A trainer named Chris Johnson booked a gym in Los Angeles on Wednesday morning, filmed LeBron James, Jaylen Brown and Tyrese Maxey running actual basketball drills together, and captioned it “new era, new energy”; within hours the discourse had processed three grown men doing a light workout like grainy footage smuggled out of a bunker. The genuinely funny part is the reaction, not the workout, and the reaction insists on being both obviously staged and, somehow, the most important thing that happened in the NBA all week.
It works anyway because August is a content desert, and dead weeks run on exactly one commodity: proof that the guys you traded for actually exist in the same building as the guys you signed. The Sixers hadn’t put James and Brown in a frame together at all until Wednesday. Brown hasn’t been photographed within thirty feet of LeBron since the trade that sent Paul George to Boston sent him to Philadelphia for George and four draft picks, two firsts and two seconds, a haul that still reads like a typo given the Sixers had just eliminated the Celtics from the playoffs weeks earlier, per ESPN. A trainer’s Instagram post, first flagged by HoopsHype, did the PR department’s job for free, and it did it better, because nobody trusts the PR department and everybody trusts a guy with a whistle around his neck and a ring light behind him. Somehow the front office actually pulled this off: the 76ers bet their offseason on a phone call, and four months later that bet is running pick-and-rolls in a gym with a trainer’s camera pointed at it.
Compare it to a hostage video, if you want the ugly version of the metaphor; compare it to a proof-of-life call, if you want the slightly more charitable one. Either way, the format is identical: a captive audience, a controlled setting, and a message that only matters because the alternative, total silence about whether this trio can coexist, would be worse. That’s why the workout happened at an early morning slot in a well-lit gym, with a trainer whose apparent second job is now confirming assets are alive, and why nobody bothered pretending the camera angle was an accident.
None of that makes the footage meaningless. This was, per Bleacher Report, the first video of James, Brown and Maxey together as teammates since the roster got rebuilt around them, and that’s a different category of information than a hype tweet. Here’s ESPN’s Dave McMenamin confirming the same detail, worth a look once for the staging and once for what it’s actually showing:
https://twitter.com/mcten/status/2090125951791419671
You can find the whole genre insufferable and still need to watch the clip. That contradiction is exactly what the Sixers are counting on to get them through six more weeks of nothing happening.
Maxey, for what it’s worth, has receipts here; he’s described his own recruiting of LeBron during free agency as relentless, going back years, according to Yahoo Sports, which reframes the workout as less a marketing stunt and more a guy finally cashing in on old texts. LeBron didn’t get traded to Philadelphia, either. He signed there as a free agent on a two-year, $8 million deal, walking straight into Joel Embiid’s frontcourt and, evidently, Maxey’s group chat. Throw in Anfernee Simons and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, plus depth pieces like Dean Wade and Labaron Philon Jr., and the roster Philadelphia built around one workout video is deeper than anything they’ve had in years. It’s clearer now why the Sixers’ title odds already jumped before a single preseason possession got played, and why the East should still be paying attention to a team that spent its August doing gym sessions instead of press conferences.
I don’t watch the NBA closely enough to have a real dog in the Eastern Conference race, but even I saw this video three times before noon, which is either a testament to good staging or a sign the league office should start paying trainers directly. Training camp opens September 29; the season starts October 20 against the Knicks. Everything between now and then is going to look exactly like this: a little too clean, a little too convenient, and impossible to stop watching anyway.
