LeBron James has two major basketball-related goals for the future, winning another championship and owning an NBA team after retirement. They are both rather lofty and on the latest episode of NBA Today, Tim Bontemps was asked which of the two was more realistic.
“It’s definitely more realistic that LeBron James is an owner of a team than he wins another title,” Bontemps said. “… Bronny James is now playing with him, his son, in LA, he’s clearly boxed into being with the Lakers now going forward. It’s hard to see a path of them being good enough to win a title.”
I would have to agree with Bontemps here. LeBron has stated that owning an NBA franchise in Las Vegas is his ultimate goal and with how open he has been about this, I think there is a good chance it will happen. If the 39-year-old doesn’t land that potential expansion team in Las Vegas, he’ll have other options as well in the future and I fully expect him to be part of some ownership group in the league.
As for LeBron winning a fifth title, well, I am not too optimistic about it. The 20-time All-Star has played at an All-NBA level in each of the last four seasons and the Los Angeles Lakers managed to win a playoff series in just one of them.
This past season, LeBron averaged 25.7 points, 7.3 rebounds, 8.3 assists, 1.3 steals, and 0.5 blocks per game but the Lakers still failed to finish in the top six in the standings in the Western Conference. They made the playoffs via the Play-In Tournament but were eliminated in five games by the Denver Nuggets in the first round.
It was fairly clear, that the Lakers weren’t good enough to win it all and that they had to make some changes this offseason. While they have a new head coach in JJ Redick, the roster hasn’t really been upgraded, so I expect the 2024-25 season to end in disappointment for LeBron. Unless the Lakers make a significant move at some point in the future, he will almost certainly end his career with four titles.
Tim Bontemps Blasted The Lakers For Messing Up The LeBron James-Anthony Davis Era
LeBron and Anthony Davis excelled for Team USA at the 2024 Paris Olympics and Bontemps felt it showed how terribly the Lakers have been run. He hammered the Lakers for screwing up the James-Davis era.
“The single biggest takeaway from this whole tournament is that it showed me how terribly the Lakers have been run for most of the past several years where you have LeBron James, and yes, he’s approaching 40, he’s the oldest player in the league, he obviously can’t play at this level for 82 games.”
“But we saw a couple years ago when he got to the Conference Finals, say what you will about injuries and favorable matchups, or whatever, when he is in moments like this, he still has the ability to turn it up to a really high level.”
“The fact that the team has been built so poorly around him and Anthony Davis, that they have been an afterthought the vast majority of the run and especially the last few years outside of, again, they had some favorable matchups that got them to the Conference Finals one time; otherwise they’ve been a non-factor.”
“You could go back to not getting Mike Conley instead of D’Angelo Russell in that deal; yeah, there are a hundred things you can point to.”
“The overall point, though, is that LeBron still has the ability to be a difference-making player at the highest level, and with him and AD, it remains unfathomable that this team remains irrelevant, and that’s what they are irrelevant.”
It is quite damning that the Lakers have two of the top 10 players in the NBA and they’re not being talked about as a serious contender. I think years down the road, we’ll look back at this era and say they should have a lot more success than they did. Injuries have certainly hurt the Lakers in recent years, but some of the blunders made by the front office are the bigger reason why they haven’t achieved as much as they should have.
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