SECOND UPDATE: There is no indication on where James will make his announcement on Thursday.
View full sizeLeBron James reportedly will announced his decision on which team will sign with Thursday during a special on ESPN.UPDATED at 12:20 a.m.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- LeBron James has tightened his inner circle and stonewalled the teams recruiting him and the media stalking him during the week in which his free agency has raged.
But whether he intends to or not, he seems to be sending out signals that something is changing, with a series of decisions being made leading up to the biggest decision of his career.
It all seems to be part of a controversial marketing strategy that has been rolled out over the past week.
It culminated, at least for the moment, on Tuesday when ESPN announced it had made a deal with James to air his free-agent choice during a prime-time special from an as-yet-undisclosed location starting at 9 p.m. Thursday.
But that is only a part of some moves James has made that suddenly seem to be coordinated to increase his already large profile. They also cry out that James is changing, though the extent is not yet clear. But there is no stopping in sight.
First, James released a website at LeBronJames.com, a domain he's owned since 2002 but had not maintained on his own since 2007. The site promises big news in the future, a departure from the past when James' site was used for minor marketing and not to announce news.
Last week, James' manager, Maverick Carter, gave a rare on-the-record interview to the New York Times to get out the message that the influential back-channel operator William Wesley was no longer involved in James' decision-making process. Wesley had been a confidant of James in various capacities since his high school days.
Then on Tuesday, James announced that he was going to start using Twitter and issued his first Tweet in the afternoon. It is a departure from James' long-standing policy of not opening himself up via social media. In the past he said he wanted to guard his privacy and, in part because he never went to college, was not interested in entities like Facebook.
That changed suddenly, nearly as suddenly as he got more than 200,000 followers to join his Twitter feed on his first day.
It was followed by the revelation that James has been in talks with ESPN to broadcast the decision. It was a plot that seemed to catch the entire NBA off-guard, including the teams that have been recruiting James to sign.
James' plans were in the works in some form for months, according to sources, having talked with ESPN about filming his entire free-agency process for a documentary. For a while, this included some plans to take a tour across the country and visit interested teams.
When the Cavs lost in the playoffs to the Boston Celtics and James played several of the worst playoff games of his career, those plans were scrapped. But it ultimately seems to have led to the strategy to capture the basketball world's attention with a never-before-seen television special.
Where the changes will stop is still unclear, but there doesn't seem to be an end in sight.
