LeBron James is a Philadelphia 76er. This is the strange truth, and it still takes some getting used to. Maybe for James too.
LeBron joined his new teammates for Sixers media day on Monday and finally spoke about the decision that surprised many people, including almost everyone in Philadelphia. It was pretty easy to imagine him returning to Cleveland once again for an encore performance or bringing his talents back to South Beach for another go-round with the Heat. You might even close your eyes and see him finally team up with Steph Curry in Golden State. By his own admission, he even saw a scenario in which he finished his career in New York in front of fawning fans at Madison Square Garden.
It was harder to imagine him choosing the Sixers, a franchise that hasn’t had much success for most of its existence and certainly not over the last quarter-century. This is, of course, an organization that drafted not one but two first overall picks, Ben Simmons and Markelle Fultz, who promptly forgot how to shoot. They had to throw one of their general managers overboard because of a scandal now known as Burnergate. One of their players, Zhaire Smith, suffered a severe food allergy which left him “lucky to survive” after eating something at the team premises he shouldn’t have. Adding to everyone’s misery, they traded for Smith on draft day in exchange for Mikal Bridges, a local kid who everyone loved and who ultimately flopped in New York and won a championship with the hated Knicks. That’s how things turned out for the Sixers.
Plus, they were bad at basketball. Maybe you noticed it. The last time the Sixers won a championship was 1983. That was… a long time ago. You get the idea. Things generally don’t work out for the Sixers.
And then, on a Friday at the end of July, LeBron James chose to sign with them. Players don’t tend to voluntarily choose the Sixers — and even when they do, it hasn’t always gone very well. Paul George chose Philly, but mainly because the Sixers offered the most while the Clippers didn’t want to pay him anything close to that. Tough stuff when you find yourself on the wrong end of a financial call and the Clippers end up looking like better decision makers than you. James Harden also chose Philadelphia. It went so badly that he ended up traumatizing a group of Chinese schoolchildren just to force a trade. Reread that last sentence. This could only be a thing with the Sixers.
Yet James still chose Philadelphia. You understand it because it remains difficult to understand. Really exciting, of course. It’s just hard to get your brain to consider this as reality. But it’s real. He was there Monday in his red, white and blue Sixers jersey with the number 23 in shadow and Phila on the chest. James said all the right things about his new team and his new city. Of Philadelphia and the fans, he joked that there had always been mutual respect even though, before now, “the vibe is we hate you.” (As a Philadelphia native, I can confirm that this is the love language of the city and that we tend to hate everything, including ourselves.)
As for the product on the field, James wasn’t shy. Expectations for the Sixers rose when they managed to trade George for Jaylen Brown. But the addition of James increased the pressure exponentially. It’s one thing to compete in the playoffs every year when Joel Embiid is dealing with his latest injury or Simmons misses a dunk, it’s another to fall short when you have arguably the greatest player of all time on the team. The Sixers have been accustomed to failure for so long and now failure is no longer an option because they successfully landed LeBron and he says so.
“You have to fall in love with doing things that are uncomfortable,” James said. “If we can do that, we can be a great team. If we don’t, we’ll be like ‘Oh man, this was a great team on paper and we had a lot of great talent – and we lost in the second round.’ I don’t want to do this. I didn’t let my family lose in the second round, I’m sure of that.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. Interestingly, LeBron’s external monologue is essentially the conversation many people are having about the Sixers. They look great on paper. Tyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecombe, Embiid, Brown and LeBron – it’s a fantastic starting five. Theoretically. We will see how this works in practice. Setting the bar for success to get out of the second round may at first seem like pretty low expectations, until you consider that the Sixers haven’t achieved it since Allen Iverson took them to the Finals in 2001. Maxey was barely born. Edgecombe hadn’t been there yet. LeBron, who is about to enter his record-breaking 24th season in the NBA, wasn’t even in the league.
Overcoming this kind of negative old basketball history and writing a new narrative would be too daunting for some to even consider, let alone attempt. But obviously not for James. Perhaps this is only possible for someone like him, who has already accomplished so much and has nothing left to prove. Maybe taking on a challenge as monumental as (forgo everything that happened to them) the Sixers doesn’t seem so taxing for LeBron. Maybe, although it’s also hard to imagine him being a Sixer in the first place.
For his part, James admitted that “work needs to be done” and he is ready to do it. He also hilariously, even so humblely said, “the luxury of my game is that I can do anything. Literally, I can do anything.”
Now we’ll see if the “all” means changing the fortunes of the Sixers. Because when he said he didn’t leave his family just to lose in the second round, what he was really saying — whether he realized it or not — was that he didn’t leave his family just to keep the Sixers being the Sixers. That’s a lot to contend with, even for LeBron.
Gn sports
