{"id":330180,"date":"2025-12-05T21:22:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T21:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/330180\/"},"modified":"2025-12-05T21:22:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-05T21:22:08","slug":"lebron-james-luka-doncic-out-for-lakers-matchup-with-celtics-on-friday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/330180\/","title":{"rendered":"LeBron James, Luka Don\u010di\u0107 out for Lakers&#8217; matchup with Celtics on Friday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Los Angeles Lakers announced LeBron James is out for Friday night&#8217;s game against the Boston Celtics. Luka Don\u010di\u0107 and Marcus Smart were also ruled out.<\/p>\n<p>James&#8217; injury designation is right sciatica and left arthritis, while Smart is dealing with a left lumbar muscle strain. Don\u010di\u0107 has been away from the team for the birth of his second child in Slovenia.<\/p>\n<p>Advertisement<\/p>\n<p>James is coming off a notable performance Thursday night, when his <a data-i13n=\"cpos:1;pos:1\" href=\"https:\/\/sports.yahoo.com\/article\/lebron-james-incredible-10-point-031155818.html\" data-ylk=\"slk:incredible 10-point streak \u2014 which has stood since 2007 \u2014 ended in thrilling fashion;cpos:1;pos:1;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas;outcm:mb_qualified_link;_E:mb_qualified_link;ct:story;\" class=\"link  yahoo-link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">incredible 10-point streak \u2014 which has stood since 2007 \u2014 ended in thrilling fashion<\/a>. With eight points on the stat sheet, James had the ball in the waning seconds of a tie game against the Raptors, but opted to pass to Rui Hachimura, who hit the game-winning 3-pointer.<\/p>\n<p>James has played in just six of the Lakers&#8217; 21 games this season because of sciatica, and his 14.0 average points per game are easily the fewest of his career. His next-lowest total was in his rookie year in 2003-04, when he averaged 20.9 points in 79 games.<\/p>\n<p>Still, the Lakers (16-5) are good for second in the Western Conference behind the <a data-i13n=\"cpos:2;pos:1\" href=\"https:\/\/sports.yahoo.com\/nba\/article\/oklahoma-city-thunder-wins-tracker-can-okc-break-the-nbas-single-season-wins-record-154525943.html\" data-ylk=\"slk:one-loss Oklahoma City Thunder;cpos:2;pos:1;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas;outcm:mb_qualified_link;_E:mb_qualified_link;ct:story;\" class=\"link  yahoo-link\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">one-loss Oklahoma City Thunder<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Los Angeles Lakers announced LeBron James is out for Friday night&#8217;s game against the Boston Celtics. Luka&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,1664,7896,7232,11473,9034,590,5548,129647,53897,184756,85],"class_list":["post-330180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-boston-celtics","tag-lebron-james","tag-los-angeles-lakers","tag-luka-doncic","tag-marcus-smart","tag-nba","tag-oklahoma-city-thunder","tag-raptors","tag-rui-hachimura","tag-sciatica","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}