AS BRONNY CLEANS UP THE CEREAL, THE LAKERS LOOKED GOOD FOR JJ REDICK
A father and a son made history on a night when LeBron James’ critical mission — a big season, in what could be his last — showed early promise as Redick debuts a year after coaching nine-year-olds
A block of history involving a man and a child, a father and a son, needed two minutes and 41 seconds. They will say it has lasted two decades. That would include a scene in LeBron James’ driveway, where a grinning old man poured a box of Fruity Pebbles into Bronny’s car. When the kid came outside and opened the door, large mounds of cereal crashed all over the concrete.
“Hey, rook! You better not be late!” LeBron heckles in his Bentley.
“Are you serious? Come, on man,” Bronny complains.
“Hey. Clean up my driveway. It’s a mess,” LeBron says.
“I’m too old for this,” Bronny says.
Where they go from here, depending on when the Los Angeles Lakers send him to the G League, isn’t as important as how well the team fares in what could be LeBron’s final season. The family had considerable fun, with the duel Ken Griffeys in town, and folks inside Crypto.com Arena ached for Bronny to shoot Tuesday evening so they could say they were there if he made one. He did not, failing on a three-pointer — the ball was passed by LeBron — and allowing another shot to be blocked by Rudy Gobert. He had one offensive rebound and briefly guarded Anthony Edwards, who missed a shot.
Then he left, perhaps taking a broom to the driveway — a video Nike is airing.
“Thank God that wasn’t my car,” Bronny said.
“He has multiple cars now,” said LeBron, smiling. “He opened that one and then got in another one.”
The rest of us wondered if the Lakers, who won 110-103, might be as good as they were in silencing the Minnesota Timberwolves. At one point, Anthony Davis growled at Edwards and shouted, “Yeahhhh!!!” He will add more affirmation if he stays healthy and has a massive season after contributing 36 points and 16 rebounds. James is about to turn 40 only on his driver’s license, pushing the boundaries of peak performance beyond that of any basketball player — ever — and starting to resemble the NBA’s Tom Brady. It is only one game. But JJ Redick looked like a head coach who never should have wasted time on ESPN.
The performance was impressive. “I’d like to go 82-0,” said Redick, 1-0 after coaching nine-year-olds last year. When he accepted the job, he eyed a questioner who wondered about his lack of experience and said, “I really don’t give a f—.” Neither did his players.
“This is the first time we had a LeBron moment that was something huge and we won,” said Davis, referring to all-time scoring moments. “Every other thing we've always lost, so it kind of kills the moment. But it was a special moment for everybody.”
The Western Conference is burdensome. Oklahoma City, Minnesota, Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic are at the top, with Phoenix and New Orleans in the middle, while Golden State and Memphis and Houston and Sacramento are around. If this is James’ final season, he needs to make a splash. He hasn’t won a championship with a parade since 2016 in Cleveland. In 2020, he won a pandemic title in Orlando, and if he saw highlights of the Celtics celebrating their 18th banner, a Boston TV station mocked a “Disney World title” won by the Lakers, who have 17.
He will not win his fifth championship. But can he rise to the conference finals? He thinks so. Do we?
For now, we know Bronny should play and not sit. That will be with the South Bay Lakers, who play at the team’s training facility in El Segundo. Only 15 months have passed since he suffered cardiac arrest. Though he ponders his health, doctors across the industry have said he can play. As his father said, “It'll be another one of those moments just to know the adversity that he went through. I’ve had a couple of family members that have had heart surgeries. Some of them older, some of them younger. And to know how long it kind of takes to get back to yourself, to see him be able to play in a college Division I game the same year that he had heart surgery was, like, a ‘wow’ moment. And I knew that at that moment that there really was going to be nothing to stop him from getting to this — to anything that he wants to do. And he wanted to continue to play basketball.”
Redick sat with LeBron and Bronny and wanted to make certain the Lakers were winning handily. They were up 16 points late in the second quarter. “We still had a job to do when we checked in. We wasn't trying to make it a circus. We wasn't trying to make it about us,” LeBron said. “We wanted to make it about the team, for us to go out there and continue to play the game, the brand of basketball that the coaching staff and our teammates wanted us to play. We kept that. We kept the main thing while we was on the floor. And that was good for all of us.”
As a sellout crowd and a national audience watched, Bronny stayed calm as LeBron urged him to play without stress. “I tried not to focus on everything that was going on around me and tried to focus on going in as a rookie and not trying to mess up," Bronny said. “But yeah, I totally did feel the energy, and I appreciate Laker Nation for showing the support for me and my dad.”
“Obviously,” LeBron said, “this is the first time in this beautiful history of the NBA that has ever happened. A father (and) son has been on the same floor, let alone be on the same team, to be able to grace the floor together. So that was just, I talked about it years and years ago and for this moment to come, it's pretty cool. I don't know that it's actually going to hit the both of us for a little minute where we really get to sit back and be like, 'Oh, sheesh, that was pretty, that's pretty crazy.’
“That moment, us being at the scorer's table together and checking in together, something I will never forget. No matter how old I get, no matter how my memory may fade as I get older or whatever, I will never forget that moment.”
To remind us of how long LeBron has been with us, Ken Griffey Jr. spoke of the old days. He was playing for Cincinnati and living in Florida. “LeBron’s first Christmas in the NBA was in Orlando, and he spent it at my house,” he said. “So we've been friends ever since he's 18. I tell everybody, wherever he's at, that's where I'm a fan.”
Bronny was born the following October.
Fatherhood is the winner.
By Friday, LeBron wants a 2-0 record when Phoenix visits.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.