The Philadelphia 76ers are no longer letting executives carry their pursuit of LeBron James alone.
Tyrese Maxey, Joel Embiid and Jaylen Brown have each been in direct communication with the four-time champion, league sources told ESPN’s Dave McMenamin on Tuesday, and it is Maxey who has been “leading the charge.”
The report lands as James’ free agency stretches into a second week without resolution. Sources told ESPN’s Shams Charania on Tuesday that Philadelphia remains one of the top potential landing spots for the 41-year-old alongside the Cleveland Cavaliers and Miami Heat, which means the recruiting phase has narrowed to the teams willing to press hardest — and the Sixers just showed their cards.
Tyrese Maxey Is the Tip of the Spear
Maxey’s role at the front of this effort is not an accident. The 25-year-old guard shares an agency with James at Klutch Sports, has spent parts of recent offseasons training alongside him and has publicly called the older star a “big brother.” Those are exactly the kinds of threads that have shaped James’ career decisions before.
The clearest precedent is Anthony Davis. When James wanted a co-star in Los Angeles, the shared Klutch connection and an existing personal relationship helped steer Davis to the Lakers, and the pairing delivered a championship in 2020. Philadelphia is now running that play in reverse — using the relationship to pull James toward an established core rather than pulling a co-star toward James.
There is also a structural reason a player-led pitch matters here. James’ agent, Rich Paul, has been handling contact with front offices throughout the process, and James has not taken formal meetings with teams. When the executive channel is closed, the player-to-player channel becomes the pitch. Maxey talking to James is not a courtesy call. It is the sales floor.
Embiid and Brown Bring Their Own History
The other two voices in Philadelphia’s chorus carry real weight with James too. Embiid, the 2022-23 MVP, stood on the podium with him in Paris in 2024, when both were part of the American roster that took Olympic gold. James has long favored playing next to a dominant interior scorer, and an Embiid pairing echoes the formula that won him the 2020 title with Davis.
Brown’s connection runs through competition rather than partnership. James and Brown traded playoff blows during James’ second Cleveland stint and Brown’s early Boston years, and James went out of his way to boost Brown’s MVP case back in February.
“He’s playing great basketball, man,” James said at the time.
That respect now cuts in Philadelphia’s favor after the Sixers landed Brown in this summer’s blockbuster with the Celtics.
Put together, the three-man recruiting party covers every angle of James’ basketball life: his agency family in Maxey, his Olympic circle in Embiid and his old playoff rivalries in Brown.
The Front Office Went Public First
The player outreach follows a week in which Philadelphia’s leadership made its interest about as loud as tampering rules allow. Bob Myers, who runs Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment, went on the “Game Over” podcast — co-hosted by Paul himself — and framed the Sixers as the destination that maximizes James’ remaining window.
“Because you can win here in Philadelphia,” Myers said.
President of basketball operations Mike Gansey pushed the same message, telling The Athletic the team has been in touch with Paul since the Brown deal.
“But we’d obviously love to have LeBron,” Gansey said.
Gansey’s ties to James go back decades — he worked in Cleveland’s front office during James’ second Cavs run and faced him as a Northeast Ohio high schooler in the early 2000s.
A franchise rarely coordinates a podcast pitch from ownership’s top basketball voice, on-record comments from its lead executive and direct outreach from three stars in the same news cycle by coincidence. This is a full-court press, and it is deliberate.
The $3.9 Million Reality
What Philadelphia cannot do is pay him. ESPN front office analyst Bobby Marks laid out the math in the network’s breakdown of James’ market: The Sixers divided their $15 million non-taxpayer midlevel exception between Dean Wade and Anfernee Simons earlier this offseason, then dipped into the $5.5 million biannual exception for Ariel Hukporti.
What remains for James is the $3.9 million veterans minimum exception and nothing more. That is why the pitch is people instead of dollars.
Miami can get to roughly $7 million under its hard-cap math, per Marks, and Cleveland could reach the $6.1 million taxpayer midlevel depending on how James Harden’s next contract lands.
Philadelphia loses the bidding war before it starts, so it is selling the one thing money cannot buy elsewhere: a loaded roster with Maxey, Embiid, Brown and rookie VJ Edgecombe, and a legacy opportunity attached to a franchise that has not won a championship in 43 years and has not reached the Finals or even a conference finals in a quarter century.
James coming off a season at 20.9 points, 7.2 assists and 6.1 rebounds per game on 51.5 percent shooting would not be a mascot signing. He would be the missing organizer for a team built to win now.
The Competition and the Week Ahead
None of this makes Philadelphia the favorite. Cleveland offers the homecoming, a roster fresh off maxing out Donovan Mitchell and the emotional pull of finishing where he started.
Miami pairs him with Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bam Adebayo in what might be the most athletic frontcourt ever assembled. Charania’s Tuesday reporting kept all three in the top tier, and no meeting or deadline has been announced.
The calendar, though, is about to force the story into public view. James will spend the back half of this week in New York, appearing Thursday at Fanatics Fest for a business summit and a live taping of his “Mind the Game” podcast, then being honored at the Time 100 gala as the magazine’s “Athlete of the Century.”
On Friday he tapes his talk show “The Shop” at Fanatics Fest with Novak Djokovic among the guests. Every microphone in that building will ask the same question, and every day the answer stays private, the recruiting from Maxey, Embiid and Brown continues.
The Sixers have made their argument through the only channels available to them. Whether a $3.9 million offer wrapped in relationships beats a homecoming or a superteam is now up to the one person who has not said a word.
