How LeBron James 76ers' challenge began by losing in Delaware as teenager

PHILADELPHIA − A few months before “Sports Illustrated” labeled LeBron James “The Chosen One” on a 2002 cover, basketball fans in Delaware saw his star potential for themselves.

That took place at the former Slam Dunk to the Beach basketball tournament over the Christmas holiday in 2001 near Lewes, Delaware, when James had just turned 17 years old and was a junior at St. Vincent-St. Mary’s in his hometown of Akron, Ohio.

James was already the most-hyped high school player in decades, with many labeling him the next Michael Jordan.

And the attention was commesurate with the hype. The Cape Henlopen gym near Lewes was packed to capacity. There were dozens of college coaches, including Duke legend Mike Krzyzewski. There were also dozens of NBA scouts and executives.

All were seated in chairs along the baseline, or squeezing in among packed fans in the wooden stands, all hoping James would choose them, whether it was attending college or going straight to the NBA draft out of high school, which was allowed back then.

“The attention doesn’t bother me,” the precocious 17-year-old James said the day before his team’s first game in the tournament. “Everyone wants to see me play. If they come, I’ll give them something they could look forward to.”

A quarter century later, 76ers fans are feeling the same way as James and the Sixers open their season on Oct. 20 against the reigning champion Knicks in New York. The Sixers’ home opener is two nights later against the Cleveland Cavaliers.

James will turn 42 years old in December. He’s embarking on his first season with the 76ers, and 24th overall in the NBA, an all-time record. The Sixers and their fans are exuberant over the fact that “The Chosen One” chose them after James agreed to a two-year contract with the Sixers worth $7.95 million.

For some perspective, James earned $50.7 million last season for the Lakers, and just under $600 million for his career, according to Spotrac. So it’s clear that James picked the Sixers based on their chances of winning the franchise’s first NBA championship since the 1983 super team featuring Hall of Famers Julius Erving, Moses Malone and Maurice Cheeks.

At the very least, the Sixers and their fans are expecting James to lead the Sixers to the NBA Finals for the first time since Allen Iverson led them there in 2001. That is also the last time the Sixers made it past the second round of the NBA playoffs.

“I didn’t leave my family to lose in the second round. I know that for sure,” James said at his introductory press conference with the 76ers on Sept. 28.

James has proven that to be true at every one of his five previous NBA teams. It goes beyond his prolific scoring. James is the NBA’s all-time leading scorer with 43,440 points. His teams have won four championships, at least one in each city for which he has already played − Cleveland, Miami and the Los Angeles Lakers.

But as James put it, anybody can score. To win a championship, it takes much more.

“So many guys that have been in our league over the course of my career have never made a sacrifice in their career,” James said. “They average 20 points and 22 points a game, and they’ve had one or two postseason appearances and zero postseason wins.”

Many teams have tried the super team concept in the past. No one has made it pay off like James. In 2010, James left the Cleveland Cavaliers to sign with the Miami Heat, who also added Ray Allen and Chris Bosh to a team that already had Dwyane Wade.

The Heat reached the NBA Finals in each of James’ four seasons and won two championships. James then went back to Cleveland in 2014 on a team that already had Kyrie Irving. The Cavaliers also reached the NBA Finals in each of James’ four seasons there, winning it all once.

James then went to the Los Angeles Lakers in 2018. In his second season, the Lakers won the NBA title with Anthony Davis.

In each situation, James and the stars around him sacrificed for the common good.

Wade did this during James’ first season in Miami, going from averaging 25.5 points per game the season before James arrived to 22.1 in James’ first season.

“I just realized what we’re playing for, and what I’m playing for,” Wade told ESPN in 2012. “LeBron is probably the most talented player we’ve seen in a while. But how good can we be? Are we going to be good if me and him are both scoring 27 a night?”

James could face an even bigger challenge on a Sixers potential super team that has spent the past decade-plus trying to figure out a path to a championship built around 7-foot-2 center Joel Embiid.

Embiid was the NBA’s MVP in 2023. He has averaged more than 30 points per game three times in his career. But Embiid has played in only 39% of the Sixers’ games over the last three seasons.

Embiid is 32 years old with multiple knee surgeries that makes his movement like someone, well, like James’ age or older. And yet, when Embiid is healthy, as he claims to be now in training camp, he’s still a dominant force.

“Jo is one of the most talented guys we have in the world,” James said at media day. “For him, it’s just about health.”

The Sixers’ offense always had to flow through Embiid, and that often takes away from the Sixers’ young, fast and athletic guards in Tyrese Maxey, who averaged 28.3 points per game last season, and second-year guard VJ Edgecombe.

There’s also Jaylen Brown, whom the Sixers acquired from the rival Celtics a month before James signed. Brown averaged 28.6 points per game last season for the Celtics.

And there’s James, who even at 40 years old last season, was one of only four NBA players to average at least 20 points, 7 rebounds and 6 assists per game last season.

That’s four players in Embiid, Brown, Maxey and James who have all run an NBA offense as the main or secondary scorer.

Can they adjust to different roles?

“I’m at the point now where I’ve shown what I can do in this league, talent-wise,” Maxey recently told reporters. “I want to be judged by winning. If we win, that’s what I want to be judged by. That’s really my main mindset, my main goal. I want to find ways to win.

“I feel like because I’ve played so many different roles, I’m capable of doing a lot of things to help this team. I can play on the ball, I can play off the ball, I can play in transition, I can catch and shoot. I’m going to play however they need me to play.”

Yet that could change within a game. The Sixers could be forced to play two different styles − one for the plodding Embiid when he’s in the game, another for the go-go style of Maxey and Edgecombe.

And how does James fit into both situations?

After all, James isn’t 21 years old, or even 31 years old anymore. He hasn’t played in more than 71 games in a season since the 2017-18 season. Just like Embiid, the Sixers will likely have to manage his minutes, perhaps keep him out of games when the Sixers are playing on back-to-back nights.

It’s basically a crash course in learning two different systems. That chemistry doesn’t develop into “instant oatmeal,” as James called it.

Already, the Sixers stars have been bonding, whether it’s in a group text, or at dinners during the preseason. James has set the tone, often arriving at the Sixers’ facility in Camden, New Jersey before his teammates. That includes days when James takes a helicopter in from New York City, where he’s living while playing for the Sixers.

“He was in there before everybody,” Edgecombe told ESPN. “As usual.”

Let’s go back for a minute to the Slam Dunk to the Beach tournament.

There were more than 40 schools in the tournament, most featuring the top high school players from around the country, including about eight Delaware schools.

In the tournament’s main bracket championship game, St. Vincent-St. Mary’s played against Amityville (New York) High School that featured center Jason Fraser, who was bound for Villanova.

The game went back and forth, but James gave his team an 83-82 lead in the final 30 seconds by calmly making two free throws. That gave him 39 points on the night. But an Amityville player sank two free throws with 4 seconds left.

Four players, including Fraser, were guarding James as he raced down the court and put up a desperation 3-point shot as time expired. It missed, and Fraser immediately ripped off his jersey and yelled out, “What’s my name?!”

It was one of the few times that James had lost a game. It didn’t sit well with him.

That was evident in December of 2003, when James was already entrenched as an NBA star, playing for the Cavaliers. Before a game against the Sixers, James was asked about that game two years earlier in Lewes, Delaware.

“We lost. I had the flu. That was it,” he said tersely, as if that defeat still haunted him.

James was then told about a quote from Robert F. Jacobs, the tournament’s director, who said that thousands of people will claim that they were there that night to see James play.

“I played in a lot of tournaments like that,” James said. “All I know is that we lost, and I had the flu.”

The lesson? Losing stinks.

That’s something James has refused to accept throughout his career. But losing is also embedded in the Sixers culture ever since “The Process” famously began in the fall of 2012. That was when the Sixers, tired of mediocrity, decided to trade away just about all of their top players for draft picks, hoping to rebuild through first-round lottery picks.

“The Process” failed miserably as first-round picks Nerlens Noel, Jahlil Okafor, Michael Carter-Williams never developed. Then the Sixers took Embiid with the No. 3 overall pick in 2014. But Embiid missed his first two seasons with a broken foot.

In the second season that Embiid sat out, in 2015-16, the Sixers went 10-72. That was only one win more than the NBA’s all-time record of futility for an 82-game season. That was set by the 1972-73 Sixers team that went 9-73.

It wasn’t until the 2017-18 season, when Embiid was healthy for a full season, before the Sixers finally started showing their potential. The next season, with a pseudo-super team with Embiid, Ben Simmons, Jimmy Butler and Tobias Harris, the Sixers reached Game 7 of the second round of the playoffs against the Toronto Raptors.

But Kawhi Leonard hit a buzzer-beating, game- and series-winning Game 7 shot that hit the rim, bounced up, hit the rim again, bounced up again before finally going in. The Raptors advanced to the Eastern Conference finals, won that, then beat the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals.

The Sixers, meanwhile, continued on their folly of bad drafts and malcontent players.

The NBA had to step in as Sam Hinkie, the GM hired in 2012 to lead “The Process,” became a laughingstock in 2016. The NBA forced the Sixers to hire longtime executive Jerry Colangelo to oversee him. Hinkie famously resigned by issuing a “manifesto.”

Colangelo hired his son, Bryan, to replace Hinkie. Before the famous “burner account” incident on social media, Bryan Colangelo infamously traded up with the Celtics from No. 3 to No. 1 in the 2017 draft to take Markelle Fultz, another top pick who never developed. The Celtics used the Sixers’ pick to draft Jayson Tatum. That was one year after the Celtics drafted Brown.

Brown and Tatum led the Celtics to the NBA title in 2023-24. The Celtics went to the Finals two years earlier.

Meanwhile, Simmons became a head case after passing up a dunk in a shocking first-round loss to the Atlanta Hawks in the 2020-21 season and eventually forced his way off the team. Embiid kept getting injured heading into the playoffs, costing the Sixers long playoff runs.

The Sixers tried adding stars around Embiid. They traded for James Harden, re-signed Tobias Harris, then signed free agents Al Horford and Paul George. None of it worked because those players couldn’t find a way to make it work with Embiid.

Somehow, the Sixers were able to trade George and the remaining two years of his four-year, $212 million contract, along with a few draft picks, to the Celtics for Brown. The trade stunned Sixers fans as well as people around the NBA considering that the Sixers’ biggest rival, the Celtics, seemingly gave Brown away.

Then James admitted the trade for Brown helped his decision to sign with the Sixers a month later.

“We’re two of the guys on the team who have been through foxhole and the wringer of what it takes from the moment we step on the court in training camp to moment we raise that Larry O’Brien Trophy,” James said on a recent podcast with ex-NBA star Steve Nash.

“We know what it takes.”

Now it’s up to James to make sure the rest of his new Sixers teammates know this, too.

Contact Martin Frank at mfrank@delawareonline.com. Follow on X @Mfranknfl. Sign up for the “Eye On The Eagles” newsletter, emailed to your inbox every Friday morning. Read his coverage of the Eagles‘ championship season in “Flying High,” a hardcover coffee-table book from Delaware Online/The News Journal. Details at Fly.ChampsBook.com

This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: How LeBron James 76ers’ challenge began by losing in Delaware as teenager