Woj no longer in the game and Shams occupying his old perch at ESPN, but there is still a race to get the inside information in front of people, and do it faster than everyone else. And people still eat it up. Were it not for that first week of July in 2010, that might never have happened.

3. Big Threes become the norm

The idea of the Big Three is still alive and well. Basically every time a team makes a big trade or free-agent signing, you’ll see a graphic on TV or Twitter or somewhere else highlighting that team’s “new Big Three” with a caption like “who’s stopping these guys???” 

The Heatles trio didn’t start the so-called Big Three trend in the modern NBA. That would be the Celtics, who united Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen with Paul Pierce in 2008. But once Miami built a bigger, badder Big Three, it kickstarted an arms race around the league that mostly continues to this day — though the new collective bargaining agreement is turning the Big Three into the Big Two as it’s gotten to pricy to carry three superstar-level salaries and still be competitive long term because of the restrictive CBA. 

4. Heat legacies are redrawn

Wade was already well on his way to a Hall-of-Fame career by the time LeBron made the decision to join him and Bosh in Miami. He’d already won a title and a Finals MVP award. He’d led the league in scoring, made All-NBA five times and an All-Defensive team three times and finished top-five in MVP voting twice. Had James never made the trip down south, his trajectory obviously would have been different, but he also wasn’t going to fade away. He was always on the track that he ended up going down.

Bosh, on the other hand, was mostly just your regular-ole All-Star level player. He was really damn good, but he was toiling on some irrelevant Raptors teams and not getting the shine a player of his caliber probably deserved. Going to the Heat changed the course of his career, and he changed the course of the NBA with his style of play. His role in Miami’s titles as a floor-spacer on offense and space-eater on defense was vital, and even though he was often singled out as inessential and flawed, nothing could have been further from the truth. Had he not had his career cut short by blood clots, his resume only would have grown. But joining up with the Heat ensured that he’d also end up in the Hall of Fame.

Pat Riley famously put his championship rings on the table in the meeting with LeBron, selling him on a vision of how he could team with Wade and Bosh and rack up victories and titles and more. It worked. Riley’s status as one of the league’s pre-eminent figures was already secure thanks to his time with the Lakers, Knicks and earlier days of the Heat, but he only added to the legend by swinging the shocking move to secure LeBron’s services.

Coach Erik Spoelstra was the guy who put it all together. There were bumps in the road, to be sure, but Spo emerged as one of the league’s top tactitians, a title he’s retained to this day. He devised the system to get the most out of his star trio on both ends of the floor and it could hardly have worked better overall. Spo has gone back to the Finals twice since those days and continued to rack up regular-season and playoff victories, to the point that he’s now 20th in regular-season wins and fifth in playoff wins. He’ll no doubt join his Miami cohorts in the Hall of Fame once he retires. 

5. USA Basketball becomes superteam launchpad

James, Wade and Bosh all played for Team USA during the 2008 Olympics on the squad that was dubbed The Redeem Team, which set out to well, redeem, the United States after its disastrous bronze medal showing in 2004. They famously formed a close bond during the 2006 World Championships, 2008 training camp and the gold medal-winning trip to Beijing, and that closeness played a significant role in their deciding to team up in Miami two summers later.

In the years since, playing on Team USA together has continued to lay the foundation for future star team-ups to the point that in 2012, then-Rockets general manager Daryl Morey told ESPN that his team-building philosophy was to “get more USA basketball team members.”

James and Kevin Love played together and later united in Cleveland. James Harden and Chris Paul played together and later teamed up in Houston. Kevin Durant played with Andre Iguodala and Stephen Curry in Golden State. Harden and Russell Westbrook reunited in Houston. Durant, Irving and Harden (and DeAndre Jordan) teamed up in Brooklyn. James and Anthony Davis teamed up with the Lakers. Durant and Devin Booker played together in Phoenix. Damian Lillard tried to push his way to Miami and play with Bam Adebayo. Team USA continues to be a breeding ground for relationships that later lead to players forcing the issue so that they can play together.

6. Rise of space and pace, aggressive defense and small-ball lineups

Given how fully-ingrained the term is in the NBA lexicon these days, it’s easy to forget that “pace and space” wasn’t always something that we talked about, in that specific way. Near as I can tell, the first time we saw it was in a story by Tom Haberstroh for ESPN about Spoelstra visiting Eugene, Oregon after the Heat lost in the 2011 NBA Finals, to get some lessons from then-Ducks football coach Chip Kelly, whose up-tempo, no-huddle offenses were taking college football by storm. (That’s not to say that nobody had ever emphasized those tenets before — just that they hadn’t necessarily been publicly packaged that way as the foundation of a team’s philosophy). 

Explosive. Fast. Unpredictable.

Chip Kelly’s speedy spread offense was an inspiration for Spoelstra. These are the words that Kelly used to describe the principles behind his signature spread offense that he rode to the BCS National Championship Game in 2011. They’re also the same ones often used to describe a Heat team led by LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh.

At least, that’s what the team is supposed to be. By most accounts, the Heat underachieved both competitively and aesthetically in the Big Three’s debut season. Miami didn’t smash the record books and played at one of the slowest paces in the NBA in 2010-11. As the one calling the shots, Spoelstra received much of the blame. But rather than deflect the responsibility, the Heat coach went back to the drawing board to find a better model. So he bought a plane ticket to go see Kelly and ask him a simple, yet vexing question:

How exactly do you turn a collection of world-class athletes into a merciless scoring machine?

Kelly’s answer made all the sense in the world to Spoelstra. To leverage the team’s blinding athleticism, Kelly told him, one must spread the floor, turn up the pace and let it fly. Pace and space are essential.

And so the mantra for the new Heat was born. Under the watch of Pat Riley, the steward of the “Showtime” Lakers in the 1980s, Spoelstra set out to design his very own attack built on speed, versatility and athleticism.

We are still living in the NBA’s pace-and-space era. Teams have turned up the jets to an even greater degree than did those Heat teams and, thanks to the combination of rule changes, the three-point revolution and the explosion of talent around the league, they are also forcing opposing defenses to cover a greater area of the floor than ever before. The average game played in 2025 was 6.7 possessions faster than the average game in 2011, and 8.8 possessions faster than when LeBron, Wade and Bosh entered the league in 2004. Leaguewide three-point rates also spiked after the Heat’s 2012 title, and the trend has only continued since then — accelerated by the Golden State Warriors dynasty, the Mike D’Antoni-coached Houston Rockets and the Joe Mazzulla-led Celtics.

Miami’s personnel changes beginning with that 2011-12 season also spurred other on-court trends. Specifically, acquiring Shane Battier allowed the Heat to play more smaller lineups with Bosh at center rather than power forward, which not only played into the team’s offensive goals, but led to Spoelstra employing more aggressive defensive tactics like switching, blitzing and trapping ball-handlers more often than any team before or since. In fairness, Miami discovered the effectiveness of these lineups when Bosh got hurt and they had to slide Battier to the four alongside centers like Ronny Turiaf, Udonis Haslem, Joel Anthony and Dexter Pittman. But it then became the Heat’s default setting for the next two-plus years.

The league only began collecting player-tracking data during the 2013-14 season so we unfortunately can’t definitively measure how aggressive the Heat’s defense was in 2012 and 2013, but the 2014 team still tops the all-time leaderboard in Aggression+ (and does so by nearly 2%), a metric I created with Krishna Narsu to measure how frequently a defense sends extra defenders toward the ball. Switching has of course since become considerably more common, with the Warriors dynasty again spurring it further. But nobody has blitzed and trapped more aggressively than did those Heat teams — because nobody has had the personnel to do it nearly as well as they did.

7. The bridesmaids: Knicks, Bulls, Nets and Clippers

These were the teams, along with the Cavs and Heat, that LeBron took meetings and considered signing with in 2010. Obviously, they all struck out. And they all took incredibly winding paths from there.

The Knicks pivoted to signing Amar’e Stoudemire, and then trading for Carmelo Anthony months later. They made the playoffs in the first three seasons of the STAT and Melo era but never seriously contended for the Eastern Conference crown, then sunk into the abyss for nearly a decade before Leon Rose, Tom Thibodeau and later Jalen Brunson dug them out of it.

The Bulls signed Carlos Boozer in 2010 and emerged as the earliest threat to Miami’s Eastern Conference reign, making the conference finals in 2011, the same year Derrick Rose won MVP. But Rose tore his ACL in the first round of the next year’s playoffs and Chicago limped along as an Eastern Conference also-ran for the next several seasons, and has spent the ensuing decade merely trying to remain relevant with low-end playoff berths.

The Nets struck out on all the big free agents and hilariously ended up with Jordan Farmar, Travis Outlaw, Anthony Morrow and Johan Petro. They traded for Deron Williams the following season but never emerged as a playoff team until later swinging a massive trade for Joe Johnson (which ironically included Farmar, Morrow and Petro). A few years later, they made one of the worst trades in NBA history, acquiring Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Jason Terry from the Celtics in exchange for a whole bunch of assets and draft picks, two of which turned into Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum. These days, the Nets are a couple years into yet another rebuild that looks several years away from turning into anything.

The Clips still had Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan on their side despite missing out on LeBron, and it wasn’t long before they traded for another member of the Banana Boat crew in Chris Paul. That spurred Lob City, the best era in the franchise’s history to that point, even if it ultimately ended without even an appearance in the conference finals. As we know, the Clips later traded for Paul George and signed Kawhi Leonard, with the George move — done to ensure that Kawhi would sign — turning into a disaster that built the foundation of this year’s Oklahoma City Thunder championship team.

8. East contenders get shut out

LeBron going to Miami was the beginning of the end for the chances of any other Eastern Conference team making it to the Finals. The Heat won the East in all four seasons that James, Wade and Bosh played together, and of course his Cavaliers teams won the East in each of the next four seasons as well. 

That meant that teams like the Celtics (more on them later), Knicks, Bulls, Pacers, Hawks, Raptors and more never had a chance to truly contend for the title. The Heat only went beyond five games four times in their 12 Eastern Conference playoff series during the LeBron-Wade-Bosh era and were taken to seven games only twice — and they won those Game 7s by a combined 36 points. His Cleveland teams were also taken beyond five games just four times in four years, and to seven games twice. His run of dominance was never seriously challenged.

9. Kevin Durant grows tired of being second

In 2013, Durant appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated, accompanied by the following quote: “I’ve been second my whole life. I was the second-best player in high school. I was the second pick of the draft. I’ve been second in the MVP voting three times. I came in second in the Finals. I’m tired of being second… I’m done with it.”

LeBron didn’t have anything to do with KD being the second-ranked prospect in high school or the second pick in the draft behind — KD can cite Greg Oden for those motivation points — but James was the first-place finisher all three times that Durant had come in second in MVP voting at that point, and his Heat also won the Finals that Durant referred to in that quote. 

Durant actually did win MVP the following season while leading the league in scoring for the fourth time in five years, but the Thunder again finished second in the 2014 Western Conference Finals. Durant missed most of the 2015 season and the entire playoffs with an injury and then his 2016 Thunder team once again finished second in the conference finals.

Durant’s frustration with constantly coming in second was certainly one of the factors that led him to sign with the Warriors in 2016, a move that like James to Miami was unpopular for its blatant ring-chasing. His journey to the Bay Area netted him the championships he so desperately sought, but the lack of recognition and credit relative to what he thought he deserved has undoubtedly played a role to his recent sojourn around the league as he searches for whatever it is he’s looking for. 

10. Cleveland’s absurd lottery luck leads LeBron home

The Cavs were so bad during LeBron’s first season in Miami that they were willing to take on Baron Davis’ contract from the Los Angeles Clippers in order to extract L.A.’s first-round pick in the deal. That pick then won the lottery, allowing Cleveland to draft Kyrie Irving. Netting Kyrie was the first domino in facilitating LeBron’s exit from Miami and return to Cleveland. 

But the Cavs weren’t done there. They won the lottery again in 2013, and then again in 2014. They ended up with Anthony Bennett and Andrew Wiggins with those two picks, and they were combined with a first-round pick to acquire Kevin Love from the Minnesota Timberwolves after LeBron re-signed with them in the summer of 2014. That enabled the Cavs to form their own Big Three, which of course led the way to their dominant run through the East and the first and only title in team history.

🏀 15 years of NBA Finals history

11. The end and new beginnings of the Celtics

In 2008, after trading for Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, the Celtics were the best team in the NBA and won the title. In 2009, they were the best team for much of the season but an injury to Garnett knocked them off course and they eventually lost in the second round to the Orlando Magic. In 2010, they got revenge on Orlando and won the Eastern Conference, but fell to the Lakers in the Finals.

Their run of success essentially ended there, though, because the Heat stopped it in its tracks. Boston lost to Miami 4-1 in the second round in 2011, then lost a Game 7 to the Heat in the conference finals in 2012 — the preceding Game 6 will go down as one of the best of James’ career. The Celtics then flamed out against the Knicks in 2013, at which point they realized that the run was over and decided to pivot.

They traded Garnett, Pierce, Terry, D.J. White, a first-round pick and a second-round pick to the Nets for (deep breath) Gerald Wallace, Kris Humphries, Keith Bogans, MarShon Brooks. Kris Joseph, three first-round picks and one pick swap. The players they collected in the deal didn’t amount to much, but the 2016 first-round pick turned into Jaylen Brown; the 2017 pick swap netted the No. 1 pick, which the Celtics traded to the 76ers for the No. 3 pick (Jayson Tatum) and a future first-rounder they used on Romeo Lankford, who was later part of the trade for Derrick White; and the 2018 first-round pick was packaged with Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder, Ante Zizic and a second-round pick to acquire Kyrie Irving. 

So LeBron ended one run of Celtics contention and, by doing so, helped lay the foundation for Boston to build another one.

12. Dirk Nowitzki, Rick Carlisle and the Mavericks get their scalp

Coming into the 2010-11 season, the Heat were massive favorites to win the title. They had a 64.5-win over/under, highest in the league by a full eight wins, and they were +175 to emerge as champions. Only one other team (the defending champion Lakers) had odds better than +1000. 

The Dallas Mavericks had other ideas. After the Heat took a 2-1 lead by winning Game 3 in Dallas, the Mavs came back to win three straight, beginning with a comeback from a nine-point deficit with just over four minutes remaining in Game 4. Carlisle’s defense flummoxed James in particular, as he averaged just 17.8 points per game while turning it over 24 times in six contests. 

The comeback gave Dirk his long-awaited title and cemented his status as one of the all-time greatest players and one of the small handful of best international players in league history. He averaged 26 and 10 in the Finals and finally put to rest the silly idea that he couldn’t win a ring because he was a jump-shooting big man and needed to get down in the post. Role players like Jason Kidd, Jason Terry, Shawn Marion, Tyson Chandler and J.J. Barea each played massive roles as well. 

The title also should have permanently etched Carlisle’s name into the annals of the league’s greatest coaches, but people seemingly forgot about that until the Pacers went on their runs to the conference finals and NBA Finals over the last two years. Whatever the case, he engineered one of the great upsets in NBA history.

13. Gregg Popovich’s Spurs become historic foil

The Spurs under Popovich basically had three different eras of inner-circle contention. They had one built around Tim Duncan and David Robinson, one built around Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili and one built around those three guys as they aged and an emerging Kawhi Leonard. The last of those teams did battle with the Heat in the Finals in both 2013 and 2014, with the former resulting in a heart-wrenching loss and the latter one of the all-time great revenge victories. 

The early Spurs were built on post-ups and interior dominance on both ends of the floor, befitting their Duncan-Robinson nucleus. As they moved into their next era of contention, they maintained their elite defense but shifted to a more pick-and-roll heavy attack with Parker and Ginobili at the keys. And by the time they got to the mid-2010s, they were moving the ball and their bodies more often and more quickly than any team in the NBA, to the point that people began referring to their style as The Beautiful Game. 

That version of the team reached its zenith in that 2014 Finals series, with San Antonio’s offense continually one step ahead of Miami’s defense, which just had no chance to keep up with the way the Spurs were slinging the rock around and making quick decisions on every touch. “They played the best basketball I’ve ever seen,” Bosh said at the time.

That season and that title was made even more special because of the way the Spurs lost to the Heat the previous year, with Ray Allen’s famous corner three robbing them of a Game 6 clincher and spurring the Heat to a comeback win and then a Game 7 victory a few nights later. San Antonio used that loss as fuel all year long and avenged it in as dominant a fashion as possible.

14. Tenor of CBA negotiations have changed

Throughout the Player Empowerment Era, the owners have been trying to pry control back in any way they can. The owners always want to win every CBA negotiation, obviously. But since The Decision, they’ve often been focused on finding ways to curtail player movement that the players themselves get to control. Every time the CBA is up for negotiation, the owners have some pet issue they want to resolve so that the most recent exercise of player power they just got up in arms about can’t happen again.

In 2011, after James and Bosh joined Wade in Miami and then Carmelo Anthony forced his way to New York at the following trade deadline, one issue the owners rallied behind was eliminating extend-and-trades so that players couldn’t push their way to a preferred destination. (That has been hilariously unsuccessful in the ensuing years, obviously). In their “solution,” they accidentally eliminated any incentive for superstars to sign contract extensions at all, all but ensuring that they’d end up reaching unrestricted free agency and thus be able to freely leave for nothing in return. 

When that, and a once-in-a-lifetime cap spike resulted in Durant heading to Golden State, the owners devised the so-called “super-max” contract that enabled “home” teams to blow other free-agent offers out of the water with starting salaries equal to 35% of the salary cap and an extra year on the deal. That almost immediately backfired as teams decided they didn’t want to take a chance of giving some players that type of contract, with others deciding to take the plunge anyway and in many cases regretting it. 

Players, of course, figured out plenty of ways to exert their own power in these situations anyway. The leverage they have to get the super-max if they want it is significant, and if the team won’t pony up, they often ask for a trade. And they often provide teams with lists of preferred destinations and in many cases get what they want. The best players also negotiate their way to player options on the final season of their deals so they can either elect to hit free agency earlier or else keep getting paid for another year when the team would probably rather they move on. They still control their own destiny in most situations, much as teams wish it weren’t so.

15. LeBron’s legacy gives G.O.A.T. debate teeth

For reasons I’ve never quite understood, debates about who is the greatest basketball player of all time — which these days typically center on LeBron and Michael Jordan — are almost never about which player was actually the best at playing basketball. They’re usually about … the other stuff. And rest assured, LeBron’s decision to join Wade and Bosh in Miami, as well as his subsequent decisions to go back to Cleveland and then sign in Los Angeles, come up when you have these kinds of arguments. 

I personally don’t really know what any of that has to do with who was better at dribbling or passing or shooting or defending or rebounding or shot-blocking or who was more athletic or who had the better post game or spin move or crossover or fadeaway or anything else, but it comes up all the time, and that obviously wouldn’t be the case if LeBron had never chosen to go to Miami in the first place.

Of course, LeBron also stacked a whole lot of hardware during his time in Miami. Four Finals appearances, two championships, two Finals MVPs, two regular-season MVPs, four All-Defensive team appearances (three first team) and a second gold medal in the 2012 Olympics. He led the NBA in Player Efficiency Rating, Win Shares, Win Shares/48 Minutes, Box Plus-Minus and Value Over Replacement Player in each of his first three seasons with the Heat. His 2012-13 MVP season is one very few people in basketball history have touched: 26.8 points, 8.0 rebounds, 7.3 assists, 1.7 steals and 0.9 blocks per game while shooting 56.5% from the field and 40.6% from three. 

LeBron was already well on his way to entering G.O.A.T. debates by the time he decided to take his talents to South Beach, but his time there was when he began stacking the type of accomplishments most people think you need to even enter the conversation. And he’s only added to that list of accomplishments in the decade-plus since he left.