Watch Rob Parker of Fox Sports Radio's The Odd Couple call out the Los Angeles Lakers and LeBron James for coordinating a plan to unite LeBron with his son Bronny James in Los Angeles at the 2024 NBA Draft, and finding a way to push a marginal college player to the front of the line to fulfill LeBron's dream of playing alongside his son.
Check out the segment above as Parker calls the Lakers' drafting of Bronny 'the worst decision that has ever happened in professional sports', and one that could not only hurt LeBron's legacy, but also damage the league for years to come
Rob Parker: “I want to make this clear. This doesn’t have anything to do with Bronny. I get it, his father is trying to help his kid any way he can. I don’t have any kids, I never played professional sports, but I must admit... I think this is the worst decision that has ever happened in professional sports. And I’m dead serious when I say this. It changes what the essence of the game has always been, which is about competition. This is why you have an NFL where you have essentially 99% of the owners are White, and the league is 70% Black. Meritocracy is what allowed this to be the case. They didn’t just go out and field their teams with people who looked like them and said ‘I don’t care, I’m gonna do what I want to do because I own the team’... It was about the best people going out there, playing the game, and the people who deserve to get jobs, got jobs.
I heard people throw around ‘nepotism.’ I’ve seen it, it’s wrong, we’ve seen it in the front office, but it ain’t the same as what we’ve seen here as far as on the field. You’d have to show me some guy getting his son a spot on the team, or some owner putting his nephew on -- ‘you take the last spot on the roster, it doesn’t matter. I want you to be on the team because I own the team.’ That’s the part where when LeBron looks at his legacy he will be leaving the sport in a worse place than when he got here. He's opened up a pandora’s box now to where I don’t know how you tell people not to do what he just did. Smaller guard, didn’t have a great year in college – he might have been able to be on a team as a non-drafted player and worked his way through, but this was like ‘NO, I’M COMING TO THE LAKERS, GET OUT OF THE WAY, DON’T DRAFT HIM’... This is all about LeBron making this happen. Jerry Jones has all of his kids in the front office, but I could justify a family business where you’re hiring people in your family more so than I can on a team. I’m not saying I’m not against nepotism, but when you play on the field, that’s supposed to be based on your merit and your ability.
Thanasis Antetokounmpo got drafted by the Knicks, and it came after a season in which Giannis averaged 6 points and 4 rebounds. So it wasn’t as if he was a big star and they knew it. Giannis hadn’t even blossomed yet when the Knicks drafted his brother. Giannis had no sway, he couldn’t tell the Knicks to draft his brother -- he had six points his rookie year. Michael Jordan owned the Hornets and could have put one of his two sons on the team.
I heard plenty of scouts say that they didn’t think Bronny was an NBA player. The whole process feels bad and doesn’t feel good. I feel bad for Bronny. If this was on his own merit, anybody drafted him, and he worked his way through, I think he would have had a better situation or better chance without people wearing this on him, where the only reason he’s there is his dad. A lot of people aren’t going to say it publicly because LeBron still has power and he’s still a big name, but I’ve talked to a lot of former players who said ‘this doesn’t feel right.’ on the way this was handled.
There is some player who might have lost out on a job because of Bronny and because of the nepotism. When it comes to the best player on the field who deserves that opportunity, I think this is where you open up this slippery slope and this backdoor, and that’s what could be the next step that LeBron has opened up. Long-term this could have a bad effect on the NBA."
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