Bronny James: Lakers Rotation in the 2nd Season? Analysis and Expectations

Bronny James: A Future in Construction in the NBA

From a suite on the 27th floor of the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas, Bronny James contemplates the panorama. It’s midday on July 13th. He observes the surroundings of the ARIA Resort & Casino, where young prospects and aspirants to the Los Angeles Lakers roster establish their temporary base. James points to the Shadow Creek golf course and the Bellagio fountains. Three days earlier, the NBA had made James another protagonist in Las Vegas, pitting him against the Dallas Mavericks and their promising number 1, Cooper Flagg. The Lakers lost. James scored eight points.

Two days later, in the Lakers’ second game, he scored 14 points and had two steals in the 94-81 victory over the New Orleans Pelicans. “My head is everywhere,” James said. “There’s a lot going on in Las Vegas. I personally don’t like the summer league at all. I like the competition and the games, but I don’t like coming to Las Vegas and being in Las Vegas… After this, I won’t do anything.” This perspective contrasts with that of his father, LeBron James, who took advantage of the weekend in Las Vegas to watch his son play, after a trip to Puerto Rico for a Bad Bunny show. Bronny’s biography, which would fit on a basketball card, notes that he was recruited less than a year after suffering cardiac arrest during a summer training session with the USC Trojans. He was selected by the Lakers with the 55th pick in the 2024 NBA draft. He made history by being part of the first father-son duo to play together in the NBA when he entered the court against the Minnesota Timberwolves. However, James has never seen the recording of that game. He hasn’t reviewed his two missed shots in that brief appearance. “I just think if you know me, I really don’t like the spotlight in the big moments,” he said. “It was a great experience to be a part of it because it was the first father-son duo. But I’m a quiet guy. I don’t like [all that]. It comes with it. But yeah, I really don’t like going back. I mean, I’ll watch my good performances where I get some minutes, but I’m not going to go watch that.” Nine months have passed since James’ NBA debut in Los Angeles, and two years since his career and life were threatened on a practice court at USC. He has spent the last year working away from the spotlight to become a significant player. His goal is to enter coach JJ Redick’s rotation, overcome the persistent effects of his heart condition, and surpass multiple veterans on the depth chart.

James, the number 55 pick most talked about in NBA history, played only 181 minutes in 27 games last season. He went from one G League team to another for the Lakers. He was much better known for briefly making history than for making plays. There were very few highlights. So many that before games, he would watch clips of his best moments from high school to boost his confidence. But there was an unmistakable low point, and that marked his season. It was January 28th. The Lakers were in Philadelphia in the middle of a five-game road trip that began with Anthony Davis scoring 36 points and 13 rebounds in a win in Golden State, and ended with Davis being traded to Dallas for Luka Doncic shortly after the trip concluded with a win in New York. With Gabe Vincent out with a left knee injury and James coming off a 31-point game for the South Bay Lakers, he was called up from the G League to join the varsity team in Philadelphia. In his thirteenth game and the first time he played a real role in the rotation as a substitute point guard, James was exposed. In 15 minutes, he didn’t make any of the 5 shots with three turnovers. Tyrese Maxey relentlessly attacked him, as the Sixers guard exploded with 43 points to lead Philadelphia to victory without Joel Embiid or Paul George. Afterward, Redick, a first-year coach, took the blame, saying he put James in a “difficult situation.” Critics who said L.A. wasted its second-round pick, that selecting James was nothing more than a nepotism play to please his father, piled on, continuing a level of scrutiny that no late second-round pick before him had endured. For James, the outside chatter didn’t matter as much as performance.

“It was definitely like, ‘Okay, this is where I’m at right now, I need to be better,'” he said. “I need to go to the gym, get extra shots up, work on my body, work on my IQ, watch film, things like that with the coaches. So, it was definitely an eye-opener for me.”

Bronny James

It was his welcome-to-the-NBA moment. “I don’t take it for granted,” he said. “It was an experience I definitely should have lived.” He finished the road trip with garbage-time minutes against the Washington Wizards and New York Knicks before returning to the G League for much of February. He struggled in his first game back with South Bay: 5 of 17 and six turnovers with a minus-18 plus-minus in a 105-101 loss to the Oklahoma City Blue. James’ coach in South Bay is Zach Guthrie, 37 years old. He was in his first year with the Lakers’ G League program after spending his first decade in basketball as a video coordinator with San Antonio, director of advanced scouting with Orlando, and assistant coach in Utah, Dallas, and Washington. A month after the season, Guthrie made a pact with James that he would be the team’s starting point guard through any inconsistency the club encountered. “It was like, ‘You’re the point guard, we’re doing this,'” Guthrie told ESPN. “I was like, ‘It’s your show, let’s go.’ ‘The ball is in your hands the whole game. We’re living and dying with him.'”

Guthrie adapted his offense to James, running “Spain” pick-and-rolls, where the action is stacked in the center of the court and a third offensive player will screen the screener, creating a variety of options for the point guard to analyze in real time, over and over until he mastered it. “‘You’re going to get really good at reading this play'”, Guthrie told him. “And I think it’s the most point guard-friendly play. And so it was like, ‘We’re going to run this to death, and you’re going to learn all the reads'”.

There was a stipulation. To keep the keys, James had to be defensively focused. “‘All I ask is that you have to defend'”, Guthrie told James. “‘And I’m going to hold you to a crazy standard. And if you’re not defending, if you’re lazy… I’m going to sub you out, I’m going to show it to the team. And that’s it. And then you’re going to play until you’re exhausted'”. It worked. Recovering from his struggles in Oklahoma City, James finished the G League season averaging 22.8 points, 5.6 assists, 5.1 rebounds and 1.6 steals, with 36.7% on three-pointers in the last seven games. South Bay went 5-2.

Redick knew the pact and closely monitored its progress. Observing James, he said, reminded him of a conversation he had with his 10-year-old son Knox after he faced tough competition at the AAU Nationals in July. “They played against a very good team, and they had several kids who were big, strong, and really talented,” Redick said. “And Knox had a crisis of confidence.” Knox is as far on the basketball spectrum from Bronny as Bronny is from his father. But there is a universal truth that applies at every stage.

“What I shared with him was like, ‘Knox, this is the good stuff. When you fail, that’s the good stuff,'” Redick said. “That’s how you get better… Come back from that trip, and it was, ‘Dad, I want to be stronger. I need to be stronger.’ It’s like, how else are we going to grow if we don’t test ourselves and fail?”

JJ Redick

Failure, of course, is a relative term for James. After suffering cardiac arrest two years ago due to a congenital heart defect, which required surgery that left a 6-inch scar in the center of his chest, wins and losses on a basketball court take on a different scope. Lakers guard Gabe Vincent, with whom James has become close, sees the experience as a valuable mental advantage for his teammate.

“Having the game taken away from him at a younger age the way it was, whether it was due to injury or whatever, I think it gave him a different appreciation,” Vincent told ESPN. “I think it forces you to have a different type of fight. It puts a backbone on you. Everybody needs a backbone, but it gives you a different type of belief in yourself while you’re fighting. You have to climb uphill. And that builds a lot of resolve.”

Gabe Vincent

Although that perspective has helped him to temper himself, James says he still feels persistent physical effects. “I get sick more easily now,” he said. “Which is a little strange, but I think it affected my immune system a bit. So, I would have moments where I would have to sit down, and that conditioning I’m working on just disappears in that week I’m out.” This happened this summer, with an illness that kept him out of a week of training before the California Classic. His conditioning suffered, and the team kept him out of the opening game in San Francisco. Then, he had minute restrictions in his second game. “Whenever you have a situation like this, it takes a while for the body’s collaborative immune system to get back to full strength,” Lakers athletic trainer Mike Mancias told ESPN. “It’s very normal for even elite athletes to experience this. But because of Bronny’s age and condition, [it will happen] even faster.” But considering his coaching staff’s main objective, his situation may seem Sisyphean. “The most important thing for Bronny is that he has to get into elite shape,” Redick told ESPN. “That’s the entry barrier for him right now. And if he does that, I think he has the opportunity to be a really fantastic player in the NBA.” Redick points to Davion Mitchell, 6-2 and 205 pounds, of the Miami Heat, or his friend and former teammate, T.J. McConnell, 6-1 and 190 pounds, of the Indiana Pacers, as examples of the type of player James can become. But part of their skills is a two-way relentlessness that requires great stamina, a physical output that James has not maintained. “In every possession, they are in the game, whether offensively or defensively, they can impact it with how hard they play,” said Redick. “With defensive pick-ups, disruption, being able to get down… I think we’ve all seen these incredible flashes of this from Bronny. And to get to that next level for him, it’s cardiovascular conditioning.” “It’s clear… I understand there’s a story of something really scary he had to live through, and I think it’s hard to overcome certain points for him, but he’s going to get there. He’s going to get there.” Guthrie has already seen progress. “His conditioning is like a basketball 401(k),” Guthrie said. “It’s about daily deposits. And sometimes, when you don’t make as much money or have an event in life, you’re going to have to take some out of your 401(k), or you’re not putting in as much… Yes, there will be times when he’s sick or this or that, but if he stays vigilant and stays on his work, I think he’ll be fine. That 401(k) will be great because he’s been working from now on, from the offseason, focusing on his diet, focusing on sleep, focusing on all those things. All that is part of conditioning. It’s all connected.” Consistency is something he learned from his father. “I think that’s a big part of why his longevity is so crazy and he’s able to endure so much for over 20 years,” James said. “I see a lot of guys who don’t want to get in an ice bath after training or don’t want to get treatment.” In the offseason workouts, he endures interval training: VersaClimber sessions, stationary bike exercises, inclined walking exercises, sprint runs, to complement practice games and skills work. (Knowing that his shot will also be key to earning playing time, James finishes his workouts with a 105-shot shooting drill. His goal is to make 80 shots). The approach has earned him support within the locker room. “We might be competing for minutes in the future, but as a teammate, as a human, as a person, I want nothing but the best for him,” Vincent said. “And it only makes the Lakers better if we have competitions for the positions on the depth chart.” Vincent was on the court in Las Vegas for the Lakers’ victory over New Orleans. James was assigned to defend Jeremiah Fears, the number 7 pick of the Pelicans, a 6-foot-4-inch athletic guard. James helped L.A. hold the promoted prospect to 5 of 21 shots with three turnovers. “After the game against the Pels, I simply texted him the next day: ‘Hey, I don’t know what they’re telling you in the background, but I liked what I saw’,” Vincent tweeted. “‘You were aggressive… You were with the main guy’… “It’s difficult, I think, sometimes in Laker Land and sometimes as a young player with expectations on him, to have a big picture mentality and look at the overall thing,” Vincent said. “But for me, we have seen the growth in him from year 1 to now, so it’s important to simply continue to ascend.”

During the first possession James played in the summer league, against the Heat in San Francisco, his rise was on display. Literally. As soon as Miami’s Kasparas Jakucionis turned his back to spin around L.A.’s DJ Steward, James accelerated from his blind side to steal the ball. Then he picked it up near mid-court, dribbled twice, and took off from a foot inside the free-throw line, finishing at the rim with a one-handed hammer. In the Vdara suite, one of his confidants says James might not have finished the play with a dunk a year ago. James agrees. “Last year,” he said, “I probably would have had a small, tray-like finish.” He might not have even had that moment a few months ago. In April, the Lakers closed the regular season at the Portland Trail Blazers with the No. 3 seed secured against a Blazers team already eliminated from postseason contention. Redick rested his main rotation players and emptied the bench, which meant James got the first start of his career. Although he had stabilized in the G League at this point and had a couple of notable games with the Lakers, contributing five points, two rebounds and a steal in a near upset in Denver while LeBron and Doncic rested, and scoring a season-high 17 points on 7-of-10 shooting with five assists less than a week later against the Milwaukee Bucks, the first half of the finish in Portland was a regression. James had two points on 1-of-4 shooting with two turnovers, and L.A. was down 15 at the half. And Redick heard it. “That was the only time I really got on him all year,” Redick said. “What I told him was: My belief in you as a player can’t be higher than your belief in yourself. And the standard you hold yourself to has to be higher than the standard I’m going to hold you to.” It’s a delicate balance that 20-year-old James is working to achieve, with daily deposits. Every bit, every day is making him believe.

“My confidence level is, for sure, taking a leap.”

Bronny James