WITH the Rockets’ season over, talk now turns to their offseason, and more specifically their chances at landing LeBron James in free agency this summer.

James has been linked to the Rockets for a while, and Chris Paul — a free agent himself this summer — is one of his closest friends. Unsurprisingly, according to Marc Stein of the New York Times in his indispensable NBA newsletter, Paul has already begun attempting to convince James to join the Rockets in July.

But the modern-day Warriors and Cavaliers, in a bloated league of 30 teams, trumped them all. Cleveland’s Game 7 triumph in Boston also came with the bonus of preventing speculation about LeBron’s free-agent future from completely swallowing up the actual championship series.

There will still be plenty of talk over the next two weeks about what James will do July 1 and the growing belief that he’ll be leaving his home-state Cavaliers this offseason to join a team better suited to consistently challenge Golden State.

Rest assured that the Rockets’ understandably devastated Chris Paul — who made a fast exit from Toyota Center late Monday night after being forced to watch the biggest game of his life from the bench because of a hamstring injury — has already begun his recruitment of James to Houston.

To sign James outright, the Rockets will have to make some significant moves to clear cap space — they’d essentially have to shed everybody except Paul, James Harden and restricted free agent center Clint Capela.

The more likely path to James joining Houston is a similar situation to Paul’s last summer, where he picked up his player option with the Clippers and engineered a trade to the Rockets. But James and the Cavaliers still have a Finals series against the Warriors to play before any of that is decided.

(SD-Agencies)