LOS ANGELES — Four minutes left in the second quarter, it was time.
LeBron James and his son, Bronny, rose from the Lakers bench and walked toward the scorer’s table.
The crowd noticed slowly, the noise building incrementally. First as a rustle. Then cheering. Finally there came a rush of excitement that LeBron and Bronny James were going to make history and become the first father-son pairing to play together in a regular-season NBA game.
And then the energy in the arena… sagged.
On the floor, the game back on, Timberwolves forward Julius Randle went right at Bronny — welcome to the league, kid — and hit a jumper over the short, slighter James.
A little bit later, LeBron drove, attracted two defenders, and passed to his son, who was open for a three — and missed it. He would finish 0 for 2, with a single rebound a box score plus-minus of -5, and the good fortune none it mattered the Lakers’ 110-103 season-opening win over the Wolves on Tuesday night.
By the time Bronny headed back, permanently, to the bench, the Lakers fans had never reclaimed that excitement they’d shown a short time earlier. Something was missing. Maybe they’d needed a LeBron-Bronny moment that never came — that 3 falling, or a father-son assist, or some other highlight-reel moment where the kid and the old legend shone together.
Or maybe, deep down, the Lakers fans, like many across the league, couldn’t shake the doubts and concerns for Bronny that not even this moment with dad, as cool as it was, could fix.
Maybe what was supposed to be a celebration is actually, for Bronny, a giant risk. That what so many will surely turn into a tale of sweetness, a beautiful slice of family joy Tuesday night, will actually shape up to be the start, and catalyst, of something else entirely.
This is the NBA, not a family reunion. This is a league of players who may not take the same pleasure in the James’ family’s plans. If Bronny is not up to the brunt of what his name and presence will place upon him, rivals and challengers may well make life on that court very hard indeed.
This was just a start, yes, of course. One game for a very young man. But first acts of any story, even those managed and prodded with careful precision and the kind of machine and influence LeBron James can command, are just that: Beginnings. Any celebration Tuesday night feels premature.
Watching LeBron and Bronny play together was fascinating. But for anyone honest enough to remember how competitive the NBA can be and how hard it will be to carry LeBron James’ name on your back in the years ahead when he’s not there to help, the special moment when Bronny James made his debut with dad was more a question mark than a feel-good moment.
It would be wonderful if this works. If Bronny James makes for himself a career in the league. On the level, say, of a Gary Patyon II — another player who carries a famous name, and yet who has made his own in the NBA, too.
I hope it happens. We all should. There’s no reason to root for failure. And last May, while at the NBA Draft Combine, I saw what I hoped were green shoots in the early stages of Bronny James’ would-be career.
But it’s hard to ignore the pestering worries that, at best, Bronny is here in the league too soon, shoved to the front of the line by the forces of his father rather than his own talent, and that Tuesday’s debut with dad — and the laudatory coverage sure to follow — will make things harder.
Jealousies are real. And if he largely stays in the NBA this season, or spends ample time in the G League, he will be playing against, and sometimes with, those who covet what he has, and resent how he got it.
In the lead up to the game, I asked several NBA executives and scouts what they made of Bronny James being in the NBA. The answers were not encouraging.
A Lakers source, hearing Bronny would play in the first game, was matter of fact: “Good. Get it done. Now we can be done with the charade.”
An executive for a rival team who’d scouted Bronny himself was equally pessimistic: “Honesty I feel sorry for the kid. He tries to play the right way. He plays hard. He can’t shoot. He’s just not that good. He is athletic as shit, but he’s just not big enough.”
Or, as a former GM summed it up: “He’ll be in trouble in the G League.”
There’s more like that. And maybe they’re all wrong. Maybe Bronny James, as I noted in Chicago at the combine, can channel that remarkable maturity he seems to possess despite his age and navigate the expectations, the jealousies, the doubts and the name on his back — and make a way for himself, someday on his own, in this league.
Maybe.
Yes, there was that preseason game last week that showed signs of potential and bursts of the athleticism that the rival executive had noted. But it was also true that it was a preseason game, hardly a marker of what’s to come in an NBA career.
Other supporters and Bronny believers will point to the report that Golden State Warriors supposedly were interested in Bronny before the Lakers took him in the second round with the 55th overall pick but passed because — get this — they wanted to “respect the wishes” of LeBron.
That, to put it kindly, stretches incredulity.
It’s also right out of the playbook LeBron ran when he was pushing back against bad press his first year in Miami. I know. I covered that team, and he and his team used anonymous reporting very, very effectively to try and shape narratives.
First of all, the NBA is a cutthroat business, and the idea any team would pass on what’s best for their organization to “respect the wishes” of a rival player would be borderline malpractice. Secondly, almost no one believed Bronny James was a draftable pick this past summer other than the fact he is Bronny James.
A different name, most will tell you, would have meant a very different path to the league, if there were one at all.
No, more likely that report was intended to try and protect Bronny from the very real worries of what will happen if, in fact, he is not ready now — or good enough, period — for the NBA.
“I could be wrong,” a scout told me. “Maybe a lot of us are wrong. But I don’t see it. And it could be a very difficult reality for him.”
The game had ended. The debut had come and gone. The Lakers had won.
In the Lakers locker room, as Anthony Davis talked about his huge night he’d had before a gaggle of reporters surrounding his locker, LeBron James walked in and sat at his own locker next to him. LeBron, as he does, made his presence known, even as AD talked about Bronny, and how special, as a father, such a moment must be.
Then Bronny entered a short time later, largely unnoticed, walking quietly past his dad, around the reporters, and to his own locker. He sat down, perhaps as unnoticed as he’d been all day — or will be again for a very long time.
He was an NBA player now, officially, with the three minutes in the box score to prove it. When, later, he came to speak to the press, he came with his dad, Bronny first, LeBron second.
LeBron talked a lot. Bronny was quieter, looking, often, introspective and his dad, to his right, talked about the Lakers opener.
They talked about the night, about the immediate past, about the history they’d just made together. They laughed about the Nike commercial with the cereal and the hazing. They talked about the times LeBron has been away as a dad to play this game. And they talked, for a moment, about perhaps the most important part of this story: The future.
“I talked about it years and years ago, for this moment to come,” LeBron said. “It was pretty cool. I don’t know if it’ll hit the both of us for a little bit.”
Or the rest of us. Not really.
Because whatever Bonny’s story turns out to be, it is that, his future, that will eventually color in the lines of what happened Tuesday night, and what it really meant.
