If your ears perked up when LeBron James said something candid over the past few years, he probably said it in response to a question from Claire de Lune.

“The questions she asks LeBron lead to some of his best answers,” Nick Wright said on his What’s Wright? podcast in April 2025.

De Lune, an NBA reporter for The Guardian, covers the whole league through the lens of innate curiosity and human-based storytelling. But because she’s based in Los Angeles, she has a front-row seat to the Los Angeles Lakers and has developed a reputation as the de facto LeBron reporter. By focusing on the human side of the historical giant, De Lune gave fans an earnest glimpse of the man beneath the records and rings.

This summer, James, 41, left Los Angeles to play out his final act with the Philadelphia 76ers.

De Lune is entering a new chapter, too, as she’ll launch Basketball, Etc., a narrative podcast via iHeartPodcasts, on Tuesday.

“The debut season will feature conversations and stories with guests including Flea, Nick Wright, Desus Nice, Kazeem Famuyide, and Eve Peyser,” reads the official iHeartMedia press release. “Episodes will feature topics exploring the relationship between art, philosophy and the Los Angeles Lakers; LeBron James’ defining 23 moments in 23 years; the secret life of NBA mascots; the story of Lenny Cooke (featuring Carmelo Anthony); women’s professional basketball in the 1970s; the ups and downs of Knicks fandom; Connie Hawkins and basketball justice; and more.”

In the conversation below, de Lune told the story of her unconventional path to basketball fandom and sportswriting, her experience covering James, and her perspective on basketball media overall.

Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

How did Basketball, Etc. come to be, and what is your greatest hope for the podcast?

Claire de Lune: I’m a huge consumer of basketball podcast content, but I didn’t see the show that I wanted to listen to. I felt like every show that I listened to tried to fill a void that didn’t exist, or wasn’t fillable. Xs and Os and couch GMing. And if it was about off-court stuff, it was kind of gossipy.

I like consuming that stuff sometimes, but I just wanted to hear long-form interviews and storytelling about basketball. Similar to the non-basketball podcasts I consume, like The Daily or This American Life. I was just like, I wish this existed. And then I was like, oh, well, I could just make it.

Sports in general are a melodrama about life and humanity. It’s theater. If you already love basketball, I hope it makes you love it more. And if you don’t really care about basketball but really love great stories, I think you’ll enjoy it as well.

i couldn’t find the basketball podcast i wanted to listen to…so i made it myself.

introducing Basketball, Etc. from @iHeartPodcasts. untold & undertold basketball stories, every tues. no hot takes, no yelling. no couch GMs. just storytelling w heart, nuance & love for the game

subscribe now! first episode drops oct 6

https://t.co/LokuZJ4SKc

— claire de lune (@ClaireMPLS) September 29, 2026

What was your relationship with basketball before you started covering it?

De Lune: I didn’t grow up watching sports at all, really. I grew up in a family that was very artistically minded. My cousins, respectively, are a documentary filmmaker and the guitarist for Interpol. My mom was a Mets fan, but not in the sense of watching all the games.

I grew up knowing about basketball because I grew up in New York in the late ’90s, so it was a very consequential time in basketball history, but I didn’t actually start watching basketball religiously until I was in my early 20s. I was on tour, and my drummer was an Oklahoma City Thunder fan, and we were touring during the playoffs. This was the Baby Thunder — like, James Harden, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant era. He would have the NBA playoffs on every night in our green room, while we waited to soundcheck or whatever. There’s so much downtime on a tour, and I just got hooked. I started watching with him, and I just fell in love with it.

It was straight hobby fandom. I can’t overstate this enough: I had zero professional ambitions regarding basketball. I was a touring indie musician. I’d been writing songs since I was 5 years old. I went to a performing arts high school. Music was what I was going to do with my life forever. There was no other option. Literally, I’ve wanted to be a musician since kindergarten.

How and when did that switch into your writing about basketball?

De Lune: I was really into NBA Twitter. I think people just assumed that I did something in basketball because I was verified and all I did was talk about basketball. Not the case. At all. I definitely was just a musician obsessed with basketball. I surpassed my music friends’ casual interest in basketball so quickly. At that time in my life, the only people who were as obsessed with it as I was were professional sports media people. I started gaining a following on Twitter. From that, I met a bunch of people.

When I moved to L.A., a lot of the friends I’d made on Twitter live out here, and I became friends with them in real life and met their friends. And then, during the pandemic, when I couldn’t tour, I was bored and started a podcast. I ended up getting poached from Spotify at that time to host a show on their live platform, which is now nonexistent.

Shortly after that, my [now-]editor at The Guardian DMed me on Twitter and said, “Have you ever thought about writing about basketball?” I was like, “No? I mean, I would, but I’ve only ever written songs.” They said that was OK, and I could try out a few articles. I did it, and my articles did well, and I’ve been working there ever since.

I’ve had a couple of students reach out to me for advice on navigating the industry and how to get a job, and I really feel so ill-equipped to offer advice because I had an unconventional path. I can’t really give advice, except that a really good life lesson I learned is, like, if you just do things that you love because you love them and lead with curiosity and passion — and you don’t have an agenda — good things can happen.

When did you first take a particular interest in LeBron?

De Lune: Around the time I first fell in love with basketball was what I consider to be his peak. My honeymoon years with basketball was 2013 to 2019. That’s when I was just watching as a fan, and it wasn’t my job at all. It was just pure excitement, curiosity, and joy, and he was just the greatest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

For me, with him, it’s 50% about thinking he’s awesome and a special person, and 50% is that I really love history and the gravity of it. I believe he will go down as the greatest player of all time, and this part of his career arc that I’ve gotten to cover is so unprecedented. It’s like living history in real time, and I’m documenting it. I am so hyper-aware of the privilege of getting to cover such a historic moment in a sport that I love so much.

To that end, we all know he’s one of the best athletes to ever live. But what makes him one of the most captivating?

De Lune: He still just does things physically to where you’re like, How? I find neuroscience super fascinating. Watching the way his brain works on a basketball court, how he sees the plays before they happen, I just find that fascinating and so cool. A question I wanted to ask him last year that I didn’t get a chance to ask him was, what’s it like to have your basketball brain only get sharper and sharper, while your body moves in the opposite direction?

There must be a lot of grief involved, I imagine.

De Lune: That’s why I found his last year so fascinating to cover. I think this is the stuff that the average fan [reacts to by saying], “Oh, you just love LeBron. You’re just a fan.” I don’t think they understand that I’m watching someone learn what grief is. I’m watching the greatest athlete of all time go through the grieving process in real, struggle with it. The denial, all the stages of grief. I’m watching someone reckon with his own basketball mortality.

i asked lebron how it feels to hear so much discourse about what a 40 year old is *hypothethically*, and how divorced it is from the quality of play he still puts on the floor.

“you are the age you tell your mind you are.” pic.twitter.com/LYko2UfsLW

— claire de lune (@ClaireMPLS) September 29, 2025

When did you start noticing him opening up more to human-based questions?

De Lune: His eyes would light up when I asked things that were a little out of left field. But I never formally introduced myself to him. That’s honestly probably a faux pas. I probably should have, but I just didn’t know you were supposed to.

I remember I was in the locker room — this was two years ago — and he was talking about something in [a media scrum] around his locker. From afar, I nodded along in agreement, and he was like, “Ain’t that right, Claire?” I was like, “How do you know my name? What?” I was so confused.

I’m friends with people in his greater orbit. I asked one of them, “Did you tell him about me? How does he know my name? He was just like, “No, he just respects your work.” That was the first time where I felt like, oh, I’ve really build a cool rapport here to the point where he wondered, who is this person?

I think I’m also my own worst critic. When every answer started going viral, I thought I must be getting good stuff. But in the moment, when I’m asking those questions, the answers are never as vulnerable as I want them to be. I’m always like, man, should I have phrased that differently to get an even better answer? And then I hear the response. People are like, “I’ve never heard him this vulnerable,” and I’m just like, oh, so I guess I did do something.

ummmmm this is the coolest thing ever? thank you, @getnickwright! pic.twitter.com/Nq6tC4rp8C

— claire de lune (@ClaireMPLS) April 3, 2025

Do you have a favorite question-and-answer with LeBron over the years that stands above the rest in your memory?

De Lune: He had been on SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt, and Scott Van Pelt asked him something in that interview. LeBron said, “Basketball is like jazz; it’s like music.” It was an offhand comment.

Scott Van Pelt didn’t ask any follow-up questions, and I wished he had. I had been at the game when he went on with Scott Van Pelt, so I was still at the game and in the locker room during that interview. I didn’t hear it in real time, but I watched SportsCenter when I got home from the arena at, like, midnight.

You just have to be that level of a sicko to want to consume everything you possibly can to get the best question, you know? I’m just a weirdo. But I heard that nugget and knew I had to ask him about that. The next game, I asked, “What’s musical about basketball to you, and do you find it be a form of creative expression?” He lit up so much. He was like, “It’s about rhythm,” and talked about being in the mall as a kid with his friends, and they would dribble an imaginary basketball to the beat of the music in the mall.

i asked @KingJames just what it is about basketball that’s musical, and if he considers it a form of creative expression, in light of his recent comments to scott van pelt about how “watching basketball is like listening to music” pic.twitter.com/4dLjkWxVdX

— claire de lune (@ClaireMPLS) March 5, 2025

God, what we’ve lost as a society is so sad.

De Lune: I know! But that was such a beautiful memory, and you could feel him going back there. I watched him go through a portal.

A locker room scrum — it’s so hard to get someone to be that contemplative and deep when you have one question. If you have an hour, or even 20 minutes, with someone, you can get there if you craft the interview correctly. That was the first time where I felt like I reached the human being. Not the media-trained, presidential candidate. The person.

That experience — and the questions I’ve asked him that went viral — made me realize that half the job is knowing what to ask and when to ask it. Just reading the room and emotional intelligence, which is honestly so lacking in the media. So many of the questions I’ve come up with came from doing that extra bit of legwork.

Half of it is doing the legwork to learn as much as you can about somebody to stumble upon a good question, and then it’s about crafting the question, picking the right time, and phrasing it in a way where they feel heard and safe. Both of those things are lacking in a lot of media, and I think that’s why players often have such a contentious relationship with the media.

Sometimes, it doesn’t even feel like a revelatory question.

De Lune: That’s how I feel every time. Literally, every time. I’m like, I really feel like I just was observant and empathetic. And then the reaction is, yeah, well, actually, that’s rare!

I’m not cynical in this work. There’s no scheme or goal I’m trying to achieve. I truly am just curious and understand the opportunity in front of me and want to make the most of it. It’s easy to stand out operating that way when there’s so much cynicism and lack of empathy.

What has been the most interesting thing you’ve observed about the LeBron media ecosystem?

De Lune: Just that there’s a whole cottage industry on hating him. There are definitely people who built their careers on analyzing him, following him around. Brian Windhorst, Dave McMenamin — he’s their bread and butter, in a way. I knew and understood that before I was in it, but I don’t think I understood how much money there is in sh*t-talking him.

What was your reaction when James officially announced his move from Los Angeles to Philadelphia?

De Lune: I felt a lot of empathy for him, with the way that all went down. I felt happy for him that he chose a much more challenging, riskier path, but one that he may be felt more appreciated or fulfilled. But, obviously, as a journalist, it’s a bummer because it was such an honor to cover him up close for so long.

In some ways, it was already changing. I feel like the best answers I ever got from him were the season before last. It’s kind of just true in life: when you’re in a good place, you’re more open and vulnerable. I definitely got great answers from him last year — and we developed even more of a rapport as people last year — but I think it was hard to get him to give really contemplative, deep answers when he was in such a weird place. Like you said, he was dealing with grief and reckoning the end of his career, and being kind of replaced as the face of the franchise.

What did you learn from covering LeBron that has changed how you cover basketball moving forward?

De Lune: I started covering him in his late 30s, so his time as a basketball player was finite from the beginning of when I started covering him. The writing was on the wall, though not nearly as much as we thought, because he’s still really good. But it made me very present and appreciative. Just valuing the moment and not taking things for granted. I think you can apply that to anything. Any time in history that you get to cover, and any time in life, it’s never going to be exactly like that again.