‘My Last Year Will Be Played With Bronny’

LeBron James has a message for all 30 teams in the NBA: whoever wants him for his final season needs to draft his son Bronny in 2024.

“My last year will be played with my son,” James told Jason Lloyd of The Athletic at the NBA All-Star Game in Cleveland. “Wherever Bronny is at, that’s where I’ll be. I would do whatever it takes to play with my son for one year. It’s not about the money at that point.”

Bronny is a 6-foot-3 junior guard at Sierra Canyon outside Los Angeles. He turns 19 in 2023 but would not be eligible for the NBA Draft until 2024 under current rules. One mock draft currently has him as a late first-round pick. The NBA would need to abandon its current one-and-done rule and allow players to go straight from the preps to the pros by 2023 in order for Bronny to enter the draft that year. LeBron went straight from high school to the NBA in 2003 and was the No. 1 overall pick of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

LeBron, 37, has one more year on his contract with the Lakers at $44.5 million in 2022-23 and would then be a free agent. He would have one year to play with a team before somebody could draft Bronny. LeBron will turn 40 during the 2024-25 season, his record-tying 22nd in the NBA.

Asked if he would consider a third go round with his home-state Cavaliers, LeBron told Lloyd, “The door’s not closed on that.”

In 2020, I wrote in this space how LeBron would “love” to play with Bronny, according to his former teammate Danny Green.

“I think he would love to,” Green said then.“I don’t know if his body will hold up for another three years. I don’t think he wants to play in the NBA and not be able to play at the level that he’s playing at right now. And I think three years from now it will be tough. The way he ‘s going, I would assume most people are a shell of themselves 20 years later.

“But I’m sure he would love to play with Bronny.”

LeBron has made a habit of watching Bronny, 17, play in AAU and high school settings.

In 2019, he watched as Bronny scored a go-ahead layup against St. Vincent-St. Mary, Lebron’s alma mater, in Ohio.

“You want to ask me what is the greatest achievement of my life,” James said in a 2018 interview with UNINTERRUPTED. “If I’m on the same court as my son in the NBA. That would be No. 1 in my lifetime as an NBA player. I’ve thought about it because my son is about to be 14, and he might be able to get in there a little earlier.”

In January 2020, when the Lakers visited the Celtics, LeBron attended the prestigious Hoophall Classic in Springfield, Mass.

LeBron sat — and stood — courtside surrounded by a slew of local police offers and security personnel. But the game played before about 4,000 fans in a standing-room only gym was not without incident.

During the third quarter, a fan threw something at Bronny as he inbounded the ball. The official called security over but no one was ejected.

“It’s just disrespectful,” LeBron said that night at TD Garden. “And it was a little kid, too. I don’t know how old that little kid was. I don’t know if he learned that on his own, or he learned it at home.”

Bronny is not the player his father is — no one is — but has to deal with similar scrutiny.

“You’d be surprised by all the stuff Bronny has to go through,”  his former teammate Ziaire Williams told Yahoo Sports. “It’s not fair, but he doesn’t let it faze him at all. I’m learning how to be more like that from him, and he’s younger than me.”

Some oddsmakers believe Bronny will commit to an HBCU, with North Carolina Central having the best odds to land him.