february 17–march 1, 2020 | newyork 31on whether Bronny would eventually make it to the NBA. “My son
is in ninth grade, man,” LeBron said in response to a New York
reporter’s question about whether he would finally join the Knicks
if the team drafted his son. “We’re trying to worry about what project
he’s gotta turn in tomorrow.”
Bronny’s parents finally allowed him to join Instagram last May,
shortly before his transfer to Sierra Canyon with Wade was
announced. “Everyone welcome the heir to the throne to IG
@ bronny!,” @KingJames wrote on Instagram. “Keep y’all hating
asses off his comments.” (Draymond Green, the tempestuous
Golden State Warrior, didn’t take the hint: “Im at your fucking neck
this summer G!!! All gas.”)
Up and down the Sierra Canyon roster, the players now saw
their place on the team as a way to build their brand in various
ways. Zaire Wade has 1.8 million Instagram followers. Dylan
White, one of the team’s bench players, is a budding rapper; his
teammates raved to me about his songs, and an Instagram
endorsement from one of the more famous kids on the team could
jump-start his rap career. “Dylan can not only use his network, but
he can use the other guy’s network if they decide to post one of his
raps,” said Chevalier, who joined Instagram this season to help
understand how his players see the world. “It allows him to get his
name out there and grow his brand and push his music.” At one
game, I met L Simpson, a Sierra Canyon basketball player who
graduated last year. He has his own clothing line, Take No L’s, and
told me business was “boomin’. ”
One irony of Sierra Canyon’s season of excessive hype is that its
best players, Boston and Williams, are not sports royalty. (Boston
has committed to attend the University of Kentucky, a basketball
powerhouse, and Williams can go to pretty much any school he
wants.) Another irony is that, despite all the attention, the team has
occasionally struggled, losing to less heralded teams from Virginia,
Minnesota, Long Island, and the other side of L.A.; Sierra Canyon
is currently ranked 17th in ESPN’s list of the country’s 25 best high-
school basketball teams, one spot ahead of a public highschoolin
Camden, New Jersey. That’s in part because there’s no guarantee
that every next-generation talent will be the Second Coming.Derek
Fisher, whose son plays on Sierra Canyon’s eighth-grade basketball
team, told me he thinks his son could play his way ontoanIvy
League team if he wanted it badly enough, but he wasn’t sure his
son’s heart was in it—or at least not as much as it was inFortnite
and NBA2K. “Realistically, in five years, he might be abletogetan
e-sports scholarship,” Fisher said. (Sierra Canyon has ateamfor
that: John Branca, an entertainment lawyer—he is the co-executor
of Michael Jackson’s estate—funded an e-sports team onbehalfof
his son that recently won back-to-back games of Rocket Leagueby
a combined score of 78-3.)
As a freshman, Bronny James has been a role player, as everyone
close to him—if not the hype machine—expected him to be. Zaire
Wade’s season was derailed by injury, and he struggled to find con-
sistent minutes. While the expectations were higher, the NBA dads
also seemed to have a more realistic sense of what was possible,
knowing how hard it had been for them, and Chevalier told me the
famous dads are generally hands-off. (This isn’t always the case for
other parents: I watched one father angrily but unsuccessfully try to
fight his way past Sosa into the locker room after a game to confront
Chevalier about his son’s limited playing time.) One evening in Janu-
ary, I walked out of the Feinberg Family Pavilion with Dwyane Wade
and tried to put a positive spin on things by asking about the suc-
cessful alley-oop his son had thrown to Bronny in the team’s game
that night, as he had done with Bronny’s father countless times. “We
wanted more of those moments,” Wade said candidly. “For him, the
opportunity isn’t here the way he wanted it to be when we came
here.” Wade said that his son had been “coddled for a while in his life”
and that this was the first time he had faced real adversity. “Would I
love him to play more and be more involved? Yeah,” Wade said. “But
if it’s not happening this year, then he has to work hardsoit happens
next year, wherever he’s at.”From left,
Dylan White,
junior guard;
Metoyer; Yu;
Bailey; Wigington;
and James.(Continued on page 88)