Bronny James and the Pros and Cons of Nepotism
With confirmation that Bronny James will be eligible for next month’s NBA Draft, I wanted to use the occasion to revisit nepotism, one of my favorite subjects. When I first wrote about this topic two years ago (which was, apparently, the “year of the Nepo Baby”), I talked about coaches:
But the Bronny James example provides for a more interesting discussion for a few reasons: He is a more sympathetic figure than Stephen Belichick (if only for the health problems Bronny has already had to overcome), and there is a much clearer standard of “merit” when it comes to players than there is for coaches.
When it comes to those traditional standards, LeBron’s son doesn't seem to merit much consideration by NBA teams. He spent his only year in college playing for USC — a bad team in a mediocre conference — and he was not especially impressive, mostly coming off the bench and averaging just 4.8 points per game.
And yet most people seem to expect James to get drafted, almost entirely because of who his father is: LeBron James has been vocal about wanting to play with his son in the NBA, even going to so far as to say that he would sign as a free agent with whatever team drafts Bronny — he’s backed off that slightly and most people expect him to stay with the Lakers,1 but it’s clear he still has that as his long-term goal. And so it seems likely that Bronny will get drafted, either by the Lakers trying to make LeBron happy, by another team trying to lure LeBron away, or by a team looking for a valuable trade piece in the case that LeBron pushes whatever team he ends up with to trade for his son.
I like a lot of things about this story, specifically LeBron’s desire to play alongside his sons, which feels both audacious and oddly wholesome. But it also gets at some aspects of nepotism that undermine common liberal objections to it. For starters, it is not supposed to be true that nepo-based hiring is so clearly in the interest of whoever is doing the hiring. It is a standard objection to nepotism that it’s counterproductive, because hiring people based on anything but “merit” is going to undermine the final product. That was the idea behind the Bomani Jones segment I responded to two years ago: If you hire the head coach’s kids as your assistant coaches, the play-calling will suffer.
My objection in that case was based on the idea that in coaching, like so many other jobs, “merit” is almost impossible to define consistently, let alone to assess in some objective manner. For most jobs, the “product” is so diffuse that pinning down exactly who is responsible for what is a futile exercise; for almost every job, there are many, many people who could fill the position with no discernible difference in the output of the overall firm.
But even in a professional basketball team — where merit really IS quantified and measured to an absurd degree, and where teams chase small, almost imperceptible differences in ability to extract a few more wins — it STILL makes sense for a team to take Bronny James. After all, most second-round picks do not become starters,2 or even major rotation players; many don’t make the team at all. Picks that late usually start in the G League, and are rolls of the dice anyway, so is it so crazy to roll the dice on LeBron James’ son?
It’s not just that picking Bronny might lure his dad to your team; it’s also true that a team might be more willing to take a chance on Bronny James, given his background, than it would be on other players in the draft. After all, is one season of college basketball, coming off a cardiac arrest, really the most important, predictive thing for someone like Bronny? Teams know quite a bit more about him than they know about most other players, and have more reasons to believe he might turn into a viable pro: He has grown up playing basketball, alongside perhaps the greatest player of all-time, as well as many of his peers. Bronny likely understands the grind of an NBA life, perhaps he is more coachable, less likely to have off-the-court problems, etc., and so there are many reasons to believe his game might develop over time. Should teams discard all that because someone else on USC averaged 11 points per game?
This is another aspect of nepotism that often gets ignored: the idea that certain traits ARE heritable, both through biology and your environment, and that therefore people who grow up around something are more likely to be good at that thing than someone who doesn’t. “Nepotism” is not the only explanation for why some people have similar skills to their parents, or like the things they like, and therefore might be drawn to the same jobs. It is tempting, and sometimes even advisable, to draw lines between which inherited advantages are fair and which are unfair — you’re allowed to get good genes from your parents, but not a job recommendation — but there are serious limits to this before the lines start getting completely arbitrary. Is Bronny not allowed to practice with his dad because that would be unfair to other NBA prospects?
And this gets at a final tension within the discourse around nepotism: that some parents and kids might WANT to work together, and so it might just be good for morale. After all, that’s really at the heart of the LeBron/Bronny issue. The former has said that a big reason he wants to keep playing in the NBA is so he can play alongside his sons,3 so drafting Bronny might make LeBron happy and increase his desire to keep playing. Obviously, that gives Bronny a kind of value that no other player can compete with. It’s unreasonable both to pretend that value doesn’t exist AND to expect any other player to have it, so how is a team supposed to compare him to other prospects?
There are certainly understandable objections to nepotism: I don’t like it when powerful people use pull to get their failsons out of trouble, and I have the same instinctively negative reaction to things like Hunter Biden working for a Ukrainian energy company, or NBC paying Chelsea Clinton $26,000 per minute. But framing the problem with these things as “nepotism” sort of misses the point: The problem in those cases were conflicts of interest, not that those kids were undeserving of those fake jobs. The fixation on nepotism reflects a peculiarly capitalist fixation on the notion of individual merit in the job market. It is based on this myth that a job is something you “deserve” — a myth which is then used to justify everything from perverse wage/wealth inequality to a boss’ absolute power over hiring and firing.
And what I like about examples like Bronny James is how he frustrates that myth. Obviously, Bronny doesn’t “deserve” to be drafted — but he probably still will and should be. And that’s OK…
LeBron has a player-option for next season.
If we go back five years, for example, and look at the second round of the 2019 Draft, only three of the 30 players taken — Nic Claxton, Daniel Gafford, Terance Mann — turned into reliable starters in the league.
His other son, Bryce, is finishing up his junior year in high school, so LeBron would need to play at least three more seasons for all three to play together.