coverage
lebron james has already become a role player, and philadelphia needs the half of the job he no longer does.
who sets the screen in philadelphia?
an eastern conference executive put that question to espn this week. the answer he arrived at was a forty-one-year-old who finished 579th out of 582 nba players in average speed on defense last season.
the executive had two more questions behind it. who does the dirty work? who defends? he was not asking about joel embiid or tyrese maxey or jaylen brown. he was asking about lebron james. he had looked at the roster philadelphia assembled in three weeks and worked out something awkward. the most decorated player in the history of the sport is the likeliest candidate to do the parts nobody wants.
that is a strange thing to say about a man on a minimum contract. it is also the season.
the conversion has already happened on one end. james spent last year turning into something he had never been, and the tracking data reads like a different player inside the same body. he held the ball for 3.8 minutes per game, 11.6% of his time on the floor, comfortably the lowest of the thirteen seasons the league has tracked. he was assisted on 53.9% of his field goals, the first time in twenty-three years that more than half his baskets arrived from somebody else’s pass. he drove 6.9 times a game, the lowest rate of the tracking era by a healthy margin. his usage rate was 26.2%, also a career low, and his 20.9 points per game matched the lowest figure he has ever posted, which he set as a rookie in 2003.
none of it made him worse. he shot 51.5% from the field. he led the league in fast break points for the eighth time at 5.7 per game, and his 6.2 per thirty-six minutes were the second-best rate of his career. more than a quarter of his finished plays came in transition, the highest share since the league began counting in 2015. he dunked 1.6 times a game, his most in nine years, after dunks had fallen to 5.6% of his field goals the season before and climbed back to 11.2%. he owns 4,090 career assists on three-pointers, more than anyone in thirty seasons of play-by-play data.
that is a role player. a very good one, with a scoring record attached.
the other end moved the opposite way in the same season. opponents shot 48.8% on the shots james defended, against an expected mark of 47.2%. that was the first time in thirteen tracking seasons that shooters beat expectation against him. he ranked in the sixth percentile in shots defended per hundred possessions. out of 582 players in the league, he was 579th in average speed on defense, which puts him in the company of donovan mitchell at 572nd and james harden at the very bottom.
some of that is a star conserving himself for the offensive end. some of it is a preference. preferences at forty-one tend to be arrangements made with the body.
philadelphia needs him to cancel the arrangement.
nick nurse’s problem is drawn on the floor before anybody throws a ball up. jayson tatum is healthy again in boston. giannis antetokounmpo is in miami. karl-anthony towns steps out to twenty-eight feet in new york. those are the men who decide series in the east, and the sixers have three plausible answers for them. embiid cannot move like that any more. brown is not big enough for two of the three. that leaves the forty-one-year-old.
the supporting numbers are worse than the headline. not one member of the projected starting five ranks inside the league’s top seventy-five in defensive drip. the best mark among them belongs to vj edgecombe, at 0.85, and edgecombe is a six-foot-four guard entering his second season. philadelphia’s one elite defender last year was paul george, and george was the outgoing half of the trade that brought brown in.
“they do not have any role players on their team now,” a rival executive told the ringer.
the arithmetic backs him up. brown took more shots than anybody in the league last season and finished second in usage rate. maxey led the league in minutes per game and has scored at least 25.9 points a game in each of the last three seasons. embiid, upright, still draws a double team every night. edgecombe finished second among all rookies in clutch points. five men, five careers spent being the reason.
a basketball floor is a piece of ground that five bodies divide by agreement, and the agreement gets renegotiated every possession. it holds when the division is honest about who can cover what. it collapses when two men both decide the ground behind them belongs to somebody else. philadelphia has gathered five players who have spent their professional lives being handed the ball, and the ground nobody has claimed is the ground behind the shot.
there is a second floor to the problem. embiid has played 490 of a possible 820 regular season games across his ten playing seasons and has never reached seventy in any of them. when he sits, the only way to keep the offense intact is to go small, and going small means james at center. a forty-two-year-old at the five in may, against towns or against antetokounmpo, is a plan that reads better in july.
the counter-plan is obvious to anybody holding a clipboard. make embiid run. make james run. keep making them run until one of them chooses which possessions to spend, and then attack the possession he declined.
the money makes the thinness worse rather than better.
james will earn $3.9 million next season, 2.35% of the salary cap, and he will be the seventh-highest-paid player on his own team. the darko projection system puts his per-possession impact among forwards earning between $40 million and $57 million. philadelphia registered the bargain of the decade and walked straight into the arithmetic underneath it. because the deal runs two years instead of one, the league grants no cap relief, where a single season would have counted $2.4 million. the sixers are hard-capped at the first apron, having signed dean wade for more than $6.1 million of the non-taxpayer mid-level exception. to fit james beneath the line they must waive a non-guaranteed contract or shed a small salary, and the roster spot that opens cannot be refilled until the regular season has started.
the cheapest acquisition in the franchise’s modern history costs them a body. the body it costs them is the kind that covers ground.
james turns forty-two on the thirtieth of december. he missed twenty-two games last season with sciatica and arthritis in his left foot. he played sixty and averaged 33.2 minutes, the fewest of any year he has had. on monday morning he posted from the gym at 4:12, the hour he has been advertising for a decade. in his announcement on friday he had written about what he still wants from the work.
“i still want to sacrifice. i still want to work,” james wrote.
the sacrifice being asked of him has nothing to do with shots. he surrendered those last season and looked comfortable doing it, playing behind luka dončić and austin reaves and then carrying a broken lakers team past houston when both of them went down. what philadelphia needs is the twenty feet between a shooter and a closeout, eighty-two times, and then again in the sixteen games that decide anything.
one player on the roster can already do all of it, and the summer may have just priced him out of the chance. edgecombe went third in the 2025 draft, made the all-rookie first team, finished third in rookie of the year voting and second among rookies in clutch points. at twenty he is the best perimeter defender in the starting five and the only one there whose game already contains the connective work. two team sources told espn they were concerned about what two high-usage arrivals would do to his development.
so the plan asks a twenty-year-old to become a role player at the same moment it asks a forty-one-year-old to become one. only one of them has the legs for the version philadelphia actually needs.
“the process is over. this needs to be the product,” one coach told espn.
the assignment is legible. philadelphia has not reached a conference final since 2001. across the last nine seasons, nineteen of the other twenty-nine franchises have reached at least one. the sixers hold the fifth-best regular season record over that stretch and have never converted it into a week in may. james has reached twelve conference finals in twenty-three seasons. he was brought in to move a franchise from one side of that line to the other, and everybody involved understands the terms.
what nobody has said out loud is which end of the floor decides it. the offense will be fine. maxey and brown can manufacture a shot against anyone, embiid remains the most dominant scorer in the building on a good night, and james is the best passer any of them has played with. james and maxey finished first and third in the league in fast break points last season, and the two of them running together is the cleanest idea on the roster. philadelphia ranked seventeenth in offensive rating without either new arrival. it will not rank seventeenth again.
the defense finished sixteenth last season, then traded away its best defender. neither of the two men who replaced him shot better than 35% from three.
rich paul described what happens to a locker room when his client arrives.
“he kind of shows you how big or little of a star you actually are,” paul said.
that lands as a sentence about ego. it works just as well as a description of a rotation. a team learns exactly how much of its own load it can carry the moment somebody arrives who used to carry all of it and no longer can.
a shot goes up in may. five bodies turn to find the men they lost. the oldest one is looking for somebody with a running start.
zane, glenn, peter, ivan, patrick and phillip went paid this week, and the tracking data on them is thin. six subscriptions, no minutes played, no recorded opinion on closeouts. the sample grows every friday, on the other side of the wall. welcome to bang!