It will be interesting to see if Paul stays in business after Lebron retires. (i guess you can count on Lebron's kid as a client. )
I saw somewhere that he was 3rd in client money and 7th in number of clients. He's got several big name clients besides Lebron.
https://basketball.realgm.com/info/agent-client-list/Rich-Paul/258
Right. but Lebron is the reason he has does clients. will they stay with him after Lebron? my guess not that many.
Lebron may have opened the door to those clients but I doubt they'd be staying with him if they didn't feel like he was doing a good job for them.
I hear a big part of the appeal for some players is "he's just like us". Meaning he's young like them (google says 37), grew up poor and black, and clawed his way to the top by working hard. I can understand that, and I'd definitely use that pitch too if I were him. The age gap is growing though, but he can still probably pull that off for at least another 10 years.
Though I get the LeBron questions too. How much of his power is from LeBron? Do all his non-star players get sweet Nike deals? Like maybe guys like Tristan Thompson and Marcus Morris have $500k Nike deals when they'd normally get $250k, maybe Terrance Ferguson and Darius Bazley get $200k Nike deals they'd normally get $100k deals? Not that this is a Rich Paul exclusive thing, any good agent would leverage his power like that, but do those sweet Nike deals go away when LeBron does? Sure Paul still has Ben Simmons, Anthony Davis, Draymond Green, but all of them together probably don't sell the amount of product LeBron does.
At the same time, how many teams care about pleasing LeBron/Rich Paul still? In the past, there was the team LeBron was on plus the 3-4 big market teams hoping to nab him in past free agency. I got to imagine the LeBron free agency dream is all but dead, so there's probably no teams not named the Lakers worried about appealing to LeBron anymore.
Power agents come and go though, so even if he's not LeBron dependent at all, I'd be surprised to see Paul remain as powerful 5 years from now. Unless LeBron Jr. is even better and more marketable than his dad and uses Rich Paul too (and dollars to donuts he will use Paul).