LAS VEGAS — LeBron James said Saturday that it was a “dream come true” for his son, Bronny James, to be drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers last month, and that “there’s a loss for words” about what the opportunity to play with him means to LeBron and his family.
“For me to see my son to be able to, you know, be in the NBA alone. I mean, it’s always been a dream of his and for us to be side by side … there’s a loss of words, to be honest,” James said after his first practice with Team USA ahead of the Paris Olympics.
“I mean, the kid has worked so hard to get back to this point. There’s just so much that’s happened over the last year with him to have this happen less than a year from his incident to be with our friends and our family. When they announced his name, it was something that was super surreal, and it’s kind of still, our family still don’t even have enough words to explain the feeling that we had.”
While LeBron was speaking, Bronny — whom the Lakers took with the 55th pick in last month’s NBA draft — played in his first professional game in the California Classic in San Francisco. He finished with four points on 2-for-9 shooting in a 108-94 loss to the Sacramento Kings in the Lakers’ opening game of summer league play.
But when LeBron — who also praised the team’s first-round pick, Dalton Knecht, saying he was his favorite player, besides Bronny, to watch in college last season — was asked what the goals were from his son’s performances over the next couple of weeks during summer league action, he made it clear he won’t spend much time worrying about his box score statistics.
“Just get his feet wet with the NBA,” LeBron said. “The pace of the game, the speed of the game, the physicality of the game. But what he does in the California Classic and summer league, it doesn’t matter if he plays well, and it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t play well. I just want him to continue to grow, practices, film sessions, his individual workouts.
“You can’t take anything stat-wise from the California Classic and summer league and bring it to once the season starts. So the only thing that matters is him getting better and stacking days. He missed a big part of the season last year because of the incident less than a year ago. So he’s behind as far as where he would have been if he would’ve played the full season obviously. But I think every day he said he’s getting better and better every day, so every day, every practice, every film session he feels like he’s getting better and better and that’s the only thing that matters.”
Saturday also marked the first time LeBron had spoken with the media since the Lakers named JJ Redick their new head coach.
Both LeBron and Anthony Davis expressed optimism over working with Redick and what he can bring to the franchise moving forward.
But when it came to the Lakers as a whole, LeBron stopped short of any pronouncements about the team being a championship contender. Instead, he said — on multiple occasions — that the focus for him was simply on doing the work every day, and seeing what the results of that would be.
“My expectation is for us to go to work every day, try to get better every day and push each other every day,” said James, who signed a two-year max contract with the Lakers last week. “Me as a captain, A.D. as the captain, we got to hold everybody accountable from the player standpoint. We’re coming in with a new system, so we have to learn the system and see what Coach Redick and the rest of the coaching staff want us to do, and then go from there.”
Davis reiterated that messaging Saturday, saying there are a lot of new things involved here, including Redick being a first-time head coach, but the Lakers cannot skip steps if they hope to get to their goal.
“Obviously the goal is to win, but this is still new, right?” Davis said. “JJ, first time being a head coach, first time being a coach, so that’s going to be new, right? Trying to learn his schemes, him adjusting to us, us adjusting to him. All that takes time. It’s not going to take two months, and then, ‘Oh, okay, we’ve figured everything out.’
“But the goal at the end of the day is still to win championships. And you can’t skip steps. So the first step is … we’re going to hold guys accountable … when something goes wrong, we’re going to hold guys accountable. And then from there, you know, we figure it out, and you get better each and every day.
“As long as we doing that, we put ourselves in a position to be successful.”