In our second episode of “A King’s Reign,” James Edwards III provides insight into one of LeBron James’ signature performances — when a 22-year-old LeBron scored the Cavs’ final 25 points of regulation and two overtimes in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals in 2007. Then, Joe Vardon has an interview with legendary coach Mike Krzyzewski as he takes us on a journey to Beijing with James and the 2008 U.S. Men’s National Basketball squad.
That team, known as “The Redeem Team,” has been fertile ground for storytelling, and it’s not difficult to see why.
After a tumultuous 2004 Olympics in Athens, where a young LeBron, Dwyane Wade and Carmelo Anthony spent more time watching than playing and Team USA finished with a bronze medal, the trio, and key addition Kobe Bryant led the U.S. to gold in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Not only does The Athletic explore the impact of that squad in Episode 2 of “A King’s Reign” but there’s also a full-length, Emmy-winning documentary about the team directed by Jon Weinbach.
Weinbach is president of Skydance Sports, a division of Skydance Media, and producer of the Ben Affleck-directed “Air,” starring Matt Damon, Viola Davis and Chris Tucker. Previously, Weinbach was at Mandalay Sports Media, where he was a producer on, among other projects, the wildly popular “The Last Dance” and executive producer on “The Comedy Store,” a five-part series for Showtime on the iconic Los Angeles comedy club.
While at Mandalay, he was the director and executive producer of “The Redeem Team,” documentary that premiered on Netflix in October 2022. Weinbach, who won a Sports Emmy for Long Documentary in May 2023 for “The Redeem Team,” joined The Athletic for a Q&A about his doc and what he learned about LeBron, Kobe, Dwyane and Co.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What was the inspiration behind doing this documentary?
I was at Mandalay Sports Media for nine years. We had done a lot of great projects — obviously “The Last Dance” — and we had done a partnership with the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to do, essentially, a kind of a “30 for 30” series of great Olympic stories.
This doc was the ninth of them. Most of them aired on the Olympic Channel, and some on NBC. The interesting thing is we’d actually done one on the 2004 Argentina team with an Argentinian director.
We were looking for a great American sports story, and this goes (back) to the co-producer of the film, Jonathan Vogler. He and I used to have this thing all the time where we go down YouTube rabbit holes. And he’s like, “The 2008 gold-medal game, greatest basketball game ever!”
And I was like, “You know, you’re right.”
It was just out of something that basic, like a YouTube discussion between colleagues.
I had a very specific emotional connection to that run. My older son was born in December of 2007. So in August 2008, he was about eight months old. What do eight-month-olds not do? They don’t sleep. All those games were on at crazy times, so I watched all those games, holding my son. I really watched.
We knew we were doing this series of Olympic films. We wanted to do a great American story. This was one I had a real personal connection to. We thought, “Hey, we got Dwyane Wade on board,” which was the real big thing. Like, OK, we have a path forward. So, that was sort of the impetus to do it.
I had always felt that this team had been overlooked in a certain kind of way, which sounds crazy, right? People think of the Dream Team and they think of, you know, some of the individual (NBA) teams, obviously the Celtics, Lakers. … But that team was a really interesting team, not just for what they did on the court, but it was — you know, for better or worse — at the Olympics.
If you’re an American sports fan, like, the world is not OK if we don’t win in track, in swimming, in gymnastics and in basketball. If we don’t do well in the States, it sort of goes to the core of our identity. If you’re an American basketball fan, we win at the Olympics. That’s what we do. It was this kind of reckoning because it almost felt like, “Oh, my God, we’re losing our way as a country. We can’t even win (basketball).”
Obviously there’s a lot of arrogance in that, but that’s why I thought the team was interesting for storytelling, because it was: How do you have some humility as a group of superstars?
Did you know LeBron before you started on this documentary?
In the sense that I had interviewed him briefly for a print article or two in my past, but this was the first time I had interviewed him in any depth.
Obviously, you had seen him interviewed before, so how did he come off when you were sitting across from him asking him questions about this time in his life?
It was remarkable because we had one advantage, which was he was the last person we interviewed for the film. By that time, we had, certainly not the final cut, but we had a cut resembling the final cut. We sent him the cut because Springhill (James’ media company) was one of the executive producers and a partner on the project. The advantage that gave us was that we could be relatively specific. We didn’t need him to do everything.
The reality is we had a limited amount of time. We had about an hour to interview him, and all I can say is he came to play.
He was candid. He was funny. He was on point in terms of what he was saying. And again, we had a little bit of an advantage. He didn’t know the questions, but kind of knew the general areas and, obviously, he knew the subject matter really well. But also, it was very clear that the team meant a lot to him, and the experience had meant a lot to him because he’s been asked every possible question on every possible basketball topic, and he’s always pretty game.
I think even most reporters would say that LeBron is pretty accommodating, a pretty honest interview. But he was really special (with this documentary). Like I said, he was focused. He was not impatient. He was thoughtful.
All I can say is as he kind of got himself going a little bit more — and it was clear as we even went on — we could have used every single minute of what he said. I would say the overarching impression was that he was a total pro and he came to play. It did not just seem like, “Oh, you know, I got seven things I got to do today, and this is the hour. I’m going to do the doc interview.”
It really felt — at least you don’t want to overstate the case — how important it was to him, (that) it did feel like it did something to him, and the quality was important.
I think that was epitomized in the doc near the end where he was talking about how that final gold-medal game with Spain was one of the greatest things he’s ever been involved in. So, obviously that time from when, as you mentioned in the doc, that you got him saying he was going to spend time with his friends and chill out after his rookie season and then all of a sudden it’s like he, Dwyane Wade and Carmelo have to go over to Athens to play and they didn’t play much. And he’s like “This s— was a waste of my time.”
Did you see that coming up early on in the questions?
I think here’s the other thing, too, that is significant about that time in his life. He had not won a championship. He had been to the finals once with the Cavs. It was between him and Kobe who was the best player in the NBA. But he was still quite young in terms of age — he was five years into the NBA, so he was 23. He had not won. In fact, nobody on that team had won except for Wade, Kobe and Tayshaun Prince. Those are the only three guys that had won championships, and Tayshaun wasn’t in the same category as Dwyane and Kobe. I think that it was a transformative experience for (LeBron), and I think this rang true for a lot of the guys.
I mean, if you look at what happened in the year or two after that, it’s pretty remarkable in terms of just the success that those guys on the team had. Kobe wins two championships with the Lakers (in 2009 and 2010). I think Dwyane Wade the following season had an unbelievable season in ’08-09. (Wade led the NBA in scoring with 30.2 points per game.) I think that was sort of his re-announcement in the basketball world. But I think that that was it.
And LeBron — you’ve seen this in his career — likes to be the team guy, and he was with that team. To me, it was very significant that he diffused whatever potential stuff could have happened between him and Kobe.
That’s not to say it didn’t happen at all. There was tension between them leading into the Olympics. We couldn’t get everything into the film, but there was a little bit of … there was an exhibition game where Kobe was shooting stuff, and LeBron was sort of miffed about it.
But it had to be LeBron. It couldn’t have been Chris Bosh, couldn’t have been Michael Redd who cut Kobe down to size and joked with them like you see in the doc. It had to be LeBron.
You said LeBron is the last interview, and you discovered a lot of this information as you were going through the footage. So you knew this going in, talking to LeBron. Was he surprised that you knew this, or was that something he was expecting? It’s been said that he has a photographic memory, so he can recall plays from years ago. Did you take him by surprise at all?
I don’t want to overstate my impact.
But you learn things through the footage.
I’ve had the good fortune to do a lot of great projects in sports, but especially in basketball. By that part of the process, I knew every frame of the footage that I could see. So, I was pretty well versed in it. I attended the 1984 Olympics in L.A. and have been semi-obsessed with international basketball ever since, both as a fan and in my professional career.
(Weinbach has produced numerous documentaries about international basketball. In 2012, he wrote and produced “The Other Dream Team” about Lithuania’s 1992 men’s Olympic basketball team, which was selected for the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for “Best Documentary” by the Producers Guild of America. He also produced “On the Map,” a critically-acclaimed film directed by Dani Menkin about the 1977 Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team, which won the European club championship, the first – and still one of the most significant – international sports victories in Israel’s history.)
All of the things being equal, I think athletes open up in a certain way when they sense that the person sitting across from them knows what they’re talking about. I think if you give whoever the interview subject is, whether it’s LeBron or Rob Peterson, there’s a dynamic. You have to let them know that you kind of care about what they say, that you are aware of what they’ve done and also to give them kind of the emotional space to swear or to be vulnerable. I’d like to hope that we were able to do that with LeBron.
But also, yeah, he didn’t need much prodding, and he was off.
I’ll tell you the part that was a big surprise. I asked, and I really didn’t know. I was hoping it was the case. I asked him the question about what was his gut feeling when he heard the news that they hired Coach K (Mike Krzyzewski)?
I was like, “Did you like Duke?” And he just went off.
And I figured he probably didn’t like Duke, right, but it was a great sort of moment in the interview. I remember turning to Greg Groggel, the producer, and Jonathan Vogler, just smiling because, you know, nobody likes Duke. (Laughs) Oh, it’s great to hear.
LeBron was just off on it; he was, you know, himself. And I think that was an awesome discovery.
(Coach K was one of the first interviews for the documentary in January, 2020, but many of the interviews were conducted after Bryant’s death in a helicopter accident on Jan. 26, 2020.)
(Many of the interviews were conducted) after Kobe’s death, and I guess one of the things that resonated with me, I heard some of the guys talking about it in past tense. Did you sense any difficulty for LeBron talking about Kobe? There’s obviously a dynamic that you guys highlight in the doc about having two alpha dogs, and everybody recognizes it, and you just mentioned about how you know LeBron was the only one who cut him down to size.
Did you find that he had any difficulties talking about Kobe at all?
You know, I’ve thought about this a lot. No … the answer is no. And I think it’s very hard because I grew up in L.A., right? I’m two years older than Kobe. I have two sons. It’s still sort of overwhelming. Obviously, that added a level of responsibility on our part to tell the story well, because it was going to be one of the first significant documentary projects to address any part of his legacy, and that hung over us as a responsibility.
In an interesting way, he was still present for the players. It was like he was still their teammate (and) he is still their teammate. It was a way to connect to that memory and to him without having to think about that unbelievable tragedy. It was a way to sort of compartmentalize a memory. And it was this really emotional thing that they all went through that I think they all look back fondly on, always.
I think with time, they will look back on it even more fondly, like a lot of things.
I have another question that wasn’t addressed in the documentary, and I was wondering if you guys ever talked about it. But that’s supposedly where Wade and Bosh and LeBron got together and were like, “Hey, you know, we could make this work in the NBA.” LeBron has that line like, “If I had Dwight Howard on my team, if (I had) Jason Kidd on my team, if I had Chris Paul on my team, I could be an NBA champion. There’s no excuses. Now we have to win the gold medal.”
It seems like they took that with Wade and Bosh and LeBron and transplanted to Miami. Was there any discussion of that when you asked him questions, or did you keep it focused on the Olympic gold?
Oh, no, we asked them directly! (Laughs.) Obviously, it didn’t have anything to do with that story … but, you know, off camera.
There was, in fact, a moment in time when we were going to make that a storyline, i.e. that Beijing was where “the big three” hatched the plan … except for one big problem. They didn’t hatch the plan in Beijing. They all said this, but Dwyane — and he was asked it a bunch in some of the press around our film — was the most forthright in saying, “Everyone thinks that we were sitting in the Beijing hotels going, ‘In two years we’re all going to get together.’ It just isn’t true.”
Here’s what I do think. There’s no question that experience from ’08 made them all feel super positive about one another and want to add to that. Whether it actively or subconsciously played a role in them being like, “Cool, let’s all get together two years later.”
But it was not like some deep, dark secret plan hatched in the Four Seasons Beijing, like a smoke-filled room or something, like, that in two years, we’re going to come together with Miami. Because also, there was all these various things that had to sort out (like) the contracts.
But yeah, I think it just gave (them) a very good feeling about each other, but it was not like it was devised there.
The #SportsEmmys Award for Long Documentary goes to The Redeem Team @KennedyMarshaII @usabasketball @59thPrairie @kingjames @DwyaneWade (@netflix @olympics). pic.twitter.com/SLyPFLl8oi
— Sports Emmys (@sportsemmys) May 23, 2023
You’ve been in the media for a while. LeBron has obviously started his own media company. They helped produce the documentary. What has impressed you most about what he’s done with his career outside of basketball in terms of media and setting up a company such as that?
He’s a unicorn in terms of being able to build an entertainment portfolio as an athlete. As big as Steven Spielberg — or I would like to think Leonardo DiCaprio — they’re huge in their space, right, in entertainment?
There’s Magic Johnson, who’s an incredible athlete. Michael Jordan’s an incredible player. It’s partly the product of the times, timing and opportunity, the mushrooming of content and all of that. But it’s still this really, really significant business on the entertainment side … it’s incredible. I mean, it’s a big credit to him, Maverick Carter (CEO), Jamal Henderson (chief content officer), who runs the company on a day-to-day basis. Also Philip Byron, who oversees unscripted for Springhill, was hugely supportive and helpful on “Redeem Team.” These are really good, smart, savvy people.
I think of the challenges a lot of athletes feel like, “Hey, I’m great at my sport. I can have an entertainment portfolio like LeBron.” I think it’s also that it is basketball, which is after soccer, in my opinion, the most global sport.
He came to L.A., and he played for the Lakers, and no entertainment executive will ever get fired for wanting to do a show with LeBron James. Who wants to say no to having a meeting with LeBron?
But it’s that timing, that opportunity and where he’s a magnet not just for projects about basketball, but really he’s become sort of the magnet for projects that touch sports, race, culture in any combination. And then it’s like, LeBron can be attached to it and feel totally organic.
That’s a credit to him and also the team around him to have the ability to make that actually happen.
Find the series on The Athletic app or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Related reading
Vardon: Introduction to the “A King’s Reign” podcast series
Sports and TV: Why sports documentaries are in a golden era
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Jesse D. Garrabrant, Nathaniel S. Butler / NBAE via Getty Images)