Bronny James, "Awful Coaching", and the Player Perception Phenomenon
I saw a tweet containing videos from "Awful Coaching" about Bronny James I found disgusting. Lets talk about it.
The other night I was browsing Twitter after I got off work, and was reading about how fans felt about certain players’ performances in this year’s Summer League games. This particular night people were breaking down Brandon Podziemski’s performance against the Heat, where he looked fantastic and dominated multiple facets of the game, whether it be scoring, passing, or his elite ability to rebound at his size. But then while I was gauging some other player’s performances, I came across this image that was tweeted out by someone:
Awful Coaching is someone I have been familiar with for the past year or so. During the Piston’s generational losing streak, I became familiar with his content when someone else tweeted it out, and then later when I saw it on TikTok, when his frankly embarrassing yelling came up on my feed interrupting my highlights of random role players in history. At first, I just assumed he was an angry Pistons fan yelling at how horrible their defense was last year, and it was. He would yell at Jalen Duren for having poor hand placement or playing in between the lob and shot poorly in drop, or point out things he believed Monty Williams did to hurt the scheme the Pistons were running, but then as I watched a couple more videos, I noticed a trend; every single one of his videos of bad defense, or as he has branded his account “awful coaching” ends in a make.
This is outright inherently flawed basketball thinking. Many great players, pundits, and coaches have said “It is a make-or-miss league” and that is true. Kobe Bryant is one of the most loved and respected players of all time, but even he would tell you his shot selection at times was poor, with one of my favorite quotes from his time in the purple and gold coming from 2014, when he was asked by reporter Baxter Holmes about his shot selection that season, and the ever brash Bryant replied with, “I’d rather not have to do that, but you can’t just sit back and watch crime happen in front of you.”
Truly a tremendous quote from Kobe, but that aside, what does this mean about Awful Coaching? Well frankly, he doesn't understand what he is watching, and screams at the camera for no rhyme or reason, but people who themselves don’t know a whole lot about basketball take his word for law because he “seems passionate.” His entire goal seems to be to get every single fanbase on his side with the claim that their coach is “awful” as every fanbase does have sometimes legitimate concerns with their coach. I have no doubt there would be Boston Celtics fans who would have wanted Ime Udoka back as their coach up until the final moment of this year’s NBA Finals had counted down, as they believed his more hard-nosed approach and defensive mindset was better than what has been dubbed “Mazzula-Ball” in which the Celtics offense systematically hunts shots at the rim or open 3-pointers, which led to one of the best offenses I have seen with my eyes.
This isn’t to say Ime Udoka is a bad coach. Udoka himself is clearly very talented at maximizing his players on the defensive end, but the perceived narratives around Udoka and Mazzula up until this past June were often to the detriment of Mazzula. Someone like Awful Coaching takes advantage of these narratives and makes every fan who follows him believe their coach too is awful and should be fired.
For example, here are two plays with the same outcome that I would consider two different qualities of defense. In one play, AJ Dybansta, an elite 2026 draft prospect who is an incredible athlete blows by his defender by attacking the top foot that seems to intentionally be towards the baseline, then gives him a bump and scores. This isn’t bad defense, AJ Dybansta just beat his man. In the next clip, Dybansta drives to the lane and is stopped quite well by the initial help defender. The poor defense comes when #1 on France Hugo Yimaga, another top prospect, is caught ball-watching and allows 2026 #1 recruit Tyran Stokes to back-cut to a wide-open layup.
Both plays result in effectively a wide-open layup, but these are two completely different calibers of defense engagement. If I were Awful Coaching I might make some claim in the first clip about “hand activity” or “allowing the blow by.” For example in the NBA Finals, he made a video called “Mavericks Coaches Should Be In Jail For a Very Long Time” in which he repeatedly contradicted himself, which was pointed out by former 1st round pick and Euroleague veteran Sam Dekker on Twitter. I went into this video and within the first 30 seconds he began yelling about Jaden Hardy’s “gambling” and “hand placement” when in reality he said it himself in the clip, Jayson Tatum hit a 3 in Jaden Hardy’s eye.
Jaden Hardy didn’t do anything wrong. The fact his so-called gamble didn't result immediately in a blow-by means it likely leans more towards GOOD hand placement. Somehow this man expects it to be the “easiest job in the world” to “just slide your feet, show your hands, and keep Tatum in the middle of the floor.” Jayson Tatum is an incredible scorer and doing all these things is something only maybe 10 defenders can do in the league, and even that is a gracious estimate. And somehow this clip has to do with the Mavericks coaching staff manned by Jason Kidd, and how they are the “most undisciplined and poorly coached team he has ever seen,” which is something he says about every single team he covers. I won’t spend hours breaking down every single one of his videos because I have better things to do, but I think you get the point by now.
This man is a grifter and a fraud, so it was of no surprise when I saw the aforementioned tweet in which he made not one, not two, but THREE straight videos critiquing the son of maybe the greatest player of all time, Bronny James. I find this behavior disgusting. I didn’t have Bronny in my top 60, but Bronny was in the tier of player that I would have considered selecting with the 55th pick, and for the Lakers to do so to keep LeBron happy and on the roster to extend a potential chance of a title is a value proposition more likely to be successful than any player taken at the 55th pick.
Bronny won’t play NBA minutes from day one, and neither will any player taken at the 55th pick this year or in pretty much any year after this, and for someone like Awful Coaching to use his name to get the three most viewed videos in the history of his channel is outright sad. This man doesn’t have the creative ability to basketball knowledge to actually create any content of meaning, so instead what he does is scream at a 19-year-old young man who already knows more about basketball than he ever will and who is already facing tons of pathetic hate on the internet.
Every night I open Twitter to graphics of Bronny’s 3-point performances in Summer League, when no other player of his caliber would ever receive this kind of attention. The problem with this is pretty clear, as people are taking this opportunity to get their dopamine hit of the day by clicking the red button on a tweet and replying in the comments that he shouldn’t have been drafted or whatever else kids on the internet say in comment sections.
The more fascinating side of this endeavor is what enables this behavior. Why is it that nearly three hundred thousand people have flocked to three videos in which a man who has never even stepped near a professional basketball court tears a young professional to pieces? Bronny James is very obviously under a lot of scrutiny due to his relationship with his father Lebron James, and how that has affected how people view him as a basketball player throughout his life. I am only one year older than Bronny, and I remember being in elementary school watching LeBron win his two titles in Miami as he held Bronny in the celebration, or when both Bronny, LeBron’s other son Brice, and his daughter Zhuri all attended the postgame press conference together after James and the Cavaliers won in Cleveland.
LeBron James basically is basketball at this point, and it is no surprise that in the social media age of every AAU game in existence being recorded that in the time Bronny was playing competitive basketball people were constantly shown highlights of both Bronny and Bryce, to the point where they then became overhyped by people who don’t pay attention to youth basketball or scout for the NBA Draft. This level of overhyping players is something that is bound to happen. I still remember every kid I know wanting to play like Sharife Cooper when he was in high school, and now Cooper is overseas playing in China instead of the NBA.
Things like this are bound to happen, but we as a basketball community mustn’t make the standards any different for Bronny. Gui Santos and Isaiah Wong didn’t get any special social media posts almost celebrating their poor Summer League performances, and the hate around Bronny is put best with one word. Pathetic. We can celebrate LeBron and Bronny as family members, and the fact that we get to witness one of the all-time greats play with his son on the court is an amazing story, but don’t turn this into some hate session for a 19-year-old young man who is by all accounts an amazing person, who also happens to be coming off a near-fatal heart condition. In the words of Kevin Garnett, “Sometimes when I hear commentating, it's sickening. People who never played the game, people who never played in the league have an opinion, and that's all it is. You are here to educate the watcher or the viewer. Sometimes it comes off as personal.” Grifters like Awful Coaching are bound to be out there, but be better, don’t enable them, and don’t make Bronny James personal.