Fox Sports’ Chris Broussard thinks that Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James will go the remainder of his NBA career without winning another title unless the storied franchise manages to acquire a former teammate of James in Kyrie Irving.
"The one way I think LeBron could win another championship with the Lakers is if they somehow were able to get Kyrie."
— @Chris_Broussard explains: pic.twitter.com/spwiNE7c91
— First Things First (@FTFonFS1) April 1, 2024
“I don’t think he will,” Broussard said about the notion of James winning another title with the Lakers.
“… This is the one way I think that he could win another championship. And this won’t happen because this team is really playing well.
“If they somehow were able to get Kyrie Irving and you’re talking about A.D. (Anthony Davis), LeBron and Kyrie. Kyrie knows how to play with LeBron. He’ll defer to LeBron, respects LeBron. That would be — I think they’d be able to win a championship. But that’s not going to happen. Obviously, Dallas is happy with Kyrie. Otherwise, I don’t see them winning it.”
Lakers insider Jovan Buha recently cited Irving as a star player that the team could target in the offseason.
Irving played alongside James for three seasons, from the 2014-15 season through the 2016-17 campaign. Notably, both players helped lead the Cleveland Cavaliers to their first NBA title in franchise history back in 2016, when the Cavaliers beat the Golden State Warriors in seven games in the NBA Finals after trailing in the series 3-1.
Fast forward to the 2023-24 regular season, and Irving’s current team in the Dallas Mavericks has been playing as well as any team in the league across the last few weeks. The Mavericks are winners of their last seven contests and hold the longest active winning streak in the NBA at the moment.
In Irving’s most recent game with Dallas, he totaled 24 points, three rebounds, seven assists and one steal while shooting 9-of-19 from the field and 4-of-9 from 3-point range against the Houston Rockets — who owned the longest active winning streak in the league at 11 games before losing to the Mavericks — on March 31.
The guard’s scoring display against the Rockets marked the fifth time over his last six games that he has managed to drop at least 24 points, with the outlier during that span being when he scored 16 points against the Utah Jazz on March 21.
The Mavericks are now comfortably in the Western Conference playoff picture, as the team owns the No. 5 seed in the conference with a record of 45-29 on the season.
James and the Lakers, on the other hand, are way below Dallas in the standings as the No. 9 seed in the Western Conference.
But Los Angeles won its most recent regular-season contest against the Brooklyn Nets on March 31. James — the oldest player in the NBA — turned back the clock against the Nets with a 40-point performance on 13-of-17 shooting from the floor and 9-of-10 from deep.
