A better example for Lebron would be that he's the top student out of the top grad school in the country, he signs a contract with a struggling firm for a set amount of years. He then takes the firm near the top of the industry and makes the owners millions and millions and millions of dollars and lots of fame and fortune. The company is always near the top of the industry but cant quite reach the peak. Maybe a very very successful search engine that is incredibly profitable but can't quite get past Google. When his contract is up, he decides that he misses his friends and isn't happy stuck in the same firm in the same area of the midwest that he's lived in his whole life. After finishing his contract, he gets an offer from a better firm in a bigger better city where his 2 best friends currently work. Do you really blame him for leaving? Do you call this person all kinds of terrible names? I think everyone here would do the same.
Again, I'm not backing the Decision and the way he went about this whole situation, but I have no problem whatsoever in the fact that he left Cleveland.
Did he promise this company that he would stay with the company until they became the #1 company in the world... then abandon them without even giving 2 weeks notice?
Did the company do everything he asked in terms of overpaying in millions of dollars on silly things (Jamison, Varejao) to keep him around... then leave the company with these ridiculously priced things that aren't compatible without him?
If he did that, then yeah, I think the company would have a little negative sentiment towards the employee.