LeBron James is already getting an NBA number.

The number: $100 million.

That is the estimate, give or take a few dozen million dollars or so, that James will collect for signing with a shoe company sometime before the June NBA draft. And it was upon reading this that I realized, firmly and perhaps irrevocably, that the math just no longer works for me.

	Perhaps we are getting a little ahead of ourselves about LeBron being ready to rule the NBA.

LeBron James' pending deal is exactly, and I mean 100 percent, what some people mean when they say they like sports but no longer love them. These people, these fans, may not even understand fully what they're getting at. I know what it says to me.

It says you can't cheer a number. It says you cannot fall in love with a salary, much less the headline over an endorsement deal. This is a colorblind, gender-free, only slightly ageist truth. Show me the money, and I'll show you an utter and complete lack of interest.

LeBron James has a number before he has a pro career. He had a Hummer before he had a high-school diploma. He has Air Jordan's fawning before he scores even his first NBA basket of the Jordan-like career that, according to the hype, he is about to embark upon.

No particular fault of James, of course -- he's playing the game straight down the line. He is a teenager cashing in on his chance, and that's America. But it is also just about everything that is wrong with the current model of sports.

James, the next Jordan? Prove it. Prove he's the next Michael Jordan and not the next Shawn Kemp. Prove he's LeBron All-Star and not Shawn Bradley, who, incidentally, was a No. 2 overall pick of the 76ers a decade ago.

Maybe James is going to dominate the NBA for a decade or 15 years, fulfill every ounce of his wonderful promise, be the player so many scouts from the Can't Miss School of Analysis say he'll be.

And maybe James is going to be the next Grant Hill: Talented, complete, passionate, and never healthy long enough to actually fulfill the promise all that implies.

Of course, you don't even need to go that far. You only have to ask whether James will be bigger than Kobe Bryant, better than Kevin Garnett. You have to ask because, to date, the hype says he will. The hype says LeBron James will be the greatest thing the NBA has ever seen. The shoe companies follow the hype in lockstep.

Whammo: Hello, $100 million. Goodbye, objective analysis.

The math doesn't add up for me. It never does, in a case like this. You know what's going to happen? A natural backlash, that's what. Every person who ever touted Shawn Bradley as the next point on the NBA's developmental curve, every person who ever "godded him up," to dust off the old phrase, added to a slowly growing pool of public opinion against Bradley. At some point, a whole bunch of people wanted him to fail, if for no reason other than to disprove the hype.

They weren't rooting against Bradley, they were rooting against the machine. Proves it again: You can't fall in love with a number. But perhaps you can grow to despise one.

Here now stands LeBron James, and you can see the blowback on this one coming in triplicate. He's young, he's cocky, he's good. A few eyeblinks from now, he'll be richer beyond the dreams of generations. And he still won't have so much as stepped on a pro court for a game of actual meaning.

That is an open invitation to evisceration. Of course, you can't cash evisceration. Months away from his first NBA game, LeBron James already has a number. Congratulate him -- and then pity him.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist with the Sacramento Bee and a regular contributor to ESPN.com