All About Bron

By Mike Rifkin

Some consider LeBron James the greatest Basketball player of All time. On Wednesday, James and the Lakers agreed to a two year 104 Million dollar contract that includes a player option for 2025-26 and a no trade clause. James had declined his 51 million dollar option prior to re-signing with LA. While the Western Conference in the NBA is very deep, it feels like so far the Lakers summer has been about catering to LeBron as opposed to winning a championship.

The Lakers hired JJ Redick to become the next head coach of the team after firing Darvin Ham. Now Redick has zero coaching experiences, but he’s worked for ESPN and most recently broadcasted the NBA Finals. But Redick also had been doing a podcast with James. The Lakers did make an offer to UConn coach Dan Hurley, who opted to stay in school. But if Hurley was the Lakers top candidate, wouldn’t they have made him a better offer? Or did they just want to make people interpret that they were going there and had already decided on Redick. 

The Lakers also drafted Lebron’s son Bronny in the second round of the NBA draft. Bronny played one season at USC before deciding to go pro. Lebron and Bronny will be the first father and son duo to play together in the NBA. Now while I have no issue with the Lakers drafting Bronny, it’s about how this was handled that I don’t like. Lebron and Bronny’s agent Rich Paul was calling teams during the second round of the draft and telling teams that Bronny would go to Australia rather than play for their teams. While it will be a tremendous moment that LeBron gets to play with his son, just sharing the floor on another team would have been a special moment as well. 

So far what the Lakers can boast about in the LeBron era is they won the 2020 NBA Championship (bubble) and they were the winners of the first Play-in tournament, of which they hung a banner for. Outside of that the LeBron era in LA hasn’t been all that great. So let’s say this is Lebron’s last contract and the Lakers don’t win another title, will we remember this similarly to Michael Jordan on the Wizards? No, it’s been better than that, but for the Lakers to cater everything to James and to only win one title would be disappointing. Will the Lakers regret catering to Lebron instead of preparing for life after him? Only time will tell.