Kevin Garnett is one of the greatest NBA players of all time. Because of that, his words carry a certain weight.

Recently, Garnett made headlines when offered something of a serious allegation against Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James. The fact that he did it shortly after he chose another superstar as the face of this era of hoops wasn’t lost on people.

“[Can] Bronny get a bucket on [LeBron] right now?” Garnett asked Paul Pierce on the ‘Ticket and The Truth’ podcast recently.

“Yeah, he can get a bucket on Bron right now. Yeah, he can get a bucket,” Pierce replied.


“Have you seen his dad?” Garnett countered. “His dad is on that BALCO, he on that new juice.”

BALCO, for the uninitiated, stands for Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative. It was a business that peddled anabolic steroids to professional athletes and was at the center of a major scandal in 2003.

Garnett’s allegation that James is somehow involved in steroid use is no joke, but he also isn’t the only person saying something along those lines.

Former UFC star Chael Sonnen, who now serves as a co-host for an ESPN MMA program, seemed to confirm Garnett’s claims against James.

“And he and I have one thing in common, we use the same drug dealer to buy our EPO. And I don’t see anything wrong with that… It was something called EPO,” Sonnen said.


“And in the world of performance enhancing drugs, in my experience, EPO is king. And it is king by eight. I would pass up five other stuff just to have that. But it’s very, very difficult to get. It’s very expensive. We happen to have the same guy.

“I didn’t say that to out him and or embarrass him. This wasn’t like a dry snitch. I’m sharing that if you want to get a basketball and you want to make it to 38, you want to be the MVP of the league, you can’t just go do certain things.”

Victor Conte, the face of the BALCO scandal, also weighed in on the matter recently during a conversation with Jason Whitlock.

“What do you think of all the conversation around LeBron James?” Whitlock asked him.

“Kevin Garnett makes a statement during a podcast that LeBron is ‘on that new BALCO’, blah, blah, blah, and there’s been a lot of rumors and speculation to that whole Biogenesis DEA investigation, people attached to LeBron were connected to that. Should we be suspicious of the longevity of LeBron’s career?”

Conte approached the matter thoughtfully.

“Yes, there’s reason for suspicion,” he replied.

“I want to be fair to LeBron, there is no evidence that I know of that’s conclusive. We have to factor in what they call the ‘standard’. You have the ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ in criminal court. You have the ‘preponderance of evidence’ in civil court.

“Then you have what they call ‘comfortable satisfaction’ that arbitrators use in the world of sport. These things that you just mentioned — his manager, his agent, his wife, his trainer, all being connected to the Biogenenis clinic, as well as another drug dealer at a gym, so it wasn’t just Biogenenis, there was another connection as well,” he continued.


“Then some of this testimony that his agent on a monthly basis was going by the Biogenesis clinic and picking up a package of PEDs with the initials of ‘L.J.’ on them.”

For whatever reason, this issue doesn’t seem to be going away.


And while a lot of the more mainstream sports media seems averse to touching on it, there is definitely some smoke here.

Will James or any members of his team ultimately opt to address this situation and put it to rest one way or the other? Time will tell.