For four seasons, the number 9 jersey at the Lakers' UCLA Health Training Center in El Segundo belonged to a kid who grew up watching his dad win championships from a courtside seat. LeBron James is gone now, headed east to sign with the 76ers, and the locker next to where his used to be is the only piece of him left in the building. Bronny James is still a Laker. For the first time in his career, he's one on his own terms.
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LeBron's exit closes the loop on one of the strangest and most sentimental chapters in recent NBA history: a father and son sharing an NBA floor, something the league had never seen before October 2024, when Bronny checked in alongside LeBron in a regular-season game. It was a moment engineered as much by circumstance as by talent. The Lakers took Bronny in the second round of the 2024 draft, 55th overall, and built a roster that could plausibly justify keeping him on it. Whether that justification held up on pure basketball merit got argued to death on sports radio and message boards. It didn't much matter. The James family got its moment, and the Lakers got the marketing bump that came with it.
El Segundo, Emptied Out
Walk through the Lakers' practice facility now and the gravity of the place has shifted. For four years, every question shouted across that gym eventually circled back to LeBron: his health, his minutes, his mood about the front office's latest moves. Reporters staked out the players' parking lot hoping for thirty seconds of him walking to his car. Bronny, by comparison, worked in relative peace, splitting time between the big club and the South Bay Lakers of the G League, grinding through the unglamorous end of a roster well clear of the spotlight his last name guaranteed him.
That peace is about to get complicated in a different way. Without his father in the building, Bronny loses the built-in shield that came with being LeBron James's son on LeBron James's team. He also loses the built-in narrative that turned every G League box score into a national story. What's left is a 21-year-old guard who has to prove, game by game, that he belongs on an NBA roster because of what he does with a basketball. Not because of who raised him.
A Draft Pick Untethered
League executives and agents spent the better part of two years openly wondering whether any front office would have used a draft pick on Bronny James if his last name were Smith. The Lakers made that bet anyway, and it was always understood around the league as a package deal. Take the son, keep the father happy, maybe keep the father in Los Angeles a little longer. That calculation is dead now. LeBron picked Philadelphia. Whatever the exact terms of his exit, the timing tells its own story: the season most associated with LeBron's Southern California chapter has ended, and his son didn't go with him.
That's notable. If the Lakers had viewed Bronny purely as an extension of his father's contract, this would have been the moment to let him walk too, or to facilitate a trade to Philadelphia so the family could stay together. Instead, by all accounts, his path in Los Angeles continues independent of that decision. For a young player who has spent his entire life introduced as "LeBron's son," that's not a small thing. It's the first real fork in the road of his career.
The South Bay Proving Ground
The G League affiliate in El Segundo has been Bronny's actual classroom far more than Crypto.com Arena ever was. Fewer cameras, fewer nationally televised humiliations, more reps against players who are also fighting for their basketball lives. It's where undrafted free agents and fringe two-way guys claw for call-ups, and it's where Bronny has quietly logged the minutes that don't make highlight packages but do make careers. Scouts who've watched him there describe a player still figuring out his NBA role: not a lead ball-handler, not quite a knockdown shooter, but a defensive-minded guard trying to find a lane that doesn't depend on bloodlines.
Now that lane matters more than ever. Every summer league possession, every training camp battle for a rotation spot, gets measured against a question that used to have an easy out. Is he here because he's good, or because of his dad? With his dad three time zones away in Philadelphia, that question just got a lot harder to dodge. And a lot more fair to ask.
An Ending, and Maybe a Beginning
LeBron James built his California legacy across two title runs and a decade of Sunday afternoon appointment viewing, and he's leaving it behind for one more shot at a ring in Philly. Los Angeles will spend the offseason arguing about what his run here meant, whether the front office should have done more to keep him, whether this is really goodbye or just a pause.
None of that is Bronny's problem anymore. He's got his own locker, his own workouts, his own reason to show up in El Segundo every morning that has nothing to do with the guy who used to have the locker next to his. For the first time since he put on a Lakers jersey, nobody's watching him because of his father. They're watching to see if he can actually play.