If the NBA spends a month delaying its entire schedule for LeBron James and then doesn’t put his 76ers on Christmas Day, that’s the funniest possible outcome the league office could produce.
I want to say I’m exaggerating. I’m not.
Adam Silver couldn’t even print the schedule until James picked a team. The commissioner said as much himself, telling a room full of finance and media people that “I would like him to make his announcement already, so we can finish the schedule.” That’s the actual commissioner of the actual NBA, on the record, admitting the league’s flagship December showcase was being held up by one free agency decision.
Now James has picked. He’s a member of the Philadelphia 76ers, his fourth team, having signed a two-year, $8 million deal with a player option, engineered by Rich Paul. Tyrese Maxey helped sell it. The two go back to Maxey’s college days, and they share an agency. Joel Embiid’s there too, assuming his knees cooperate for five consecutive minutes.
It’s a genuinely fascinating third act for the greatest bandwagon-jump of the peacetime era.
So the whole schedule reveal, Opening Week and national TV windows included, got pushed back to accommodate it. Every assumption points toward the league building Christmas Day around the guy it just spent a month waiting on.
That’s the assumption, anyway.
James has played in a record 20 career Christmas Day games, 19 of them in a row, which is basically his union-mandated holiday shift at this point. Awful Announcing is predicting a five-game slate with 76ers-Knicks as the 5pm centerpiece, pitting the league’s biggest individual draw against the New York Knicks, specifically Jalen Brunson’s Knicks, in a matchup that’s happened on this holiday more than any other. CBS Sports guesses differently: 76ers-Knicks on Opening Night at the Garden, then 76ers-Cavaliers gets the Christmas slot.
Neither of those is confirmed. Nobody outside league offices actually knows what’s in tomorrow’s release.
The realistic version probably has him on Christmas somewhere. TV wants him, the league wants him, and both predictions above already have him playing that day on the same 76ers team that’s already +900 to win it all off a two-year contract nobody expected. Silver isn’t going to torch a ratings bonanza over a scheduling headache.
But picture the alternative anyway. The league delays its entire release, all but admits on the record that James was the last variable holding it up, and then the Christmas slate comes out without him in it. Maybe the Sixers aren’t good enough yet. Maybe the math points elsewhere. Maybe Silver’s still a little salty about a month of “any day now” texts.
That’s not a snub. That’s a sitcom ending.
I’ve got real stakes here as a Knicks fan. Either my team gets the marquee Christmas slot against the most-discussed roster in the league, or I get to watch the NBA answer a month of manufactured suspense with an anticlimax so perfect it loops back around into great television.
https://x.com/LegionHoops/status/2086902392277365109
Eighteen hours left of nobody knowing anything. Somehow that’s the most honest this schedule process has been all summer.
