In the summer of 2012, when the Miami Heat added Ray Allen to a roster that already had LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh, the first question wasn’t about talent – it was about who was going to move. Allen had been a first option his entire career. Bosh had already spent two years quietly playing second choice himself. The Heat won the championship that year and the next. The question of “who moves” turned out to be less about egos and more about whether the right people were willing to ask it honestly. Twelve years later, ESPN’s Brian Windhorst watched the same question come to the Philadelphia 76ers – and he is not confident everyone in that locker room is ready for the answer.

LeBron James joined the Sixers on a two-year veteran’s minimum deal, saying Philadelphia represented the final chapter of his career and his chance to become the first player to win NBA championships with four different franchises. He joins a roster already featuring Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, sophomore V.J. Edgecombe, and recently acquired Jaylen Brown.

“Jaylen Brown didn’t choose this,” Windhorst said on The Hoop Collective podcast. “LeBron chose this. Tyrese Maxey and Embiid were talking to LeBron on the phone trying to talk him into it. Jaylen Brown didn’t choose this — this was put onto Jaylen Brown.”

“He comes in with a boulder on his shoulder because of the way that, quite frankly, he just got dumped in his mind — and I don’t blame him. Disrespected by the Celtics on the way out the door, two years removed from winning a Finals MVP and a championship there. But if he comes in with a priority of this revenge tour, how does that work with all these other, and we haven’t even mentioned VJ Edgecombe, by the way.”

Jaylen Brown arrived as a five-time All-Star having just carried the Celtics as their primary option through Tatum’s Achilles recovery – a season where he averaged 28.7 points and had the basketball in his hands the way it had never been during Boston’s championship years. He did not request a trade to the Philadelphia 76ers. He was traded there; he had no say in the move, and is now being asked to share the ball with the player everyone was calling to recruit.

Over the past three seasons, Joel Embiid has appeared in 96 of a possible 246 regular-season games for the 76ers. In 2025-26, he missed games with a lateral meniscus injury, knee soreness, a strained oblique, a shin stress fracture, and then contracted appendicitis on a Houston road trip and required an appendectomy days before the Sixers’ playoff run began. “I don’t even know if I care about what Embiid does the first five months of the season. I don’t care what Embiid looks like in November, December, January, February. They need him for really important games in the playoffs. We’ll see it in the spring.”