Seventeen Lakers have spent more time on the court. Sixteen Lakers have scored more points.
He has been but a speck of lint on the Lakers’ lapel, a bit of dust at the end of the Lakers’ bench, a small and irrelevant bystander in the Lakers’ long and arduous journey.
The nepo baby whose arrival last summer was ripped across the NBA landscape has quietly risen above the criticism and gradually drowned out the noise.
The famous son whose selection as the 55th pick in the 2024 NBA draft was trashed in this space as “not very smart” has actually become part of something that borders on ingenious.
I was wrong. I was very wrong. There have been few things more right about this season than the saga of Bronny James.
He hasn’t made an NBA impact, but he hasn’t been a distraction, either. Arguably the league’s most disliked and discounted rookie when the season began, he has won over fans, impressed teammates, inspired his father, and silenced the media.
Ten months ago, when the Lakers acquired the oldest son of their best player, I wrote that the move was an insensitive joke.
Ten months ago, I had the hottest of hot takes.
“It’s not very smart,” I wrote. “And, for two of the main people involved, it’s not very fair.
I concluded my screed with, “Bronny is coming … the circus is starting.”
Turns out, the circus never arrived. The reality is, in one of its finest efforts, the Lakers’ management handled the sensitive situation with nimble smarts.
Everything about this strange arrangement has worked, every fear has been squelched, all awkwardness has disappeared, and the Lakers have been left with a happily productive father and a gratefully improving son.
Bronny James has been their most improved player simply by morphing from a punch line into, well, a player.
“Since Day 1, I’ve just been impressed with the person that he is,” coach JJ Redick told reporters last month. “And to deal with … frankly, bull— because of who his dad is and just keep a level head about it and be a class act says a lot about him, says a lot about that family …”
Maybe it was truly cool with Redick from Day 1, but for the rest of the league, Bronny’s arrival raised a giant red flag. After all, this was a 19-year-old kid who missed most of his only college season while recovering from a heart attack, and suddenly he was given a Lakers uniform and a guaranteed contract?
This initially seemed like at least partly a publicity stunt designed to enable Bronny and LeBron to become the first father-son duo to play together in the NBA. Except the Lakers surprisingly didn’t milk it, and actually enabled it when relatively few people were watching.
In the second quarter of the season opener against Minnesota in late October, with the town’s attention focused on the Dodgers, father and son checked in together and played nearly three minutes. Bronny returned to the bench for the rest of the night and that was that.
History made. Moving on. The Lakers won the game and Bronny barely made a ripple. The tone had been set. Nothing to see here.
“[I] tried not to focus on everything that’s going on around me, and tried to focus on going in as a rookie and not trying to mess up,” Bronny told reporters after his debut.
He was just trying not to mess up. That was his mantra the entire season, a pledge filled with the respectful humility that framed his image into that of a likable kid who was just here to hoop.
He was a nepo baby, but he didn’t act like it. He was the most famous son of the most famous basketball player in the world, yet he quietly behaved like just another lucky stiff.
This attitude quickly became apparent to the fans, who began cheering for him as if he was the team’s lovable mascot, which, in a sense, he was.
The consistently popular chant would surface late in Lakers blowouts, when arenas would fill with, “We want Bronny!” The league’s most criticized rookie became the most embraced, and even though he played in only 22 games and was on the court for double-digit minutes in only four of them, those cheers resonated.
Was he good? What did you expect? No, by NBA standards, with few rare exceptions, he wasn’t great. In one nightmarish game in Philadelphia, when he went 0-for-5 shooting while being consistently burned on defense in 15 awful minutes, he was miles from great.
But by fair standards — playing where he belonged in the developmental G League as a teenager with essentially no college experience and a history of heart failure — he was promising.
He played 18 of 50 games for the South Bay Lakers, and his last 11 were strong as he averaged 22 points, five rebounds and five assists. He scored 30 or more points three times, including 39 points in 38 minutes in a late March win against the Santa Cruz Warriors.
While standing on the court after that game, the rarely interviewed Bronny offered a compelling glimpse into his situation.
When asked by SpectrumSportsNet what he had been trying to prove, he said, “Just that I belong out there. That’s all I’m trying to prove. A lot of people say I don’t, but I just come out, work every day, try to get better every day and prove myself every day.
All the criticism that’s thrown my way, it’s just amazing to shut all that down and keep going,” he said.
All this time, his father was watching. In fact, perhaps the biggest takeaway of the first year of the son’s appearance is the enormous effect it has had on the father.
LeBron has openly cheered for Bronny, as evident after the 39-point game when LeBron tweeted a note of support that read, in part, “SMILE THROUGH IT ALL … KEEP GOING!!
LeBron has also fought for his son, accosting ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith at courtside of a recent Lakers game and rebuking him for making his criticism too personal
In all, the appearance of Bronny has energized and invigorated LeBron, who is on pace to play 71 games, equaling the most since he came to Los Angeles seven years ago.
Statistically, LeBron is playing about as well as he’s ever played as a Laker. Defensively, he’s playing even better, as if every night he is trying to set an example for his son.
His emotional investment in this season was clear from his first comments after he and Bronny played together.
“That moment, us being at the scorer’s table together and checking in together, it’s a moment I’m never going to forget,” LeBron said. “No matter how old I get, no matter how my memory may fade as I get older or whatever, I will never forget that moment.”
No matter what happens during the rest of the season, the forced, frantic shotgun marriage between Bronny James and the Lakers has been a blissful success.
“There’s not really much I can do [about] people, random people, talking about me every day,” he told reporters. “Can’t really do much about that, so I just go in the gym and work, put my head down and try to get better.”
After watching Bronny James do just that — head down, work hard, get better — one can actually describe his first Lakers season with four words that few previously dared to string together.
