The Wait and Weight for Bronny James

A fan wearing a white LeBron James Lakers jersey arrives well over an hour before tip-off. Another man sports a wine-colored LeBron Cavaliers jersey here at Haas Pavilion in Berkeley, California. There are plenty of other James replicas on this Wednesday night in early February: James’s yellow Lakers jersey. His purple one. His black one.

But everyone in the building is here to see a different James, Bronny James, the King’s eldest son and USC’s 19-year-old freshman guard.

Bronny sprints out of the tunnel alongside his teammates to warm up ahead of their matchup against Cal. Drake and 21 Savage’s “Circo Loco” is blasting, but it appears Bronny can hardly hear it. He has white earbuds in, blocking out the noise. Blocking out the student marching band, drumming and screaming and clapping. It’s Cal’s first sellout since 2017, and it isn’t because of the competitiveness between the two teams; at the time, the injury-marred Trojans had dropped six of their past seven games, dwelling at the bottom of the Pac-12 standings.

Fans came to see Bronny.

The buzz surrounding him is overwhelming. He is both a household name and a complete mystery, someone millions have heard of but few truly know much about. Fans know he’s supposed to go to the NBA next year, per the plan LeBron made publicly known years ago, when he stated his desire to play alongside his son before retiring. LeBron is 39, and the urgency for the two to play together feels stronger with each passing day. And tonight, these fans want to see whether Bronny’s any good. Whether he’s anything like his father. They’ve all heard his critics:

He should stay in school for another year. Maybe all four years.

He’s not even close to being NBA ready.

He’s considered an NBA prospect only because of his dad.

Bronny has played at the collegiate level for only a few months, after recovering from an episode of cardiac arrest last July stemming from a congenital heart defect. He missed four months of action before returning. He usually comes off the bench for the Trojans, averaging 5.0 points, 2.8 rebounds, 2.4 assists, and about 19.7 minutes per game. But tonight, against Cal, he’s in the starting lineup. As with each game he plays, many watch wondering whether he can live up to his father’s legacy.

That’s a Herculean task, let alone for a 19-year-old who is just 6-foot-4 and 210 pounds; LeBron, by comparison, is 6-foot-9 and 250 pounds. “Bronny has the weight of the world on his shoulders,” says Grizzlies guard Ziaire Williams, Bronny’s close friend and former Sierra Canyon High School teammate.

“I don’t know what I would do if I was in his position, with all the attention and just the notoriety,” Williams says. “He’s not even worried about it—or doesn’t even see it, to be honest. He just—he blinds it so well.”

Bronny is facing pressure and scrutiny maybe unlike any seen by another college athlete before. Everything he does, or doesn’t do, becomes a national story. A news cycle. But he hasn’t asked for the spotlight. In fact, he doesn’t do interviews. He doesn’t want the attention. He hardly posts on social media. And if you talk to those around him, they mention his unwavering humility. How he stays modest and focused amid a trying season. The highest-profile athlete in college basketball is somehow attempting to keep a low profile.

But the season has reached a tipping point. On February 20, ESPN didn’t include Bronny in its latest 2024 mock draft, projecting him to be selected in 2025 instead. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Bronny will stay at USC another year. But the mock draft sparked a national discussion when LeBron responded in a now-deleted post on X: “Can yall please just let the kid be a kid and enjoy college basketball. The work and results will ultimately do the talking no matter what he decides to do. If y’all don’t know he doesn’t care what a mock draft says, he just WORKS! Earned Not Given!”

But Bronny can’t simply be a kid. Not with that last name. Not in this fishbowl, where expectations rise by the day, where everything he does is compared to his dad, and where everyone is wondering whether he’ll make it to the NBA. The chatter extended to March 2, when Klutch Sports CEO Rich Paul, LeBron and Bronny’s agent, discussed with ESPN how Bronny will weigh his entry into the 2024 draft. Paul said it would be based on specific team interest rather than draft position. “I don’t value a young player getting into the lottery as much as I do getting him on the right team in the right developmental situation,” Paul said. That may or may not involve Bronny playing with LeBron, though Paul added that if the two could play together, LeBron would be “head over heels excited.”

Still, the response to LeBron’s response, his tweet, continues to dominate discussions, a fresh wave of debates and takes appearing each day. But it isn’t the first time LeBron has spoken about Bronny’s future. About a year ago, LeBron memorably tweeted: “Man Bronny definitely better than some of these cats I’ve been watching on league pass today. Shit lightweight hilarious.”

The discourse surrounding Bronny has now taken on a life of its own. He’s almost become a narrative, with some forgetting that he’s a person and not just a prospect. A teenager who still loves to play video games and hang out with his friends.

And on this night against Cal, Bronny takes a moment to himself before tip-off. He doesn’t say a word. There’s a lightness to him, a calm, even though he knows all eyes are glued on him. Each step he takes, each expression on his face, will be dissected, discussed—eventual fodder for daytime sports talk shows and the NBA draft rumor mill. Yet he looks unfazed, carrying himself with a quiet confidence.

“He has no ego,” says USC’s head coach, Andy Enfield. “Sure, he wants to do well for himself, but he’s all about the team.

“It’s who he is as a person,” Enfield says. “He’s the son of one of the greatest basketball players of all time. But when he steps on the court, he’s Bronny—and he’s just one of the guys.”

But being one of the guys isn’t enough to satisfy the masses, people who want to see him be a star, to excel. To be the mirror image of the kid from Akron. But it’s clear Bronny, unlike his father, is not an overnight sensation. He’s a work in progress, with limitless potential and a zealous work ethic, but facing a tremendous climb amid a season like no other.

Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images

Minutes before tip, Bronny bounces the ball to himself, driving hard to the hoop to slam it home. Suddenly the crowd begins to roar. Not for the eye-popping dunk—but for the surprise of a familiar figure who walks in, wearing a purple Uninterrupted hoodie and a knitted blue-and-white beanie, stealing all the eyes in the arena.

No one knew LeBron was coming, but now, fans turn away from Bronny for a moment to watch the King. They rise to their feet, whipping out their phones, jockeying for the best angle. “LEBRON!” they scream.

LeBron, trailed by security, makes his way to a seat tucked to the side of the basket. It’s the eve of the NBA trade deadline, but it’s also just another Wednesday night, and the father wants to watch his son play.

Bronny doesn’t look over at LeBron, doesn’t break his focus. He high-fives his teammates. The game begins. As soon as Bronny catches the ball, an unmistakable sound fills the arena:

BOOOOOOOOOO!

BOOOOOOOOOO!

BOOOOOOOOOO!

It isn’t immediately clear whether fans are booing the Trojans as a collective or just Bronny. But as soon as he gives up the ball, the crowd becomes quiet, the arena eerily still. Then, when Bronny gets the ball back?

BOOOOOOOOOO!

When Bronny cuts to the basket, receiving the ball quickly before dishing it back out?

BOOOOOOOOOO!

The collective sound is deafening. How overpowering it is, how targeted it is, how chilling it is. No other Trojan is booed, not even the team’s two top scorers, Isaiah Collier and Boogie Ellis, who could both be future NBA players in their own right.

Somehow, Bronny doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t look surprised, either, and he certainly doesn’t look rattled. He’s accustomed to this kind of treatment. He was booed at Arizona in January. Three days later, fans at Arizona State chanted “OVER-RATED” after he blew a layup. He dealt with similar treatment while playing for Sierra Canyon in high school. “Shoot—every day,” says Williams, his former teammate. “Every day. Whether it’s a league game and crowd’s getting rowdy and call him a ‘daddy’s boy’ and ‘overrated’ and all this stuff, it’s almost like it fuels him for more fire. And he really just laughs it off and just used it as just more motivation to just kill on the court.”

But tonight against Cal, Bronny isn’t laughing. And he isn’t booed for just a possession or two. He’s booed the entire game. At one point late in the second half, when the game is close, the crowd chants: “DAD-DY’S MON-EY!”

It’s a sad, disorienting scene, the same fans who cheered for LeBron so exuberantly so callously jeering at his son. As if the two aren’t blood. As if the two aren’t just people.

The game feels like a distillation of modern sports culture; people are trolling to troll, bereft of the slightest trace of empathy. Fans who are wearing LeBron jerseys mock Bronny, unable to register the irony, unable to allow themselves to grasp that Bronny is 19. He simply wants to play basketball. But he can’t simply play basketball. Be a normal kid, living a normal life. Besides, this is all new. This chapter, this world—one that his dad can no longer protect him from. It’s daunting. It’s exciting. The time is finally here. Bronny is in the arena, daring and vulnerable, facing all that comes with becoming his own man.

For years, James has publicly said he hopes to play in the NBA not just with Bronny, but also with his youngest son, Bryce, who is currently a junior at Sierra Canyon. In 2022, LeBron, Bronny, and Bryce graced the cover of Sports Illustrated together. It was an homage to LeBron’s iconic “The Chosen One” cover from 20 years ago, when the high schooler led Ohio’s St. Vincent-St. Mary High to consecutive state titles.

Heading into this season, all seemed to be moving according to LeBron’s plan. Bronny was mostly expected to be a one-and-done player. More than a third of USC’s games were added to ESPN, ESPN2, or ESPNU. The Trojans were ranked in the top 25, having added the no. 4–ranked recruiting class in the country.

Bronny was the biggest story in college basketball.

He still is. It’s just turned into a much different story—with a few more twists and setbacks than anticipated. Bronny’s stock has fallen in most mock drafts; in others, he isn’t even mentioned. His freshman season hasn’t gone the way many had hoped. Though many analysts acknowledge that it is miraculous he’s playing at all, given his heart condition, they say he needs to be more assertive and improve his shooting. Many have pointed out that he might benefit from staying in college longer.

But therein lies the complexity of the situation: What if Bronny’s timeline for development doesn’t align with his father’s timeline for retirement? In a vacuum, it wouldn’t be a big deal if Bronny needed a little more time to develop. Future NBA players stay in school all the time. But LeBron will be 40 in December. He has only so many years left to play. “I am a Laker, and I’m happy and been very happy being a Laker the last six years, and hopefully it stays that way,” he recently said to reporters. “But I don’t have the answer to how long it is or which uniform I’ll be in. Hopefully [it] is with the Lakers. It’s a great organization, so many greats. But we’ll see.”

There is reason to believe that Bronny will indeed enter the NBA next season. The Athletic reported in mid-February that the Lakers are “willing to explore the notion of adding Bronny James next season.” The Lakers don’t own the rights to their first-round draft pick (the Pelicans have the option to take it this year or next), but they do have a second in the 2024 draft. ESPN also reported that LeBron hoped to negotiate a new multiyear contract with the Lakers this summer that would pay him “nine figures.” LeBron wields enormous power in the NBA; a team could draft Bronny to entice his father.

But what if Bronny needs more time?

He is, as Enfield repeated numerous times to The Ringer, “just a freshman.” A freshman who’s trying to adjust to the speed, the physicality of the college game. A 19-year-old who’s trying to navigate being a celebrity and a student and an athlete, finding middle ground between those who believe he is a work in progress and those who believe he should already be a finished product.

Bronny has impressive court vision and a high basketball IQ and often seems to make the right pass, the right play, according to his coaches. He brings a tenacity on defense and is known for his unselfish play, as was his father earlier in his NBA career. But he still has a long way to go. “As all freshmen, you go through a learning curve,” Enfield says. “And because he joined the team late in midseason [due to his cardiac arrest], he wasn’t available to play at the beginning of the season. It was more difficult for him because he had missed so much time.” Enfield often reminds him, “It’s OK to go through this learning curve. You’re a freshman. And you’re not only a freshman, but you didn’t start the season on time.”

Enfield is excited about Bronny’s potential growth. “We expect him to be a terrific player down the line. He has a big upside in his game, and as he gets more experience, it just keeps developing.”

USC has not allowed Bronny to speak to the media after practice or games—unlike his father, who was a media darling from the start—except after his return to play in December, when he told reporters he was “thankful for everything—Mayo Clinic, everything they helped me with, parents, siblings, supporting me through this hard time in my life.” Klutch Sports Group appears to be overseeing USC’s Bronny-related media requests and hasn’t made Bronny available, either. They declined The Ringer’s request for this story.

Bronny has handled the hoopla surrounding him with grace. Not once has he lashed out at his critics or at overzealous fans on social media. There are no viral clips of him slipping up in some way. Doing anything remotely controversial. He’s focused on improving his game and playing within his team’s system. “His teammates love playing with him,” Enfield says, “and he just fits in so well as a person.”

His teammates respect him, especially after what he endured with his health. Indeed, after Bronny’s debut against Long Beach State back in December, Ellis told reporters: “He’s built for this.”

Enfield says he appreciates how Bronny shows up to practice each day motivated to push himself. “He wants to become a great player,” Enfield says. Bronny doesn’t do drills half-heartedly. He encourages his teammates and is often the first off the bench cheering and clapping when they make a good play. He walks around with a smile, and that rubs off on his teammates. “He has a very positive spirit about him,” Enfield says. “An energetic personality. In the way that he carries himself, and the way that he plays every day. … It’s very infectious.”

As he describes Bronny’s personality, Enfield watches the freshman launch 3s on the left wing at USC’s Galen Center. Practice ended about 20 minutes earlier, but Bronny is one of two players still left on the court, putting himself through extra reps. Enfield recalls a moment in practice a few days before that, during a scrimmage, when Bronny stole the ball and dribbled as fast as he could up the court. He dished a laser pass to a teammate running ahead of him, who easily scored. As Bronny sprinted back on defense, the offense lost the ball. Instead of letting the ball roll out of bounds—it’s only practice, after all—Bronny hustled over and dived for it, tightly clutching it before feeding a teammate to ignite the fast break.

“Just to see that intensity and that passion for playing the game,” Enfield says, “you can’t teach it. That’s just who he is.”

Of course, there are hundreds of Division I players who similarly sacrifice their bodies every day, who hustle and dive and sprint each possession to little to no fanfare—and who will never make the NBA. Who will never receive even a slice of the attention Bronny receives. But no other current college player has to perform under the scrutiny that Bronny does. It’s the gift and the curse of being the son of arguably the greatest of all time, someone who just became the first NBA player to reach 40,000 points.

It’s somewhat impossible, being in Bronny’s shoes. It’s somehow made more ironic by the fact that Bronny’s feet are adorned with sneakers with his dad’s name on them.

His triumphs aren’t magnified in the same way that his failures are. If he has a poor shooting night, he’s branded a poor shooter, not a person who’s having a poor outing. The bar is impossibly high.

He is, in other words, unable to satisfy. That’s something many former players and their sons have dealt with before, even those that didn’t make the NBA, like Michael Jordan’s sons. Jeffrey Jordan played for the University of Illinois and the University of Central Florida, and Marcus Jordan played for University of Central Florida. Both earned regular minutes, but neither came close to following in their father’s footsteps. Tim Hardaway Sr., Hall of Famer and five-time NBA All-Star, understands the pressure firsthand from his experiences with his own son, Tim Hardaway Jr., a forward for the Mavericks. The two navigated similar struggles at the beginning of Hardaway Jr.’s college career at Michigan. Hardaway Sr. explains what that pressure feels like: “It’s terrible, to tell you the truth,” he says. “It’s terrible for them because they get scrutinized, and everybody comes after them thinking that they could take it. … You want to keep them away from all their scrutiny that comes their way.” He pauses. “You can’t. That’s the frustrating part about it. No matter what you do, you can’t get that off them.”

Hardaway Jr. faced treatment that’s similar to what Bronny experiences at road games; fans screamed at him: “Who’s your daddy?!”

“It gets brutal out there,” says Hardaway Sr. “I just tell guys … like LeBron, Carmelo [whose son, Kiyan Anthony, is a top prep prospect in the 2025 class] … I tell ’em, I say, you got to try to stay positive with your kids, make them understand you’re going to grow from this and get better. It is going to make you stronger. Don’t let this get you down.”

LeBron seems to share a moment with Bronny toward the end of the Cal game. With less than seven minutes left in the back-and-forth contest, Bronny catches the ball and fakes to one wing, giving himself some cushion to release a 3.

He misses. Short.

James stands up, catching Bronny’s eyes. LeBron pretends to shoot an imaginary ball, cupping his fingers down after the release with emphasis, as if to say: Keep shooting.

Bronny nods. For a second, it is as if it were just the two of them, in their own world, speaking their own language. A flashback to a simpler time, to Bronny’s younger days when LeBron was on the AAU sidelines. The boos are a faded memory. In this moment, nothing else matters but them. Their love. They are the only two people who can truly understand the weight of expectation each carries, the impossibility of carrying it. But here they are, not MVP and prospect, just father and son, sharing a beat.

The basketball world has followed Bronny’s every move since before he could even walk. Kentucky coach John Calipari, who had known LeBron since he was a teenager, had his eyes on his son very early on. “When Bronny was born, I sent LeBron scholarship papers,” Calipari says. He then watched Bronny play in the fourth grade AAU national championship. “When I saw him as a fourth grader, I told him they still hold true,” Calipari says.

Many other coaches soon took notice, too. Not just because of his surname, but because of his game. When he was a 10-year-old, Bronny’s highlight tape went viral. When he was 11, he had more offers from blue bloods like Duke. James told CBS Detroit around that time that several schools had offered his son scholarships. “It’s pretty crazy. It should be a violation,” James said. “You shouldn’t be recruiting 10-year-old kids.”

Photo by John Jones/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

But the world Bronny grew up in was vastly different from the one of his father. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X. The internet brands a kid before he can even write his own story. And no matter how well Bronny played, how much he tried to distinguish himself, inevitably, he would always be compared to the legend with the same name. In 2018, LeBron acknowledged the pressure that inevitably came with that decision. “I still regret giving my 14-year-old my name,” James said of Bronny in the debut episode of his series The Shop.

“When I was younger,” James continued, “I didn’t have a dad, so my whole thing was when I have a kid, not only is he gonna be a junior, I’m gonna do everything that this man didn’t do. They’re gonna experience things that I didn’t experience.”

The love LeBron has for his son is palpable. Like any father, he’s proud of his son—of all his children. He wants the best for them. And he knows what it’s like to carry seemingly impossible expectations. He has done it his entire career, more than living up to astronomical hype, becoming the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. James and his wife, Savannah, have always been present for their children, according to those who have been around Bronny. It is because of this foundation that the 19-year-old is handling the pressure of this moment so well.

“He’s been raised by great parents, and they’re not tolerating none of that extra stuff,” says Williams. “It definitely starts with his family. … It’s all he knows, is how to be … a good teammate, a good friend.”

LeBron taught Bronny the same values, the same drive, that propelled him to NBA stardom. A grinder’s mentality. “In Northeast Ohio, nothing is given,” LeBron once said. “Everything is earned. You work for what you have.” And while Bronny, too, is known for his work ethic, he didn’t have the same childhood. The same struggles. He can’t be the kid from Akron.

But he worked to establish himself as an elite prospect in his own right. Bronny was a McDonald’s All-American and a five-star recruit, averaging 13.8 points, 5.5 rebounds, 2.7 assists, and 1.8 steals during his senior season at Sierra Canyon. He was ranked no. 19 overall by ESPN.

Many who watched Bronny play over his last couple of years in high school and on the AAU circuit praise his work ethic and versatility. And they say that he may simply need more time to develop. “Every year he’s added more and more to his game,” says Glen Worley, a former Compton Magic coach who has watched Bronny play since junior high. “He’s gotten a better jumper, he’s gotten stronger, he’s gotten more athletic. I think sometimes he defers to his teammates a little bit too much, but I think he plays basketball the right way.”

People used to say the same things about his father.

Frank Bennett, a coach at Chaminade College Prep in St. Louis who briefly coached Bronny at the 2023 Nike Hoop Summit, remembers how hard Bronny played during each possession in practice. The team was working on pressing. “He was just so energetic behind pressing, to the point where he caused back-to-back turnovers in practice and finished both of ’em with monstrous dunks,” Bennett says. “It was just cool to watch the teammates’ reactions too. … They fed off of it.”

Ray Barefield, who’s a coach at Rancho Christian High School in Temecula, California, and coached current Cavs big man Evan Mobley and coached against Bronny, believes that Bronny’s work ethic will aid his development in the coming years, even if it takes longer than some would have liked. “A lot of times, you look at NBA players, they’re jumping in production. Is it really that they’re getting better, or they’re getting that much more mentally mature? Most of the time, their jump is mental maturity. … He’s entitled to a [maturation] process.

“I just think it’s going to take its natural course,” Barefield says. “It may be not on the time frame that people think it should be or it’s supposed to be based on what they perceive as hype. But if Bronny can keep being the kid he is, and with the work ethic he has and the right attitude that I see he’s always had, I think it will take place.”

Bronny has shown flashes of potential at USC. He had a season-high seven assists against Oregon in February. Against UCLA at home in late January, he had a monster block against guard Dylan Andrews as he drove to the basket.

Bronny then received a rare technical for yelling “give me that shit” at Andrews—arguably the closest thing to a controversial moment that he’s had all season. Enfield subbed him out. Though he sat for most of the game, playing only 15 minutes in the ugly 65-50 loss, he was still, in a sense, visible. Fans on the opposite end of the Galen Center continued to distract Bruin free throw shooters by waving two Big Head cutout posters, one of LeBron and one of Bronny.

No matter where he turns, Bronny can’t escape his famous dad. He also can’t escape the pressure that comes with following his path. This time next year, Bronny could be in the NBA. He could be playing with his dad. Or on another team. Or he could be back at USC, launching jumpers until sundown, perfecting his craft.

His story is just beginning, while his dad’s is soon coming to an end. Maybe their careers will cross and they’ll write a new story together. Maybe they won’t. Maybe there is another story to come, better than either could have penned. Maybe one day he won’t just be LeBron’s son. Maybe one day, he’ll just be Bronny.