This is a story about fathers and sons, about a boy’s dream and his dad’s unconditional love and that place where they can intersect in new and wonderful ways. It’s a story about love and basketball, a story about LeBron James and Bronny James.
For years LeBron had the impossible dream of playing in the NBA with Bronny, who was born one month before LeBron’s second season in Cleveland in 2004. That vision was part fanciful, part farcical – father and son, teammates? Everything would have to go two steps beyond just right, with LeBron playing a record-tying 22nd NBA season and Bronny being good enough to turn pro as a teenager.
We’ve seen the way LeBron plays the game and plots the future, throwing passes nobody sees and forming sacrificial financial alliances – the first so-called super team is what he put together in Miami in 2010 – nobody else considers. His vision is impeccable, is my point, and two years ago he began speaking his truth into existence.
“My last year will be played with my son,” James told The Athletic in 2022. “Wherever Bronny is at, that’s where I’ll be. I would do whatever it takes to play with my son for one year. It’s not about the money at that point.”
Two years ago this was no longer fanciful or farcical or even all that farfetched. Bronny, a coveted recruit in the class of 2023, was appearing on mock drafts as a potential lottery pick. So here we are in 2024, with LeBron a potential free agent at 39 and his eldest son a potential NBA prospect at 19. At the 2024 NBA Draft Combine this week at Wintrust Arena in Chicago, a prospect from Southern California named Bronny James is competing with a certain 6-8, 250-pound proud papa watching from the bleachers.
This is a story about LeBron’s love for his son, and a sacrifice he never imagined he’d have to make. What happens when a father’s dream doesn’t line up with that of his son? Sometimes, nothing happens. The father wants what the father wants, and out of love for his son – or for himself – he makes it happen anyway.
Here, something else is happening:
LeBron James loves his son enough to get out of the way.
Bronny, LeBron to Pacers? Nope.
This could’ve been a story about another kind of dream, one for NBA cities as humble as ours, places where the LeBrons of the world would never choose to play. Players like that, they can go anywhere in the country, and they tend to prefer exotic locales or exceptional rosters or, in a perfect world – a world LeBron concocted in Miami 2010 – both.
But what if you’re, say, the Pacers or Pistons or Blazers or Wizards, and you have the chance to jump the line?
The 2024 NBA Draft offers that chance. Bronny James is that chance.
You know how this story could’ve gone: Draft Bronny James in June, sign LeBron James the next day, and voila – instant franchise overhaul. Every game’s a sellout, even if most are on national TV. ESPN moves a reporter to town for daily updates on the father-and-son spectacle.
Pacers fans, you know you’ve considered it. So have you in Washington D.C. and Portland, and even in towns where the NBA franchise is perhaps one great player away from catapulting from commonplace to contender. Looking at you, Chicago or Sacramento or, say, Golden State.
But all of you, all of us, have to do what LeBron James has done and drop the dream. He has made it clear: He doesn’t want this anymore. Well, let’s put that another way: He has made it clear he doesn’t want that for Bronny anymore. Would LeBron like it for himself? Probably. Could you blame him? This was his dream, and it’s within reach. One of the most unique careers in sports, capped by a season alongside his son? Disney has never made a movie about that, because who’d believe it?
It could happen in 2024-25, right here in the real world – right here in Indianapolis or there in Detroit or Houston or wherever – but LeBron has backed away from his position of 2022, when he said “I would do whatever it takes” to finish his career “with my son.”
“Bronny is his own man,” LeBron said in early April, the first time he publicly distanced himself from a future tethering of this particular father and son. He was addressing rumors that Bronny would enter the transfer portal after one season at USC, with the University of Memphis a potential landing spot given LeBron’s friendship with coach Penny Hardaway. "He has some tough decisions to make. When he's ready to make those decisions, he'll let us all know. But as his family, we will support whatever he does."
You could read that as empty wordplay, as a father trying to fly the helicopter out of his son’s airspace, but it’s the truth. NBA scouts at the draft combine in Chicago will tell you LeBron’s handlers are actively warning NBA teams not to draft Bronny, not if their intent is insincere, their real goal the father in LeBron’s long-proposed package deal.
There is no more package. No more deal.
Only a father who loves his son enough to set him free.
'A divide between Bronny and LeBron'
Bronny could play in the NBA, and by that I mean, Bronny could belong in the NBA. It won’t be easy for him, and it might not happen immediately or ever. He has the look of a player who could need NBA G League seasoning before finding the right NBA team for his unique skillset: An undersized shooting guard (6-1½ without shoes) with elite athleticism (a vertical of 40½ inches) and the ability to knock down shots. In one shooting drill this week, Bronny went 19-for-25 on 3-pointers.
Is Bronny a rising star? Probably not. He averaged 4.8 points, 2.8 rebounds and 2.1 assists in 19.3 minutes as a freshman at USC. He shot 36.6% from the floor overall, and 26.7% on 3-pointers (16-for-60), but those numbers deserve an enormous asterisk: Bronny was playing months after suffering a near-fatal cardiac arrest in July and undergoing heart surgery to repair a congenital heart defect.
Bronny is so much like his father in at least three ways: That vertical is special, his basketball IQ is said to be exceptional, and his teenage maturity is preternatural. Look, there’s no denying that Bronny was born with silver sneakers on his feet. His father is LeBron James. Any idea how easy that could make life? But that works both ways.
His father is LeBron James.
Any idea how difficult that could make life? Kids who aren’t on anyone’s radar get into trouble everyday because they’re kids, and that’s what kids do. Even adults can go from unremarkable to infamous with one wrong comment in public, or one wrong tweet on their phone. Bronny is the Lion King’s son, eyeballed in every gym he’s ever played, but carries himself as an old soul. He’s a little LeBron, doing the right things and saying the right things, like these comments from the combine.
"My dream has always just been to put my name out, make a name for myself and get to the NBA," Bronny James told reporters Tuesday. "Everything that follows my dad, people just try to link me with that and all the greatness that he's achieved. I haven't done anything yet, so I feel like there needs to be that divide between Bronny and LeBron.”
The young man who said that is only 19 – and LeBron is right there with him, in philosophy and in Chicago, a father watching his son compete and loving him enough to put Bronny’s dream above his own.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
Join the text conversation with sports columnist Gregg Doyel for insights, reader questions and Doyel's peeks behind the curtain.
Most Popular
Comments / 0