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CHICAGO — The name he bore was so unreasonably large that, when Bronny James stepped onto the floor for his first scrimmage at the 2024 NBA Draft Combine here this week, it was disorienting, at first, to recognize the person who carried it.
Wearing the gray pinny of his team, the number 50 on his back, the would-be NBA player best known as his father’s son seemed … tiny. His smallness, compared to the players who seemed to loom over him on that floor, fit neatly with some of the news he’d made: That without shoes he had measured in at just 6-foot-1.5.
There were hopeful signs, too, but they felt overmatched by so much doubt. Yes, his 40.5 vertical was outstanding, and, yes, his impressive 6-foot-7 wingspan offered more reasons for optimism for those eager to believe in the basketball player with the big name. But many here doubted this James belongs in the league, including several who had scouted him throughout his so-so freshman season at USC.
This scrimmage was a small, first step toward trying to disprove all that. Here, now, as the buzzer sounded and the game got underway, was a chance for Bronny to be a basketball player worthy of whatever pick he may earn in next month’s draft, despite the reservations, challenges and pressures that will follow him.
It was not a step that went particularly well.
At first, Bronny seemed to simply vanish from the floor. Not good. Not bad. Not overmatched. Just … not particularly there. A strange place to inhibit for a young man whose whole basketball life — and likely his whole basketball life to follow, whatever that looks like — has been illuminated by, weighted down with and enhanced because of his dad being LeBron.
Yet that invisibleness was better than what followed. These kinds of scrimmages are not exactly wildly revelatory insights into players’ NBA futures. Most of these aspiring hoopsters have not played together, are nervous, are fighting to have a shot at being drafted, and are playing a microcosm of a microcosm of their still-budding careers.
Yet Bronny, in these nearly 20…
Source link : https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/inside-bronny-james-2024-nba-draft-combine-and-why-he-could-follow-path-of-another-hall-of-famers-son/
Author : Bill Reiter
Publish date : 2024-05-16 16:06:56
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