People toss the term around often when they're talking about LeBron James.

They can't deride his wondrous basketball abilities, so they talk about his ``posse.'' They say the kid is good, but he comes with this ``posse,'' and it comes out sounding like garbage from people who don't really know - frankly, people who see a young African-American millionaire and think something must be fishy.

Jim Paxson doesn't get it.

``His best friends are his high school teammates, and all of them are going to college to play basketball except one, who's going to play football at Ohio State,'' said the Cavaliers' chief of basketball operations. ``The other two guys around him are his Uncle Randy, who's kind of making sure he keeps his commitments and does what he needs to do, and Maverick Carter's another former teammate that's a little bit older. And he's got his mom, and she's been great.''

In other words, if this is James' ``posse,'' we should all be so lucky.

``I'm not sure what people expect, but he's 18 and he's mature,'' Paxson said of James, who makes his Reebok Pro Summer League debut with the Cavaliers tonight (8) against the Celtics at UMass-Boston. ``He handles things in a way that I don't think my 17- and 19-year-old could handle, and he seems to have a good sense of who he is. He knows that basketball is the most important thing, and that's where he's got to establish himself - on the floor. He doesn't seem to let all this other stuff out there bother him.