The Philadelphia 76ers held media day on Monday, and if you are not a basketball person you should know that media day is normally the most content-free event on the NBA calendar: players in clean jerseys saying they are in the best shape of their lives, attended by a handful of regular reporters. This one was near standing-room only. The team would have moved it to its home arena in Philadelphia, except a Phoebe Bridgers concert was in the way. The Blue x White scrimmage — an intrasquad practice game, essentially — will be held in the downtown arena for the first time this Saturday because more fans want in, and the get-in price for the home opener is already pushing toward $300. Philadelphia is a city where, on the same night, the undefeated Eagles were playing on Monday Night Football, and where the Phillies had just snuck into a wildcard slot to begin their “Red October.” And the Sixers owned the news cycle anyway.
The reason arrived at about 11:15 a.m. LeBron James, officially a Sixer since July 27 but in Philadelphia for the first time, walked into a second-floor room in Camden behind a phalanx of staff and began, literally, clearing the table. Water bottle: floor. Microphone: yanked off its stand. Placard bearing his name: examined and placed on the floor too. “You guys know who I am, right?” he said, according to CNN’s Dana O’Neil, who reported the scene. As mission statements go, moving the furniture around is a decent one.
Then came the sentence that will either be cast in bronze or thrown back at him. Explaining why he relocated east while his family remains out west, James said: “I didn’t leave my family to lose in the second round.”
Eleven words, and Philadelphia has a long institutional memory for eleven-word declarations, because fans there keep receipts. This is the city that adopted Moses Malone’s “Fo Fo Fo” prediction of a sweep through the 1983 playoffs — the Sixers went Fo, Fi, Fo and won the title — and also the city that, 31 years later, has not forgotten Ricky Watters asking “For who? For what?” after declining to stretch for a pass. The Sixers themselves have gone 25 years without so much as reaching the Eastern Conference Finals. So a promise of more than a second-round exit is, in local terms, enormous. It is also, in national terms, a promise from a man with four championship rings who will turn 42 this season and just changed teams, which tells you something about both his self-belief and the state of the roster he joined.
About that roster. General manager Mike Gansey pulled off what CNN described as the coups of the offseason: not just signing James but trading for Jaylen Brown from the Celtics, a deal executive vice president Jameer Nelson said was so quietly assembled that “if it had leaked, I’m not sure it happens. That’s just my opinion.” Brown’s arrival started things; Tyrese Maxey finished them. Maxey, 25, had become James’s workout partner in the offseasons after the pandemic, the two regularly in the gym at 6 a.m., and when James wanted an honest evaluation of the Sixers he asked Maxey directly. Philly had been on the whiteboard of destinations maintained by James’s agent, but even people inside the building treated it as a long shot.
The discovery of the news has become a genre of story on this team. VJ Edgecombe was getting a pedicure. Nelson was at an Airbnb in Huntington Beach, California, for his daughter’s softball tournament and couldn’t tell his family, so he played dumb until his daughter Jayce started screaming, “LeBron is coming to Philly!” Edgecombe started a new team text chain, then realized the obvious problem: “But I don’t have LeBron’s number,” he said. “And even I did, I wasn’t adding him to it. I made Tyrese do that.” There is a small sociology of hierarchy in that sentence. The 25-year-old is the bridge between the greatest player of his generation and everyone else; the rookie doesn’t cold-text the King.
James’s actual sales pitch, delivered over nearly 20 minutes, was less about his own game — though he did note that “the luxury of my game is I can do everything. Literally I can do everything” — and more about process. Not the Process, the Philadelphia rebuild doctrine whose name makes locals flinch, but a James-branded version with four rings attached. He took a swipe at unnamed players who compiled big scoring numbers and no postseason success, dismissed an “instant oatmeal” society that expects everything quickly, and described himself as an incubator for other players’ success. “You have to fall in love with doing things that are uncomfortable,” he said. “And if we can do that, we can be a great team. If we don’t do that, then we’ll be like, ‘Oh man. That was a great team on paper and we had a lot of great talent, and we lost in the second round.’”
Which is a nicely self-aware place to land, because it converts his own headline quote into a test. James has built the expectation, priced it at $300 a seat, and told everyone in advance exactly what failure will look like. Practice starts Tuesday. His family is still in California.