A note to LeBron James’ skeptics. And maybe to the Sixers’.
The risk in LeBron’s move to the Sixers is mostly James’ to bear. What he’s done during his career to date suggests it’s a risk that can pay off for player and team.
Anybody who doubts the existential significance of the news that broke late Friday morning only needed to walk through Center City as the world broke for lunch. It was the darnedest of things, borderline ridiculous, enough to make you cringe in real time at the thought of writing it down. You could keep a steady pace and never escape the news, for every few strides there was another person telling someone else at a volume everybody else could hear, receptionists and tradesmen and medical technicians and folks waiting for busses to parts unknown, flashing phone screens like lottery tickets and yelling “Yo” into microphones and, in at least one case, wandering alone looking up toward the sky with a smile so zen you could have sworn you were one of the ones getting left behind.
It was a startling thing to witness. A revelation, even. Amidst the direct and inescapable blast of modern day America’s technological firehose, there are still stories so universally relevant as to draw a chorus from chaos and fragmentation.
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It was also a reminder. A reminder that, however ardent his skeptics and critics, however loud their sighs of breath, however long their rolls of eyes, LeBron James long ago escaped the containment of both basketball court and court of public opinion. He is a cultural singularity, to an extent that few athletes before him have ever been.
That might be a helpful thing for the sighers and eye-rollers to keep in mind. Even if LeBron is not your GOAT, or even your ideal of what a great athlete should be, it has little bearing on the significance of his deciding to cast his final lot with the Sixers. He is unquestionably on the shortest of short lists for the best to have ever done something, and even if he isn’t the best still doing it, he is good enough to have had a standing offer from virtually every contending team in the NBA. Sure, there are teams, and fans of teams, who could argue that the spectacle might conflict with the mission. But, then, these are the Sixers. The spectacle is James choosing to join them. The reputational risk is disproportionately his to bear.
It would be silly and self-disqualifying to ignore the magnitude of such a decision. Miami, Cleveland, Golden State, Denver — all have won titles. Those who have done it without him might be justified in thinking about legacies, whether that of the organization or that of the incumbent superstar. The Sixers have no legacy. Less than a month ago, they had very little hope of being relevant for the next three years. There aren’t many worst-case outcomes for them.
Isn’t that the genesis of the reaction? Its universality? Its ... audibility? On a basketball level, on a competitive level, one has no choice but to at least pay some reconsiderations to one’s prior assumptions about both player and team.
The only thing the Sixers had going for them was the basketball level. Whether James proves to be a difference-maker is almost secondary to the fact that he thinks he can be. Nobody has ever done what he is attempting to do, on practically every different level. Win a title with a fourth team. Win a title at the age of 42. Win a title alongside Joel Embiid.
Nobody has ever done those things. Yet, few have done anything that James has already done at every juncture of his career. He already holds the record for most minutes played at both age 40 and age 41. The 1,989 he logged last season were nearly 300 more than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in 1988-89. That doesn’t include the postseason, when James averaged 38 minutes and 23.2 points per game to lead the Lakers to a first-round upset of the Rockets without co-star Luka Dončić.
James isn’t the player he once was, obviously. He may not even be the player that the current consensus holds him to be. His .594 true shooting percentage — a measure of collective offensive efficiency from the field and foul line — was slightly better than league average in 2025-26. His 30.8 points per 100 possessions average was his lowest since his rookie season and nearly four points lower than any season since. He does not rebound or force his way to the foul line the way he once did.
But all of that only lowers James to the level of all of the other players throughout his career who weren’t anything close to the players he was in his prime. The difference is that those players were also in their primes. James is 41. If you erased everybody’s age from the stats, you’d easily zero in on him as a player who would be a massive value on a playoff roster at $4 million per year. That’s before you factor in the sum of his game: not only the ability to carry an offense for stretches as a primary scorer and spend the interim as an elite connector, but also the true ballplayer aspects of the game that escape quantification. It isn’t a fluke that the Lakers were a better defensive team in both the regular season and postseason when James was on the floor. It isn’t a coincidence that they rebounded better and committed fewer turnovers in the postseason.
For all of James’ physical advantages, for all of the legitimate debates one can have when weighting those advantages in the Greatest of All Time argument, anybody who has watched James play should be able to appreciate the feel that he has for the game of basketball. He is the rare superstar who is also a glue guy, as evidenced by the varied rosters with which he has won championships.
Therein lies the real coup for the Sixers.
