USC Basketball: Ryen Russillo Reacts To Changing NBA Draft Assessment Of Bronny James

He's fallen out of some mocks.

All-Star Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James' support of his son, USC Trojans freshman combo guard Bronny James, possibly lingering in school longer than expected after previously saying, rather directly, that he wanted the duo to team up soon on an NBA floor, has not gone without scrutiny.

The always-incisive Ryen Russillo of The Ringer has weighed in on the move in a recent segment on his self-titled podcast.

"I think the biggest story from the NBA was LeBron James," Russillo said. "It was a tweet about his son Bronny James being removed from ESPN.com's 2024 mock draft. That's two rounds. He wasn't in the first round, he wasn't in the second round either."

James clapped back on X/Twitter with a since-excised post asking for patience, requesting that pundits "let the kid be a kid." 

"LeBron got crushed for it, it was deleted, and there's a lot of history behind this, so let's examine this story from as many angles as we can. Let's start with the nice stuff. This is a dad talking up his kid. I'd rather have my dad talk me up than tell me I suck every day. Like everything there's a balance to this," Russillo allowed. "I think, especially knowing LeBron's own upbringing, knowing his father was not part of the picture, there is something you can look at this and say, 'Hey this is endearing that he has been just to the mat for his son.'"

"So if you go back over history here, there's some tweets that are putting a lot of pressure on his kid," Russillo said, before going on to quote some optimistic LeBron James tweets. "And then you have last night [when James tweeted 'let the kid be a kid']. But now that he's part of the draft conversation, like he was with the mock a year ago, and now removed from it last night... the same way we watched all the guys before the one-and-done era who were jumping from high school to the NBA, we watched high school kids and we asked ourselves a simple question: 'Can this kid play?'"