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LeBron James must be so sick of this. If he wanted to experience being the best player on an otherwise thin team, he could simply remember the Cleveland Cavaliers’ run to the NBA finals in 2007. Or the 2015 NBA finals when his best teammates, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love, suffered injuries. Or the 2018 season, which convinced SNL to make a spoof of James’ support staff. “I’m 53 years old,” one of LeBron’s “teammates” says in the clip. “I have seven kids, and two of them are also on the Cavs.” It’s 2026, James is a Los Angeles Laker, his two best teammates are hurt, and one of his kids actually is on the team.
How on earth did we get here, again? James is 41. The story of his season was his labored yet successful pivot into the Lakers’ third option, behind Luka Dončić (who was having one of the best stretches of his career before tweaking his hamstring in a humiliating loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder) and Austin Reaves (who strained his oblique in the same game). Both men are in their primes. James, on the other hand, has been plagued with what some observers may call old guy injuries: he missed the start of the season due to sciatica; he’s sat out a couple games since thanks to arthritis in his left foot. So how – how – is it that Dončić and Reaves were the ones felled by injuries and James is the iron man? Aren’t the rules that athletes in their 20s get to enjoy energy and health, while those in their 40s have to retire and become mediocre pundits?
Surreal as James reprising his role from a decade ago is, there’s nobody more used to the gig. Asked recently what his team now needs from him, James said, “everything, so nothing changes for me. Just back to the old ways.” Dončić and Reaves are out indefinitely. If James can prolong the Lakers’ run, that pair may have time to come back and restore the team to its best possible form, but there are no guarantees.
James has at least one thing going for him, aside from the small matter of being arguably the greatest player of all time: the Lakers are playing the dysfunctional Houston Rockets in the first round of the playoffs. This version of the Rockets, without vital contributors in Fred VanVleet and Steven Adams, are capable of blowing a 13-point lead in overtime. There’s simply no other group in the NBA who have it in them, even those teams who spent most of the season trying to lose. On top of that, Kevin Durant recently hurt his knee in practice, forcing him out of Saturday night’s series opener, which the Lakers won 107-98. The Rockets’ offense is poor at the best of times, but removing KD is like taking the bacon and bread off a BLT.
And look, James did not carry the Lakers in Saturday’s win, though the Rockets offered so little resistance that he never had to try. Luke Kennard had 27 points. James had 19, and so did Deandre Ayton. (Guess Ayton drank his crunk juice.) But it was the King who commanded the pace and flow of the game. James had 13 assists to what felt like every single one of his teammates, many of them leading to wide-open shots. He either created or assisted on 15 of the Lakers’ first 19 points. He hit a long three in the fourth quarter, then a ridiculous fadeaway over Amen Thompson, the Rockets’ best defender. He snagged an errant pass in the first quarter; while tumbling out of bounds, he managed to leap in the air and drill the ball off Thompson’s legs to maintain Lakers possession. James played 38 minutes. He finished with a +11 on-off rating, the best on either team.
Saturday was no anomaly. James’ on-court play has been notable this year not just in its continued quality (again: he is 41), but in its effort and intentionality. In December, he sacrificed his run of 1,297 consecutive regular season games in which he’d scored 10 or more points to dish the ball to Rui Hachimura for a game-winner. In the closing minutes of a March thriller against the Denver Nuggets, James dove for a loose ball as if he was a teenager again; the Lakers wound up winning in overtime. Before Dončić and Reaves went down, James had morphed into an uber-efficient role player, producing restrained masterpieces in a radically different style to his do-it-all finals heroics in the 2010s.
It’s been clear since before this season even started that the Lakers won’t win the title this season. Even if they get past the Rockets, the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder will almost certainly grind them into a fine sand in the next round. James must know it.
But maybe he’s just not fazed by any of it, or having to play without Dončić and Reaves. “I’ve been in every situation you can ever imagine as a basketball player,” he said after Game 1. And he has. The bar for his career being set at “surpass Michael Jordan” when he was still in high school didn’t deter him. The venom aimed at him after the Decision, as if he’d committed a serious crime by cheesily announcing his move to the Miami Heat, didn’t do long-term damage. He responded as well as was possible to the disaster that was the 2011 finals. A meaningful portion of NBA fans’ aggressive certainty that basketball is actually an individual sport hasn’t bullied him into becoming a ball hog at the cost of team success. Maybe sharing a starting lineup with Kennard, Ayton, Hachimura, and Marcus Smart instead of taking part in a superteam hardly registers as a challenge at this point.
Perhaps, with time, playing on so many less-than-ideal teams may even end up benefiting James’s legacy – in some calmer world, when we can soberly agree that most of those finals losses weren’t on him alone. James would probably have won more rings on better teams (or if he got to play against worse teams in finals). We might also not have gotten to see the outer reaches of his skill. The way things turned out, he faced enough adversity that he had to show us every extraordinary version of himself.
