By TIM REYNOLDS AP Basketball Writer
LAS VEGAS — He first played on the U.S. Olympic team as a 19-year-old. He did it again in his 20s, twice. And now, a few months from turning 40, he’s back for one more run.
LeBron James didn’t need another Olympic experience to complete some missing box on his resume or add to a legacy that was secured long, long ago. He decided to play this summer for one simple reason – because he wants to.
Taking his first steps toward becoming the first U.S. men’s basketball player to compete at the Olympics in three different decades, James hit the court Saturday with the team that the Americans are sending to the Paris Games later this month. Training camp opened in Las Vegas, the start of a 5½-week quest where the only acceptable ending will be the U.S. winning gold for a fifth consecutive time.
“I’m still playing a high level,” James, a three-time Olympic medalist – two golds and one bronze – said Saturday after the first workout. “I still love the game of basketball. And Team USA has done well by me, so I felt like it was important for this summer to be able to go out there and play with the rest of the guys.”
The first practice came on a day of another first for the James family; the workout in Las Vegas was simultaneous to the Lakers’ first game in the California Classic summer league – the pro debut of Bronny James, his oldest son.
It would have been very easy for James to ask for Day 1 off, to go see his son’s debut. It was never a consideration. He took the court shortly after the buses rolled in, slapping hands with teammates, throwing down dunks and reconnecting with two of his former coaches – the Miami Heat’s Erik Spoelstra and the Clippers’ Tyronn Lue, both of whom won NBA titles with James on their squads.
“I was blown away by how hard he practices,” U.S. coach Steve Kerr said. “I went to Ty and Spo, and I said, ‘Is this normal?’ And they said, ‘Every day, every day.’ And then I said to Spo, ‘What about way back when you got him?’ And Spo said, ‘Every day, every drill, every walkthrough.’”
Kerr has coached against James in four NBA Finals, all of which featured Golden State guard Steph Curry – who plays for Kerr with the Warriors and is making his Olympic debut this summer.
And it’s fair to say that teaming up was part of what intrigued James and Curry when it was time to decide whether to play in Paris or not.
“I’ve talked to both of them about this idea of being together after going against one another with such high stakes over the years,” Kerr said. “They obviously fit really well together. The idea of Steph playing off the ball, and LeBron pushing it in transition, that’s pretty intriguing. Obviously, Steph will play on the ball as well. And LeBron has become such a good shooter, but they’re both so good at so many different areas of the game. I think they’re really excited to compete together for the first time.”
James was part of the U.S. teams that won bronze at the 2004 Olympics in Athens and the 2006 FIBA World Championships (now called the World Cup) in Japan. And ever since then, the Americans have gone unbeaten when James is wearing USA across his chest in international play.
Starting with the bronze medal game in Japan 18 years ago, the U.S. has played 36 games – 10 at the FIBA Americas tournament in 2007, then four exhibitions before and eight games at the 2008 Beijing Games, then five more exhibitions and eight games at the 2012 London Games – with James in uniform. The record: 36-0. He hopes it’s 47-0 when this summer’s run ends.
“I’m here to have a good summer,” James said.
Even after not playing in Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo, James will be participating in his fourth Olympics – tying the record for the most by any U.S. men’s player. Only Carmelo Anthony has played in four Olympics for the U.S. men to this point; Kevin Durant will play in his fourth this summer as well.
That’s a nice side note, but not the thing James is thinking about these days.
“Our only goal,” he said, “is to win a gold medal.”
As for his son, James said it was a “dream come true” for Bronny to be drafted by the Lakers last month, and that “there’s a loss for words” about what the opportunity to play with him means to LeBron and his family.
“For me to see my son to be able to, you know, be in the NBA alone. I mean, it’s always been a dream of his and for us to be side by side … there’s a loss of words, to be honest.
“I mean, the kid has worked so hard to get back to this point. There’s just so much that’s happened over the last year with him to have this happen less than a year from his incident to be with our friends and our family. When they announced his name, it was something that was super surreal, and it’s kind of still, our family still don’t even have enough words to explain the feeling that we had.”
When LeBron – who also praised the team’s first-round pick, Dalton Knecht, saying he was his favorite player, besides Bronny, to watch in college last season – was asked what the goals were from his son’s performances over the next couple of weeks during summer league action, he made it clear he won’t spend much time worrying about his box score statistics (Bronny had four points on 2-for-9 shooting in a 108-94 loss to the Sacramento Kings on Saturday afternoon).
“Just get his feet wet with the NBA,” LeBron said. “The pace of the game, the speed of the game, the physicality of the game. But what he does in the California Classic and summer league, it doesn’t matter if he plays well, and it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t play well. I just want him to continue to grow, practices, film sessions, his individual workouts.
“You can’t take anything stat-wise from the California Classic and summer league and bring it to once the season starts. So the only thing that matters is him getting better and stacking days. He missed a big part of the season last year because of the incident less than a year ago (Bronny survived cardiac arrest last July 24 during an informal team workout at USC and it was later determined he had a congenital heart defect). So he’s behind as far as where he would have been if he would’ve played the full season obviously. But I think every day he said he’s getting better and better every day, so every day, every practice, every film session he feels like he’s getting better and better and that’s the only thing that matters.”
Saturday also marked the first time LeBron had spoken with the media since the Lakers named JJ Redick their new head coach.
Both LeBron and Anthony Davis expressed optimism over working with Redick and what he can bring to the franchise moving forward.
But when it came to the Lakers, LeBron stopped short of any pronouncements about the team being a championship contender. Instead, he said – on multiple occasions – that the focus for him was simply on doing the work every day, and seeing what the results of that would be.
“My expectation is for us to go to work every day, try to get better every day and push each other every day,” said James, who signed a two-year contract with the Lakers this past week. “Me as a captain, A.D. as the captain, we got to hold everybody accountable from the player standpoint. We’re coming in with a new system, so we have to learn the system and see what Coach Redick and the rest of the coaching staff want us to do, and then go from there.”
Davis reiterated that Saturday, saying there are a lot of new elements, including Redick being a first-time head coach, but the Lakers cannot skip steps if they hope to get to their goal.
“Obviously the goal is to win, but this is still new, right?” Davis said. “JJ, first time being a head coach, first time being a coach, so that’s going to be new, right? Trying to learn his schemes, him adjusting to us, us adjusting to him. All that takes time. It’s not going to take two months, and then, ‘Oh, okay, we’ve figured everything out.’
“But the goal at the end of the day is still to win championships. And you can’t skip steps. So the first step is … we’re going to hold guys accountable … when something goes wrong, we’re going to hold guys accountable. And then from there, you know, we figure it out, and you get better each and every day.
“As long as we doing that, we put ourselves in a position to be successful.”
