Bronny James is, in many ways, the quintessential addition of the post-2020 championship Los Angeles Lakers. Think of all of the big names they’ve added to the roster since then. The ill-fated Andre Drummond signing of 2021. The Russell Westbrook disaster that followed. Minimum signings like Carmelo Anthony and DeAndre Jordan. Reunions with aging champions Rajon Rondo and Dwight Howard. The Lakers of the past few years have been much better at winning press conferences than games.
Bronny is the logical extension of that trend. He is almost inarguably the most famous rookie entering the NBA for the 2024-25 season. The Lakers are justifiably going to make a big spectacle of the NBA’s first ever father-son duo, assuming the elder LeBron James stays on the team. Take this for what it’s worth, but it seems odd to me that there has been no reporting about his player option decision as of roughly 9 p.m. ET on Thursday night. Regardless, the Lakers love being attached to fame and history.
But fame doesn’t equal success. Bronny fell to No. 55 for reasons that extended beyond Rich Paul’s Australia threats. He was a late second-round pick because he was a late second-round prospect, and while there are obvious exceptions, late second-round prospects rarely impact short-term championship pursuits.
Does this mean the Lakers shouldn’t have drafted Bronny? Of course not. The No. 55 pick was a low-upside asset anyway, so fame aside, using it to potentially keep your best player happy and tied to the franchise is pretty reasonable. With time and seasoning, Bronny could potentially grow into an independently valuable NBA player. His high school career alone was going to get him a chance in the NBA, either with the Lakers or someone else. His name had value to the Lakers. His game had value within fringe NBA circuits. So by all means, take him at No. 55. The pick itself is pretty harmless.
It’s what the pick represents that starts to make things feel a bit iffier. The Lakers won only 47 games last season. They lost in the first round of the playoffs, and with LeBron set to turn 40 this season, they are probably trending down as a team. They’re going to need a roster shakeup to change that, and a second-round pick isn’t going to cut it. Given this team’s recent history, it’s fair to worry if they’re going to be satisfied with making the splashy addition whether or not it turns out to be the impactful one.
The Lakers have already won the press conference, but Bronny does little to actually help them win games, and, well, for the time being at least, they don’t seem like they’re acting all that aggressively on that front. During JJ Redick’s introductory press conference on Monday, general manager Rob Pelinka essentially deferred to the difficulties of the new CBA when asked about possible offseason trades.
“I do think in this system, as I opened, some of the trades are more difficult, especially if you have a second-apron team and a first-apron team, and there’s a chance we’ll be in the first apron, the trades are less prevalent than they used to be,” Pelinka said. “So, will we look for trades that help us become a better team? Absolutely. Are those trades, do they have the same probability that they had under the old system? No, it is a different system.”
The Lakers entered the offseason with three tradable first-round picks: No. 17 overall on Wednesday along with picks in 2029 and 2031. They used No. 17 to select Dalton Knecht out of Tennessee. Pelinka said that the Lakers explored trades before taking him, but again cited the new rules as an obstacle.
There’s still time for the Lakers to make a significant upgrade this offseason. They might even be waiting for clarity on D’Angelo Russell’s future before they try to make one. His $18.7 million player option for next season would represent significant matching salary for the Lakers in any trade, whereas their other mid-sized contracts mostly belong to players they’d prefer to keep, like Austin Reaves, Rui Hachimura and Jarred Vanderbilt. It isn’t reasonable to expect the Lakers to make a trade before they know what’s tradable. In a day or two, the Lakers might have a revamped roster that looks more competitive in a loaded Western Conference.
But the messaging thus far this offseason has been that this team is thinking about the long-term rather than the short term. They have continuously emphasized player development via press conferences and leaks, and even if they hadn’t, just look at their coaching search. They hired a head coach in Redick with no experience on the professional or collegiate level only after a college coach said no to them. Redick and Dan Hurley may well become elite NBA head coaches some day. It probably isn’t going to happen overnight. LeBron doesn’t have time to wait for the Lakers to organically develop a contending roster for him. It’s now or never for the soon-to-be quadragenarian.
The Lakers have already sacrificed a mountain of draft picks to the altar of James’ win-now ambitions. Hesitating to give up more of them is reasonable. On paper, it almost always makes sense for teams to emphasize player development and hold their picks in the name of long-term responsibility. But if that is indeed the plan, it’s worth wondering what practical, on-court purpose even keeping James (and, to perhaps an even greater extent, Anthony Davis) still serves?
If you’re not going to make the short-term investments it will take to give James a genuine chance at the championship, why not thank him for his service and allow him to walk to a new team? Why not cash in Davis as a trade chip now, when his value is at its peak, when keeping him risks age or injury getting in the way of a future rebuild? Why does a team that has won 17 championships care about potentially winning 47 games next season?
The answer to that is a complicated mishmash of the team’s business interests and unconventional power dynamics. It’s also fear of the unknown and good old fashioned NBA inertia. Settling on a direction is hard. Boston’s quest for banner No. 18 started with the Celtics accepting the reality that the Kevin Garnett-Paul Pierce era no longer held any championship equity and moving them to kickstart what comes next. There might be a bit more juice to squeeze out of this era of Lakers basketball. James and Davis are still good enough to justify pushing the chips in and trying to climb back to the top. Those two are also old enough for the front office to justify cashing out now and, like the Celtics did a decade ago, preparing for an uncertain future. Either side is reasonable.
But it certainly looks, at this stage, like the Lakers are planning to put that decision off for at least a little while longer and seek a more dangerous middle path, and drafting Bronny helps them do it. For the next few months, at least, most of the coverage surrounding the Lakers will be about the feel-good story of an all-time great sharing the court with his son instead of the far more pertinent story of an all-time great potentially ending his career on a team without legitimate championship aspirations. Glamour without substance is so very Hollywood.
The Lakers have time to change all of this. It doesn’t even have to be in the immediate future. They salvaged the 2022-23 season at the trade deadline, and could potentially take another swing there next February. They may well be able to get hauls back for trading James and Davis next summer if this season is a disappointment.
The goal, above all else, should be avoiding the sort of slow, steady decline that tends to come when your two best players are a combined 70 years old. If the franchise is committed to matching and eventually exceeding Boston’s 18th championship banner, it needs to either swallow the bitter rebuilding pill the Celtics did in 2014 or seek the Jrue Holiday- and Kristaps Porzingis-level additions that Boston invested in last offseason to push for the 2024 title in earnest. Nothing in between. Championships aren’t won on the middle path. Commit to the present or commit to the future.
Bronny means little to the former beyond potentially securing his father’s signature, and history suggests that no No. 55 pick is all that likely to matter to the latter. In basketball terms, he’s just another late second-round pick. A famous one, surely, but not in any way more important to the team’s on-court prospects than any others. There’s nothing wrong with using a late second-round pick on a late second-round talent. It just isn’t an excuse to do what it takes to secure, either now or in the future, the sort of talent that actually impacts winning on the highest level. As the Lakers have learned over the last few years, fame isn’t much of an indicator of future success. Bronny may be a good story, but the Lakers have a handful of far more important decisions ahead of them.
