LeBron James picked a familiar cast for his newest venture. The four-time NBA champion launched his own YouTube channel Saturday morning, and the very first video he chose to publish has nothing to do with the Philadelphia 76ers, the Los Angeles Lakers or anything from the second half of his career.
It is a golf video, and it stars the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers. James announced the channel on social media Saturday, telling fans, “You all loved the 2016 reunion trip so much” that he decided to share more of it, and describing the new page as a home for his life on and around the golf course.
You all loved the 2016 reunion trip so much I thought I'd give ya'll a little more. 🫡🤣 Welcome to my YouTube channel! My life on and around the course. Let’s go!!! 👑⛳️🏌🏾https://t.co/JKA9egPBEi
— LeBron James (@KingJames) August 15, 2026
The debut episode delivers exactly that: roughly a full round’s worth of footage from the championship team’s 10-year reunion trip to Scotland earlier this summer, with James, Kevin Love, Richard Jefferson, J.R. Smith, Channing Frye and Tristan Thompson trading golf shots and insults in equal measure.
The video is live now on James’ YouTube channel.
What’s in the debut video
The format is a three-on-three scramble, and the sides split along lines that will amuse anyone who watched those Cleveland teams closely. James paired up with Jefferson and Love to face Smith, Frye and Thompson, with Thompson gamely working through what appeared to be his first real exposure to the sport.
Rain cut the opening day short, so James, Smith and Frye went back out the following morning to finish what the weather interrupted. The golf itself runs the full spectrum.
Smith, who has spent his post-playing years chasing the game seriously at the collegiate level, is clearly the class of the group, though he spends much of the round refusing to accept compliments from friends who play nowhere near his level.
James and Love land on the opposite end — invested, improving and visibly furious at themselves after every miss. Frye, meanwhile, walks away as the unexpected star of the episode.
He gets hot with the putter as the round goes on, and after draining one, he turns to James and delivers the line that will travel farther than any golf shot in the video: “Cleveland, this is for you!”
It is a needle aimed directly at a man who left the franchise twice, delivered by a teammate who helped him raise the banner. That the moment plays as pure affection rather than an actual shot at James says everything about where that group stands a decade later.
A surprisingly honest conversation about retirement
The banter is the draw, but the episode’s most memorable stretch is quieter. Between holes, the group drifts into a candid discussion about what it actually feels like to stop playing professional basketball, and Smith and Jefferson admitted they still have not fully made peace with losing that part of their identity.
It is a striking thing to hear on a golf trip, and it is even more striking with James standing in the frame. He is the last member of that championship core still playing, now heading into his 24th NBA season at age 41.
Watching him listen to two close friends describe the void waiting on the other side adds a layer to the video that no scripted content series could manufacture.
Why the 2016 Cavs are still the main characters
There is a reason this specific group keeps pulling the spotlight back to Cleveland. This summer marked 10 years since the 2016 NBA Finals, when the Cavaliers erased a 3-1 deficit against a 73-win Golden State Warriors team — something no franchise had ever done on that stage — and ended the city’s 52-year championship drought.
James earned Finals MVP, Kyrie Irving hit the biggest shot in franchise history and role players like Smith, Frye, Jefferson, Thompson and Love became permanent folk heroes in Northeast Ohio.
The reunion trip itself became a summer storyline the moment it started. The group traveled through the United Kingdom in June, and the wine-soaked golf outings generated so much organic attention that James openly cited the response as the reason he turned the footage into content.
The trip included a stop at Loch Lomond Golf Club in Scotland, though not every member of the title team made the full journey. For Cavaliers fans, the subtext is hard to miss.
James has now played for three other franchises, flirted with a Cleveland return as recently as this offseason and ultimately landed in Philadelphia.
Yet when it came time to introduce himself to a new platform and a new audience, the identity he reached for was not Lakers LeBron or Sixers LeBron. It was the 2016 Cavaliers, presented as the defining relationship of his basketball life.
What comes next for the channel — and for James
James plans to release episodes monthly built around rounds at notable courses with friends filling out the groups. He has also been open about the larger purpose behind the project.
In a recent Boardroom Talks interview, James said his goal in golf is to “open doors for kids that look like me” — expanding access to a sport that was closed off to him growing up in Akron.
The timing is deliberate, too. James is weeks away from opening his 24th season, and his first game as a Sixer comes against the defending champion New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 20.
A monthly golf series gives him a low-stakes content lane that can run alongside the season without touching basketball at all. For Cleveland, though, the takeaway from Saturday is simpler.
The franchise James twice left behind is still the one he reaches for when the cameras are his own. The banner from 2016 hangs in Rocket Arena, the team that raised it is spending its second act together on golf courses in Scotland and the most famous athlete on the planet just made all of it the opening statement of his new channel.
Whatever jersey he wears in October, the first thing new subscribers will learn about LeBron James is that he won a championship in Cleveland — and that he has never stopped talking about it.
