LeBron signing puts pressure on 76ers: NBA coaches, execs reactRamona ShelburneJul 27, 2026, 07:00 AM ETClose
- Senior writer for ESPN.com
- Spent seven years at the Los Angeles Daily News
BOB MYERS SAT on the baseline of what is now called Rocket Arena in Cleveland in June 2017, watching over the Golden State Warriors, when he did something he hates.
“I don’t like these kinds of harsh phrases but, ‘you’re either getting better or you’re getting worse,'” Myers stated, when asked if he ever worried that adding a superstar like Kevin Durant to a Warriors team than had won a championship in 2015 and NBA record 73 games in 2016 could disrupt the special alchemy that group had found.
“No team, no business, we don’t just flatline. So if you have a chance to get a guy like Kevin Durant … it should be simple, ‘Let’s try to get better.’ You don’t have to be that smart to see what he can do.”
Nine years later, in a very different role, on a very different team, Myers found himself with the same kind of zero sum choices this offseason:
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Was Daryl Morey still the right president of basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers?
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Was superstar forward Jaylen Brown worth trading for?
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Was LeBron James the right finishing addition for this team?
As an executive and leader, Myers has made a name for himself with emotional intelligence and social grace. When he helped build those dynastic Warriors teams as the general manager, he was able to do so from the ground up, with Stephen Curry and coach Steve Kerr as the ultimate cultural loadstones and perfectly interlocking components such as future Hall of Famers Klay Thompson and Draymond Green.
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The job in Philadelphia is very different. Myers — the president of Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, which owns the 76ers — isn’t building off a solid foundation. If anything he’s reverse engineering after the foundation the Sixers had been built on in the “Trust the Process” era, crumbled.
The big swings for Jimmy Butler III, James Harden and Paul George never got Philadelphia out of the second round of the playoffs. Former No. 1 pick Ben Simmons is out of the league. MVP center Joel Embiid is on the wrong side of 30 with knees that will need close, careful management for the rest of his career and a virtually immovable contract that has swelled to over $60 million a season.
“The Process is over,” one NBA coach told ESPN. “This needs to be the product. They need to finish this thing. The Sixers have done this for a long time with Embiid and it’s go time.”
Though the questions he has been tasked with solving in Philadelphia are very different from the ones he answered in Golden State, Myers applied the same “you’re either getting better or you’re getting worse” logic in replacing Morey, and adding Brown and James.
“I can totally see why they did it,” one Eastern Conference executive stated of the Sixers’ moves to acquire Brown and James. “They’re desperate. They needed to do something else before they get through to the next thing.
“So getting Jaylen for what they got him for is a good risk. Getting LeBron on a minimum is outstanding.
“What I’m not sure is why [James] did it. You’ve got a lot of guys who want the ball in their hands. Who’s setting screens? Who’s doing the dirty work? Who’s defending? A lot of that is going to fall to LeBron, I think.”
SHORTLY AFTER JAMES made his announcement, 76ers All-Star guard Tyrese Maxey posted a video of himself celebrating with the caption, “I’m like Coach Cal.”
He was referring to his former college coach, John Calipari, who has routinely landed top recruiting classes at Kentucky, Memphis and now at Arkansas.
Maxey, who played one season for Calipari in 2019-20, was among a small group of people who got some inkling late Thursday night that James would ultimately choose the Sixers, according to sources. James has known Maxey for years and is represented by the same agency. But even he didn’t fully believe it was real until he saw ESPN’s Shams Charania report the news and James put his statement out on X on Friday.
“I still want to sacrifice. I still want to work. I still want to grind,” James wrote on X. “I still want to compete, to win and have a chance at the feeling of winning another championship.
“I believe I can help make the Philadelphia 76ers a championship team and I am so excited to energize a new fan base and start this incredible journey one last time.”
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Those close to James say they believe him when he stated in his statement that he thought he “was done when the season ended.” But as he decompressed and evaluated where he was in his life and career, the feeling of leading a team and winning the way he’d done in the Los Angeles Lakers’ surprising first-round upset of the Houston Rockets while Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves were injured, stuck with him.
“I think he just realized he had a lot of meaningful basketball left in him,” is how one source close to James put it.
There are risks, of course. Two Sixers sources pointed out the potential disruption to the development of VJ Edgecombe, who showed flashes during his rookie season of the kind of potential to lead his own team one day. How much will adding two high-usage players in Brown and James take the ball out of Edgecombe’s hands?
The NBA coach countered that Edgecombe will learn far more from Brown and James than he will be stunted by them, and besides, “it’s not like this team is going to stay healthy all year. The young guys will probably have to carry the load in the regular season anyway.”
“Honestly, LeBron is the guy who just proved the best that he’s capable of playing a different role,” the coach stated. “None of those other guys has ever really done it.”
That’s the big play here for all of them. That James will help elevate a group that hasn’t been able to win on its own yet. That he’ll make everyone around him better, as he did during his peak seasons in Miami and Cleveland.
“If this goes well, none of those five guys are going to average career highs,” the NBA coach stated. “They’re all going to play a different role than they have in the past or maybe that they want to. So the most important thing is going to be getting everyone to buy in. Getting everyone to forget about how the stats affect their contracts or reputations.”
JAMES COMES TO Philadelphia with more hardware than the rest of the team combined, but it’s not as if the other 76ers’ trophy cases are barren. Brown was the 2024 Finals MVP — an award James has won four times — and Embiid was league MVP in 2023. But while James won the most recent of his four MVP awards a decade before Embiid won his, he might be closer to that form than Embiid is to his career-best season.
Embiid played only 57 games over the past two regular seasons, fewer than James played last season in his age-41 season. He sat out games in both of the 76ers’ playoff series in 2026, though it should be noted it was because of emergency appendicitis surgery, not because of his knees.
James has long admired Embiid’s talent and basketball IQ, sources close to him stated. But like many in the league, he had questions about Embiid’s durability.
James ultimately decided that the Sixers had the kind of high IQ basketball players and high-end talent he was looking for. His comfort level with Myers and new general manager Mike Gansey, whom he’d known from their days as high schoolers in Ohio — Gansey was the runner-up to James for Ohio’s Mr. Basketball in 2001 — and shared time together in Cleveland, helped the cause. As did his agent Rich Paul’s strong working relationship with Philadelphia owners Josh Harris and David Blitzer.
Embiid had extensive and meaningful conversations with James during the recruiting process, and has been trying to get James to Philadelphia — at least in a tongue-in-cheek fashion — since 2014. James considered joining the 76ers in 2018, before signing with the Lakers. The two teamed up to win gold in Paris in 2024.
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Only James and Embiid know exactly what was stated during their conversations this month, but clearly Embiid stated the right things when it came to his health and how they’ll both manage the pressure that comes with forming a superteam.
If they win, both men will share in the glory. If they don’t, hard choices will follow.
“It all comes down to Joel,” one league source close to the situation stated. “If it’s Tyrese, VJ, Jaylen Brown, LeBron and Adem Bona, that’s not a championship team. But if it’s those four guys and Joel, that’s a championship team.
“That’s not to say it’s Joel’s fault if it doesn’t go well. He might get blamed anyway. But more that he can be the reason they win — and LeBron can really help him.”
THERE IS ALMOST nothing the internet loves more than a gaffe amid a high-stakes drama that gives the appearance of revealing behind-the-scenes machinations that were supposed to stay hidden. So when an employee with the Miami Heat accidentally published a proposed introductory news conference time and date for James last week, it instantly went viral.
Coming around the same time as Dan Le Batard’s compelling interview in which Heat president Pat Riley noted that his relationship with James had “thawed” in recent years and blessed James’ return to Cleveland as something he had to do to get “the scarlet letter” off of his back, the social media gaffe seemed especially revelatory.
DraftKings sportsbook had the Heat at +1000 at the start of free agency, behind the Cleveland Cavaliers and Warriors (who were -275 favorites), but had moved them to -200 favorites as of earlier this week.
Then the coup de grâce. Internet sleuths soon found a job posting for the Heat’s YouTube page that seemed to suggest the person who’d made the gaffe had been immediately fired. Never mind that the job post had been up since the beginning of July.
Paul acknowledged he even thought that Miami would end up “as the spot,” for a long portion of a decision-making process that finally concluded Friday morning when James unveiled he’d chosen Philadelphia.
“It’s one of those things where you have already been somewhere and you’ve been so successful there, why erase it, going back there?” Paul told ESPN. “You’re never going to be able to duplicate or trump what you’ve already done.”
There were certainly basketball arguments to be made for the Cavaliers and Heat. The Warriors were also appealing for a time, a source close to James stated, but only if they acquired a proven star forward like Washington Wizards’ forward Anthony Davis, with whom James had won a title in 2020.
Paul has become a constant public and private voice throughout the monthslong saga in which his client’s moves have been dissected and analyzed for clues about his future. He whiteboarded the pros and cons of James’ free agency options on the July 3 edition of his “Game Over” podcast with co-host Max Kellerman.
But even he stated he had no idea which direction James was leaning until the two spoke in depth Thursday evening and a final decision was made at 1 a.m. ET on Friday.
Which is why the saga of the poor Heat staffer — who sources told ESPN had scheduled vacation for this week and was trying to get ahead of work that could come up if James indeed chose the Heat — was so amusing to Paul and the small group of people James confided in during his process.
“Did anyone really think LeBron was doing a press conference?” stated another league source close to the process, pointing out James didn’t make his first appearance as a Laker until training camp in the fall of 2018.
League rules prohibited the Sixers from even issuing a statement confirming the signing until James officially signed on the dotted line on Sunday night.
Which is kind of fitting in a way. James took every day of the 24 days he had to process his decision. The Sixers are still reconciling their trusting of a process, started under very different conditions more than a decade ago. Myers was brought in to reverse engineer everything. But the zero-sum choice remains as simple as Myers stated nine years ago: you’re either getting better or you’re getting worse.
LeBron stated he believed he made the Sixers better. So did they. The next process is making sure that happens.
