On Thursday morning, The Athletic's Andrew Marchand reported that NBA great LeBron James and ESPN are “closing in” on a deal for a behind-the-scenes docuseries—similar to the Michael Jordan-focused series The Last Dance—that would chronicle the final chapter of the 41-year-old’s legendary career.
To do this, the belief is that James will have a camera crew following him around during his one- to two-year stint in Philadelphia (though Rich Paul has hinted it could conceivably go longer), where he signed as a free agent less than a week ago. The series is also expected to use footage from earlier in the King’s career, some of which will be brand-new to the public.
Additional details, including a release date, aren’t known at this point, considering the deal is not quite across the finish line, and Maverick Carter—CEO and co-founder of LeBron’s SpringHill Entertainment—denies that anything like The Last Dance.
We are NOT doing anything like the “last dance” LeBron doesn’t even know when his last season is
— Maverick Carter (@mavcarter) July 30, 2026
But assuming there is some documentary project in the works that might bear some resemblance to The Last Dance, they should keep one big thing in mind ...
What LeBron could learn from Michael Jordan and The Last Dance
In no sport is the GOAT title as contested as it is in basketball. Depending on who you ask and the year in which they were born, the best player of all time could be anyone from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Wilt Chamberlain to Bill Russell—and there are strong arguments for all three. But the names that come up the most frequently are LeBron James, the NBA's all-time scoring leader, and Michael Jordan, the six-time championship winner with the Bulls.
For 23 years now, the pair have been compared to one another ad naseum, sparking passionate conversations behind analyst desks and over bottles of beer. And as the younger of the two, James, in particular, has been both belittled and buoyed by this parallel from the second he stepped into the league.
“My motivation,” he said in 2016, “is this ghost I’m chasing. The ghost played in Chicago.”
So it’s fitting, then, that the ghost also has a championship bid-chronicling docuseries, one that is widely considered one of the greatest pieces of sports media in history and the definitive portrait of a generation-defining basketball player. In fact, almost immediately following its release, The Last Dance set a new standard for these kinds of retrospectives, not only because of its wide-ranging access to Jordan—the mega-star understandably shrank from public view once he finished on the court—but because of its access to other players of that era, who sat for wide-ranging and revealing interviews about the popularity of the 1990s NBA and the trials and tribulations of squaring up against MJ.
The series also featured some never-before-seen footage from the 1997–98 championship season, which proved even more enticing. This was an age of sports that predated social media departments and Instagram Lives, so fans were much less clued in on the behind-the-scenes machinations of their fave teams. That scarcity is unlike anything we have today.
In the end, all of this worked in Jordan’s favor. He could, in many ways, control the narrative the docuseries was telling. Viewers hadn’t seen or heard from him much in years, considering his relative reclusiveness, which also lent itself to the anticipation surrounding the project (as did the time that had passed since his retirement). Nothing about it felt rushed in the interest of views; it felt thoughtful, intentional and extremely well-curated, made not to be “first,” per se, but to be the best—which, not for nothing, is also a very Jordan ethos.
James and his team would do well to remember this. One would imagine the King's camp hopes this would be a legacy-defining project, something the world returns to when the GOAT debate inevitably arises again, or when James is so old he'd rather be wheeled out onto the hardwood. They want people to remember not the multimillionaire player who chased rings, but the Kid from Akron, his unlikely journey to the top and how he (at the very least) energized a scrappy city in his pursuit of a fifth and final title.
Now, that last piece might prove the riskiest; Jordan heads would love nothing more than to use a failed run at a title to support their hypothesis that MJ will never be topped, and capturing that pursuit on film in perpetuity could very well fuel their fire. But nostalgia is a powerful drug, one that can erase even the longest-held of biases—it works best, however, when enough time has passed.
James should absolutely release a docuseries, whether it’s focused on his final season(s) or his full career. Fans would love it. Networks and streamers would love it. It would be historic, full stop. But if he’s still feeling like chasing that ghost, then taking his time, stepping back from the limelight, and waiting at least a few years to release it would be the best move. Such restraint allows for a better final product overall (just think of the players they could interview with enough time). And knowing that this will be immediately compared to The Last Dance, even if his team isn’t positioning this as a similar project, he’ll certainly want that.
In other words, and as has been the case with most of his career, he should try to follow in Jordan’s footsteps yet again. Because, weirdly enough, it might be the best way for him to differentiate himself in the history books.
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