The 2026-27 NBA season starts this week!! There are so many things to look forward to. The Toronto Raptors, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Boston Celtics all have new pieces. The San Antonio Spurs will be seeking vegeneance after falling short in the 2026 NBA Finals. AJ Dybantsa, Caleb Wilson, and Cameron Boozer (along with many others) are getting ready to write the first few chapters of their NBA story.
But at the center of all this excitement sits the literal King of the league: LeBron James. After all these years, James is still a high-quality NBA player, and after a drama-filled offseason, he's getting ready to debut for a new team.
The first time we will see LeBron James play a meaningful game for the Philadelphia 76ers is tomorrow, when the team travels to Gotham City to play the New York Knicks.
To prepare for what will (probably) be James' last debut for a new team, let's look back at the history of The King's debuts.
LeBron James all-time record in first game with new team
To give us a slightily bigger sample size, we are going to count James' official career debut with the Cleveland Cavaliers and his return to the team in 2014 as two seperate debuts. That gives us four debuts in total to look at: those two games, plus his first games with the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat.
Anyway, the history of James' debuts is not nearly as storied as the rest of his career. To this point, James' team has never won his inaugural game with the team. Here are all the dates and final scores to those games:
Date | Opponent | Final Score (Result) |
|---|---|---|
10/29/2003 | Sacramento Kings | 106-92 (L) |
10/26/2010 | Boston Celtics | 88-80 (L) |
10/30/2014 | New York Knicks | 95-90 (L) |
10/18/2018 | Portland Trail Blazers | 128-119 (L) |
James can't blame his teammates for letting him down, either. In three of those four games, he had a negative plus-minus, and the only time he had a positive plus-minus was against the Boston Celtics; and even then, it was only a plus-1. Overall, he's got a minus-29 in debut games. Also, funny enough, he has played the Knicks before in a debut game.
Of course, James was still incredibly productive when it came to his own box score production. Here are his stats from those four games:
Date | Points | Rebounds | Assists | Steals + Blocks | FG% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
10/29/2003 | 25 | 6 | 9 | 4 | 60.0% |
10/26/2010 | 31 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 47.6% |
10/30/2014 | 17 | 5 | 4 | 0 | 33.3% |
10/18/2018 | 26 | 12 | 6 | 1 | 56.3% |
In total, James has averaged 24.8 points, 6.8 rebounds, 5.5 assists, and two stocks (steals + blocks) on 50 percent shooting from the floor. Funny enough, these numbers aren't too far off his actual career averages.
At the end of the day, these numbers mean very little in the grand scheme of history. We have thousands and thousands of minutes of data that illustrate how impactful of a player James is, and how much more successful his teams become when he joins them (or how much worse off they are when he leaves).
Win or lose, James is going to help the 76ers a ton this season. Still, I'm sure it'd be cool for James to get this debut monkey off his back.
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