Every professional basketball player experiences their welcome to the NBA moment at some point or another. It’s an essential point that every player goes through where they’re reminded just how different things are now that they’re in the league. When former two-time NBA champion Shannon Brown was asked about his, LeBron James was the first guy that came to mind.
Brown was selected 25th in the 2006 NBA Draft by the Cleveland Cavaliers. It was a team coming off a trip to the Eastern Conference Semifinals, piloted by the rising sensation LeBron James. He had only been in the league for three seasons, but LeBron was already garnering MVP votes in each season. He was described as years beyond his age.
LeBron was so mature that he was already dishing out welcome-to-the-NBA moments to other players. He did it to Brown on one occasion through a savvy pump fake on offense.
“One time, Bron cam and hit me with a shot fake and put his shoulder all in my ribcage,” Brown described on the Out The Mud Podcast. “I was like, dang! That was a welcome to the NBA moment. I gotta stay down on these shot fakes.”
Brown was an All-Big Ten defensive team member in college, but he quickly learned that the NBA was much different. Stars like LeBron had a bag of tricks to work with to expose inexperienced defenders like him, and he wasn’t afraid to use it even in practice.
But it wasn’t just LeBron giving Shannon the work. The big forward David West used to show him up as well.
“Even practicing with that rookie squad, like man, David West used to bust my a**,” Brown recalled.
Eventually, Shannon would learn to become an above-average defender for his position. But it didn’t come without first taking some lumps from LeBron and West in practice. The good news is that he’s far from the only player to have such a moment with King James.
Ryan Dunn On LeBron
Not everyone’s welcome to the NBA moment has to be bad, though. For the Suns’ rookie Ryan Dunn in 2024, he recalled a moment against LeBron that he looks back on fondly.
Dunn joined the Run Your Race podcast with Theo Pinson to describe the memory. The former NBA veteran asked him what his welcoming moment entailed.
“Guarding LeBron James for the first time,” Dunn said. Even though it was the preseason, it still meant something to him. “He said no you got Bron. You have to guard LeBron James… Next possession, took me to the mid-post, then fade away, he missed it.”
The miss gave Dunn the confidence and feeling that he belonged in the NBA among the best players in the world for the first time. And how could it not? He had just forced one of the greatest of all time to miss one of his patented shots.
At the end of the day, there are probably other players who would reference playing against LeBron as their welcoming moments. But these two, we look back on quite fondly because they show that it can be either a good or a bad moment, depending on who you talk to.
