Mark the date down: July 24, 2026. The day LeBron James signed with the Philadelphia 76ers. We've been waiting on this decision for nearly a month, and we finally got it. The Sixers are stoked. The Cavaliers and Warriors are bummed.
Let's take a look at the biggest winners and losers as the King has finally picked his castle.
Winner: Philadelphia 76ers
This is pretty obvious. They got LeBron James a few weeks after flipping Paul George for Jaylen Brown. There are home runs and there are grand slams. This was a grand-slam summer for the Sixers. James, on a reported two-year, $8 million deal, is immediately the greatest bargain-bin signing in NBA history. Two players averaged at least 20 points, seven assists and six rebounds last season while shooting at least 50% from the field: Nikola Jokić was one, James was the other. And Philly just got him on a minimum contract.
You're going to hear a lot of "there's only one ball" takes here, and it's true; there's arguably a scoring surplus with the Sixers and multiple players are going to have to sacrifice touches and shots. But that's part of what makes James so valuable here. He's maybe the best connector in NBA history, and his passing will help blend a heavy-usage starting five. Nick Nurse, entering Year 4 as Philly's coach, is nothing if not creative. He has a lot to work with, and he now has 82 games to experiment with more leeway.
In the end, this will still come down to Joel Embiid's health in the postseason. But getting there in one piece and not having to go through the play-in is the first step up the mountain, and neither Embiid nor James will have to carry a disproportionate load through the regular season. Immediately, their chances of being healthy going into the playoffs rise considerably. And Nurse can stagger all these guys, too. Every lineup will have not one but two elite scorers. And when they're all in there, defenses won't have anywhere to hide a weak link.
James obviously saw all this. He picked the Sixers for a reason. They're a legit championship contender.
Loser: Golden State Warriors fans
I say fans because I'm not even sure the Golden State front office is terribly concerned about competing for a title at this point. They'll go for it if a move falls into their laps for no real cost, as Jimmy Butler did and James would have, and sell that as "going for it" for Steph Curry, but they're most definitely not prioritizing competing at the highest level when there is any kind of future cost involved. Joe Lacob and company want to prove their brains are bigger than everyone else's after Curry is gone.
But the fans? They know they'll never have another Curry, and they have been desperate for the team to make aggressive moves to give him a realistic chance at a fifth championship while he's still an All-NBA player. James probably wouldn't have done that, but it certainly would've gotten the Warriors closer with the same "if healthy" caveat every team carries.
Instead, the Warriors put all their eggs in the LeBron basket, couldn't pull off a trade for Anthony Davis (if they ever really even tried), and now they're at the end of a summer in which they have yet to add a single non-rookie player. The front office seems like it's OK with that. The fans are most certainly not.
Loser: Stephen Curry
Curry is never going to be the kind of superstar that leverages his teams into decisions they don't want to make. He does his job and lets the front office do theirs. But he clearly would've loved to play with James, who has long made it clear he would love to team up with Curry. That dream just died.
And now Curry has to go into next season with another Warriors team that isn't capable of competing with the best teams in the league. Curry has to be frustrated inside. He'll never say it, but this is a guy who has almost single-handedly taken the Warriors from the $450 million franchise it was when Lacob and company purchased the team to the $11 billion behemoth it is now.
The team's owners owe him a lot. Damn near everything, if we're being honest. And they have failed him. That 2022 championship was an accident. The Warriors didn't try for it. Curry simply went out and took it with Andrew Wiggins as his second-best player.
The Warriors were only going after James because he wasn't going to cost them anything, but still, Curry was definitely close to not just a dream basketball pairing but a team that could, under optimal conditions, compete with anyone. Now he's back to fighting for a play-in spot as another of his precious prime years is poised to slip away.
Winner: Eastern Conference truthers
There is a growing contingent of modern-thinking fans who have grown tired of the two-plus-decade inequity between the Eastern and Western conferences. But there are others, the traditionalists, who don't want change and argue it's cyclical and have long maintained the East will eventually come back around.
This summer, that appears to have finally happened, and James choosing the Sixers further solidifies the East as at least the West's equal and probably its top-to-bottom superior. The West is still stacked, don't get me wrong. Two of the three best teams (the Spurs and Thunder) are out there. But that's always been the East's problem: a couple of teams at the top capable of winning at the highest level but no real competitive depth behind them.
Suddenly, the East is littered with big-time teams. The Knicks just won the title. The Pacers are coming back with the team that very possibly would've won the 2025 title had Tyrese Haliburton not blown out his Achilles. The Heat added Giannis Antetokounmpo. The Sixers added Brown and James. The Celtics won 56 games last year and could be better this season. The Hawks are quietly building out a Knicks-like roster with two-way wings, no max money committed to anyone and plenty of flexibility to keep improving.
The Cavaliers missed on James, but return the bones of a conference finals team. The Pistons won 60 games and will presumably be getting Jalen Duren back. A lot of people had the Magic as a contender last year on paper, and all that talent is still there after nearly upsetting Detroit in the first round. The Wizards have Anthony Davis and Trae Young leading an impressive group of youngsters headlined by No. 1 overall pick AJ Dybantsa. The Raptors are probably going to end up with Kawhi Leonard when this cap-circumvention investigation mercifully wraps up.
I could make the argument that at least eight of these teams would be no worse than the third-best team in the West. Add in the Knicks being the champs, and yeah, it's finally safe to say the East is back.
Loser: Cleveland Cavaliers
On some level, every team that struck out on James is a loser. But those levels vary considerably. The Heat and Timberwolves already made their summer splashes with Antetokounmpo and LaMelo Ball, respectively. Yes, Minnesota would've loved for James to slot as Julius Randle's power-forward replacement, and Miami could've used his offense, but the Warriors and Cavs were the teams that had all their eggs in the James basket.
We already hit on the Warriors as a loser, and to me, the Cavs are hurt even worse by missing out on LeBron. To say nothing of the disappointment of the hometown boy not coming back to finish his career where it all started, the Cavs clearly hit a ceiling last season.
They'll say that Knicks series was closer than a sweep indicates. Hell, Kenny Atkinson probably still thinks the Cavs actually won. But they didn't. They weren't even close, really. What they were was one game from losing against the Raptors in the first round. The same Raptors, as mentioned above, that are most likely going to get Leonard once this investigation wraps up. That's one team that clearly jumps Cleveland.
Add the Sixers, Pacers and Heat as teams that will also be significantly better next season. The Hawks dealt the Knicks two of their three playoff losses and proceeded to onboard Aaron Wiggins, Lu Dort and No. 8 overall pick Kingston Flemings.
Meanwhile, the Cavs actually lost players. Dean Wade and Keon Ellis are gone. By now, all the best Plan Bs have been signed elsewhere. Cleveland is looking, maybe, at Jonathan Kuminga. Otherwise, they're running back the same team that hit a hard ceiling last year and now has two contracts in Donovan Mitchell's and, soon, James Harden's that are almost certainly going to age poorly.
The time was now for Cleveland. That's why they traded a 26-year-old Darius Garland for a 36-year-old Harden. They took their shot in the playoffs and missed. Then they took a second shot this summer, and missed again. Even if they manage to stay the same, the Cavs effectively got worse against all the East teams that got better.
Winner: NBA schedule makers
Last week, NBA commissioner Adam Silver took to the Fanatics Fest stage and basically told LeBron to hurry the hell up because the 2026-27 schedule needed to be finished. It was a fair point. The NBA is entering the second year of a $76 billion deal with Disney, NBC and Amazon, and the downstream effects of James' decision are huge.
Whatever team James wound up choosing was always going to be penciled in for Christmas Day and probably 25ish national games. The weeks around those dates are greatly impacted by who is playing who, and when, as the league tries to limit high-priority back-to-backs and achieve scheduling balance while highlighting the right matchups. James was holding a lot of that up, and now the league can get the networks off its back and finish the schedule.
Loser: Boston Celtics
As mentioned above, I've argued that the Celtics could very well be a better team than they were last year, even after trading Jaylen Brown. But they still sent an All-NBA player in Brown to their division rival, which would have been risky enough even had Brown not become the lure that landed James.
In essence, the Celtics gave the Sixers Brown and James for Paul George, who's on one of the league's most upside-down contracts. The Celtics made the trade for their own reasons. Independent of what the move did for the 76ers, they probably made the right choice. Brown is not worth the second max salary Boston was going to have to commit to in the second-apron era. Philly now has three max contracts in Brown, Tyrese Maxey and Embiid. That's their problem now.
But basketball-wise, the bottom line is Brown and James are now playing for the 76ers courtesy of the Celtics. You can cut that pill up any way you want, but it's still going to be hard to swallow.
