LeBron James Jr., better known as Bronny, is in France right now with the California Basketball Club playing a bunch of matches against some of Europe’s top competition. CBC features many prominent sons, including Bronny’s younger brother Bryce, Scottie Pippen’s son Justin, and Penny Hardaway’s son Ashton, as well as other notable Southern California high schoolers. But the draw is Bronny. ESPN airs CBC’s European games because of Bronny, and they’re probably happy with their commitment to do so, since yesterday he blessed a poor Frenchman with that monstrous dunk.
Two relevant things about Bronny to LeBron Sr. are 1) LeBron regrets naming his son after himself, and 2) LeBron wants to play alongside Bronny in the NBA. Barring the loss of a limb, the eldest LeBron will still be in the NBA for the 2024-25 season, the first campaign Bronny will be eligible for. The hurdle here is whether or not Bronny turns out to be an NBA player. Every highly regarded high school rookie has their eyes on the league, though few have to deal with the added pressure of LeBron James publicly promising to become your teammate two years before it was even legally possible, let alone doable in the world. basketball sense. Bronny will ultimately succeed or fail to make the NBA on his own terms, and it’s unfair to judge him against his father, because, well, basically, no one in the world is equal to LeBron as a basketball player.
Bronny is about to be a senior in high school, which means this summer represents his last big opportunity to improve his stock as a prospect before his senior year of high school prom and possible engagement. Like his namesake father, Bronny is obviously a smart basketball player, although unlike LeBron Sr., Bronny isn’t built as some kind of combination of Karl Malone and Magic Johnson. He’s 6-foot-3 and possibly still growing, making him essentially the size of an average NBA point guard. Most scouting services rate him as a four-star prospect, somewhere between the 39th or 43rd best player in his class, and he holds scholarship offers from some of the biggest college programs in the country.
In a vacuum, the recruitment of the 39th best player of the class of 2023 does not really make the news outside of the niche press. But the player in question is having his European tour broadcast on ESPN, so obviously it’s not a vacuum. The New York Times covered Bronny’s Big Summer a few weeks ago, and they got to the heart of the matter in painfully understated terms.
Bronny, a 6-foot-2 guard, is widely characterized as having a keen basketball IQ but lacking in elite athleticism and sharp shooting — an asset to almost any team but most likely a role player.
Whatever Bronny ends up doing in a year — attend college, play in a developmental league, or go down an unconventional path — is unlikely to alter the trajectory of the championship ambitions of, say, Gonzaga or North Carolina. North.
New York Times
It’s a kindly presented example of the mismatch between Bronny’s hype as a prospect and his abilities as a player. The talk around his status has generally been tricky, as he’s neither a can’t-miss superstar talent nor a scrub. One of Carlos Boozer’s twin sons is the real prospect #1 in his class, a ranking that clearly distinguishes his family name and his talent. Bronny will always gain a lot of attention because of who he is, but he’s not such an undisputed star player that he’ll entirely justify that attention in basketball terms. None of this is his fault, and really, maybe LeBron Sr. shouldn’t have put the pressure to do the NBA on his son. Because of his family and that fateful quote, some will always judge Bronny by his father’s impossible standard.
But something that is unambiguous is that the big dunk Bronny slammed. If he will eventually be judged as a basketball player, it’s at least promising to see him flaunting numbers and doing extremely cool stuff like that.
