“If you take Bron who he is now with the athleticism, speed, and everything, agility… I don’t think there’s a question who the greatest player would be.” LeBron James has heard every debate in the book. GOAT talk, Finals records, superteam critiques. But here’s a thing not often explored: what if LeBron had played in Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant’s famed triangle offense? That’s the conversation Tracy McGrady, Gilbert Arenas, and Nick Young dove into on the latest episode of Gil’s Arena. And the answers weren’t as simple as “yes” or “no.”

It started with a question from McGrady: “Do you think if Bron played in a system like the triangle? And Kobe was the system, do they have the same type success individually?” That’s where it began messily. Arenas immediately jumped in, suggesting the fit might not be seamless. “So put Bron in the triangle with Shaq,” he countered, sparking a back-and-forth about how LeBron’s pass-first instincts might clash with the triangle’s demands.

McGrady pushed back, asking whether LeBron could thrive on the way Kobe did. The group couldn’t resist turning it into a hypothetical head-to-head. Nick Young was blunt: “I don’t think LeBron could be like Kobe, though. That’s the thing. I don’t think LeBron would never win a championship.” Now, that line might sound outrageous, but it reveals something deeper.

“If Bron got introduced to the triangle at an early age, that’s different. Bron would have expanded his game… If you take Bron who he is now with the athleticism, speed, and everything, agility, and put him in that triangle learning that I think we talking about… I don’t think there’s a question who the greatest player would be,” T-Mac said. And when asked if LeBron would be better than Kobe in the triangle, Gil was blunt: no.

The beauty of the system, he explained, is how it forces movement and spacing.“Because it becomes he be a better winner… I can’t focus directly on you because now it’s UCLA cuts, right? Everybody moves, weakness moves, and it forces us to cut and give space. Then I get to do my one-on-one,” he said. For a player as unselfish as LeBron, all that motion would naturally elevate his passing, and when he chose to attack, defenders couldn’t stop him. In short, the triangle could have accelerated his path to winning, even if he was already a smart, dominant player.

The triangle offense, innovated by Tex Winter and immortalized by Phil Jackson, asked players to sacrifice individual tendencies for the sake of spacing, rhythm, and balance. Kobe mastered it. Jordan weaponized it. But would LeBron, arguably the game’s most adaptable weapon, really thrive if the triangle clipped the very edges that made him special?

Arenas even dismissed the idea that Kobe could adapt to LeBron’s tempo-driven, facilitator-heavy style either. “Kob can’t play like Bron. I got to give them those teams, too.” That’s the paradox here. Both legends thrived by bending the systems to their own advantage. But in this thought experiment, the system comes first. The irony is that LeBron, more than anyone, has built his career on adaptability. 

LeBron James and the triangle what-if

With four rings spread over three franchises, LeBron has proven he can win with just about any blueprint. He’s been the bruising freight train in Miami, the floor general in Cleveland, the aging-but-still-dominant orchestrator in Los Angeles. At age 40, he’s still averaging 24.4 points, 7.8 rebounds, and 8.2 assists like a threat on any given night. McGrady made that very point as we saw earlier. 

Which brings us back to LeBron’s legacy. Because if the knock on LeBron has always been his Finals record (10 trips, 4 wins), then you have to ask: how different would that resume look if he were dropped into the structure that delivered six rings for MJ and five for Kobe? Would those painful 2011 and 2014 defeats have gone differently inside the triangle’s guardrails? That’s also where the thought experiment collides with the never-ending GOAT debate.

Jordan and Kobe thrived in a system designed to maximize their abilities, while also holding them accountable when necessary. LeBron, on the other hand, has always been the system. Every team he joins bends to his style. Would he have willingly given up that control? Maybe the GOAT debate was always destined to rage on, triangle or not. Nick Young, for one, wasn’t buying it.

“You gotta… because he got to shoot and do all that, all the stuff. He can’t driving. Ain’t no driving range for him.” That’s the rub. The triangle shrinks the runway. LeBron without downhill lanes is a different player. But it’s hard not to imagine the flip side. LeBron in the triangle could have been terrifying with his size, vision, and post-game all perfectly suited to its spacing principles. Instead of racking up 11,584 assists—fourth all time—through sheer improvisation, he’d have been dissecting defenses inside a structure that constantly created high-percentage looks.

Maybe we’d be talking about six or seven championships. Maybe LeBron would’ve piled up more titles inside the triangle. Or maybe not. That’s the beauty of the what-if, right? You can only wonder. What’s real is that LeBron James has already outlived the system era. His career has been defined not by one coach or scheme but by a two-decade run of bending the league to his game. Still, for one night, on a roundtable of NBA storytellers, the thought of LeBron running the triangle had everyone buzzing.

And maybe that’s the true mark of his greatness: even after more than 50,000 points career-wide and four rings, we’re still asking, what if?