Will Bronny James & LeBron James play together this season? Lakers coach JJ Redick has a plan
It won’t be long now before the 2024-25 NBA season begins and with that, we’ll get a first look at the highly anticipated Lakers father-son duo.
Knowing that the pressure is now well and truly on, the Lakers’ new head coach has outlined his plan of development for the team’s rookie and how he will ultimately share the floor with his father, the legendary LeBron James.
JJ Redick has plans for LeBron & Bronny
With the start of the NBA season a little over a month away, attention has naturally turned to preseason and all that comes with it such as roster building. With that in mind, we come lineup of the Los Angeles Lakers which for obvious reasons is now under the microscope. To that end, it was only natural to find the Lakers coach JJ Redick back in his element - a podcast - giving some insight as to what we can expect in LA this coming season.
Speaking on ESPN’s ‘The Lowe Post’ on Tuesday, Redick discussed among other things, his path to coaching, how he landed the Lakers job, and, what fans can look forward to in his first season on the bench. Understandably, that led to talk of perhaps the biggest issue on Reddick’s plate this season: How to handle the team’s new guard Bronny James. As the son of the team’s current star and arguably the most iconic player in the NBA, Bronny’s development is going to be a hot topic. Now, it’s worth noting that Redick did touch on guard Max Christie and guard Jalen Hood-Schifino, while also finding time to praise first-round forward Dalton Knect, but Lowe pressed him on the younger James’ future and the plans for it.
Interestingly, Redick went on to indicate that the franchise intends to lean on Los Angeles’s G-League team, explaining that he considers the team and its staff to be an extension of the Lakers themselves. “I would expect us to use the G-League for very specific reasons,” Redick told Lowe. “I think Bronny is a young guy I’m very high on... as a basketball player. And I said this at his press conference. I said, he’s kind of like our first player that we get to mold and help develop. And so we’re going to look at the G-League as a tool in our player development system.”
To be clear, Redick did not offer any specific information about a timetable for Bronny’s development but he did reveal that he has in fact had conversations about how to put LeBron and Bronny on the court at the same time and by the looks of things, it could be earlier than any suspect. “In terms of that moment, yeah, we’ve talked about it and we’ve thought about it,” Redick said. “We’ll get it done. I don’t want to commit to anything right now but that is going to happen and is going to happen sooner rather than later.”