Gilbert Arenas didn’t leave much room for debate when the conversation turned to the 76ers’ pecking order. On Gil’s Arena this week, he pointed straight to LeBron James as the player he believes would set the tone in Philadelphia when the play gets changed on the fly.
Arenas framed it as a simple question of authority. In his view, the real issue is not who scores the most, but who gets the group moving the way it needs to move.
“You don’t have to lead the team in scoring,” Arenas said. “But who’s going to be running the structure of the team? The best person fit for it is LeBron James.”
Gilbert Arenas says LeBron James is going to be the alpha on the Sixers:
— NBA Courtside (@NBA__Courtside) October 16, 2026
“In that locker room if the coach draws a play and LeBron says no, no we going to run the 1-4 me, Maxey doing pick and roll and then you going to pass it to me then Jaylen Brown back door we going to get… pic.twitter.com/ON9Bf8SGvr
He tied that thinking to a hypothetical on-court disagreement: a coach calls one play, James wants something different, and the team has to decide whose voice matters most. Arenas walked through it with James initiating a pick-and-roll for Tyrese Maxey before creating a cut for Jaylen Brown and said that sequence shows the kind of control he thinks James would have.
“Who the fu*k think the rest of the team is going to listen to? That coach?
Or LeBron James? Then that’s the alpha.”
The question of hierarchy has followed Brown since his offseason move from Boston placed him alongside Joel Embiid, James, and Maxey. During Philadelphia’s media day in late September, reporters asked Brown about that leadership order, and he declined to get into it. According to Yahoo, he gave them far less than Arenas did on the subject.
Arenas didn’t hedge. For him, the answer is James, because he sees James as the player most capable of organizing that group and commanding its attention, whether or not he ends up leading the team in scoring.
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Philadelphia is weighing whether to claim Jemison or use its last two-way slot on him, a move that would at least give the team another option in the middle as it tries to survive the early stretch. Jemison has bounced around the league and has size and experience, but the appeal comes with the usual caveat for a player in his position: the 76ers would be betting on depth first, with his consistency and longer-term upside still very much open to question. [Read more 🡒]
Sixers Fans Will Have Strong Feelings About VJ Edgecombes Priorities
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Jason Williams, though, was not having it, arguing that players in the league should place the organization paying their salary above anything else. It is the kind of comment that tends to hit a nerve with Philadelphia fans, who expect total commitment and are already learning what makes Edgecombe tick. The tension here is less about whether he cares about winning than about where he sees his greatest responsibility, and that debate figures to follow him as his profile grows. [Read more 🡒]