Where LeBron James Stands Ahead of His First Season With the 76ers
- 🔑 ESPN’s NBA Rank 2026 placed LeBron James at No. 18, down from No. 8 in last year’s edition of the same list — the first time in the ranking’s 15-year history he has finished outside the top 10, as he enters a 24th NBA season and his first with the Philadelphia 76ers.
- ESPN said the ranking measures projected 2026-27 regular-season contribution rather than career legacy, and its panel cited his age, last season’s reduced availability, and a smaller, complementary role alongside Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey and Jaylen Brown as reasons for the drop.
- Nikola Jokic was ranked No. 1 in ESPN’s panel vote, narrowly ahead of Victor Wembanyama and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, which the panel described as one of the closest races for the top spot in the list’s history — context for how bunched the league’s top tier has become.
- No 76ers games, preseason or regular season, had been played as of Sunday morning, 27 September 2026. The team’s preseason opens Monday, 5 October, against the New York Knicks, and the regular season opens Tuesday, 20 October, also against the Knicks.
- The Knicks are the team that eliminated Philadelphia from the 2025-26 playoffs on their way to winning the NBA championship, which is part of why both of James’s first two games in a 76ers uniform — one exhibition, one that counts — come against the same opponent.
- This article does not use, cite, or imply any betting odds, point spreads, or win-probability models anywhere. ESPN’s NBA Rank is a media panel’s subjective ranking of player quality, not a forecast of game outcomes or championship chances.
LeBron James enters his first season with the Philadelphia 76ers ranked No. 18 on ESPN’s NBA Rank 2026 — the first time in the list’s 15-year history he has finished outside the top 10. He is 41 years old and about to begin a 24th NBA season, and as of Sunday morning, 27 September 2026, none of it has actually started yet: the 76ers’ preseason opens Monday, 5 October, with the regular season following on Tuesday, 20 October. Here’s what the ranking says, why it dropped, and when the games that will actually test it begin.
Where did ESPN rank LeBron James for the 2026-27 season?
No. 18. ESPN’s NBA Rank 2026, published in the final week of September 2026, placed James 18th among all NBA players heading into the season — down from No. 8 in the previous year’s edition of the same list, and the first time in the ranking’s 15-year history he has finished outside the top 10.
The list is ESPN’s own annual player-quality ranking, built from a panel vote rather than a statistical model. For 2026, ESPN said it replaced its previous, broader voting pool with a seven-person panel of its NBA writers and analysts. One of them, ESPN’s Dave McMenamin, wrote that “seeing James outside the top 10 is jarring” — a reaction echoed across the rest of the panel’s commentary on the drop.
James’s fall wasn’t an outlier at the very top: ESPN’s panel put Nikola Jokic at No. 1, narrowly ahead of Victor Wembanyama and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, in what the panel described as one of the closest races for the top spot in the list’s history. That’s context, not comparison — James was never competing with that group this year; the panel’s stated reasoning for his own ranking was about his situation, not anyone else’s season.
Why did the ranking drop so much?
ESPN’s panel said the ranking reflects projected 2026-27 regular-season contribution, not career legacy — and on that basis, three things counted against James: his age (he turned 41 during the offseason), a reduced role in an increasingly crowded Philadelphia offense, and last season’s availability. He appeared in 60 of the Lakers’ 82 games in 2025-26, averaging 20.9 points, 6.1 rebounds and 7.2 assists — solid production, but fewer minutes to show it in than in most of his prior seasons.
The other change is structural. For most of his career, James has been the offense. In Philadelphia he joins a roster already built around Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey and Jaylen Brown, and a panel projecting regular-season impact has to weigh a smaller, complementary role differently than a lead one. We already went through the signing terms, the roster fit and the health math behind that arrangement when the deal was announced in July, and that analysis holds regardless of where any single ranking places him.
When do the 76ers actually play their first game?
They haven’t yet, as of Sunday morning, 27 September 2026. No preseason or regular-season 76ers games had been played by that point. Both openers happen to be against the same opponent.
| Date | Opponent | Site |
|---|---|---|
| Mon 5 Oct | Knicks | Home |
| Thu 8 Oct | Nets | Away |
| Sat 10 Oct | Celtics | Away |
| Fri 16 Oct | Celtics | Home |
The preseason schedule runs four games, all in the first three weeks of October, per the team’s own published slate. The regular season then opens Tuesday, 20 October, on the road against the same Knicks — a matchup the league scheduled as part of its opening-night tripleheader. Philadelphia’s first home game of the regular season follows two days later, on Thursday, 22 October, against the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The Knicks are the team that eliminated Philadelphia from last season’s playoffs on the way to winning the NBA championship, which is part of why both of James’s first two appearances in a 76ers uniform — one exhibition, one that counts — come against the same opponent.
What does the ranking actually tell us about the season ahead?
Not much about what will happen on the court — only where one panel of NBA writers currently rates him, before a single game has been played. ESPN describes NBA Rank as a snapshot of projected contribution, not a prediction of wins, and nothing about it changes what preseason and the regular season are actually for: finding out.
That’s still more than a week away. Between now and the 5 October preseason opener, the number likely to keep generating coverage is 18 — a first for James in a list he had finished in the top 10 of every year prior. Whether it holds up as the season plays out is a question the schedule above will start answering, not this one.
If you want the roster math behind the signing itself — what James’s arrival does to Philadelphia’s health-dependent ceiling — that’s covered in our look at why the 76ers brought him in back in July.