{"id":618948,"date":"2026-04-20T10:15:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T10:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/618948\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T10:15:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T10:15:08","slug":"lebron-james-is-41-and-hes-somehow-still-carrying-his-team-in-the-playoffs-lebron-james","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/618948\/","title":{"rendered":"LeBron James is 41. And he\u2019s somehow still carrying his team in the playoffs | LeBron James"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019 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\u2019 support staff<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019m 53 years old,\u201d one of LeBron\u2019s \u201cteammates\u201d says in the clip. \u201cI have seven kids, and two of them are also on the Cavs.\u201d It\u2019s 2026, James is a Los Angeles Laker, his two best teammates are hurt, and one of his kids actually is on the team<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 third option, behind Luka Don\u010di\u0107 (who was having one of the best stretches of his career before tweaking his hamstring in a humiliating loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder<\/a>) 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\u2019s sat out a couple games since thanks to arthritis in his left foot. So how \u2013 how \u2013 is it that Don\u010di\u0107 and Reaves were the ones felled by injuries and James is the iron man? Aren\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n

Surreal as James reprising his role from a decade ago is, there\u2019s nobody more used to the gig. Asked recently what his team now needs from him, James said, \u201ceverything, so nothing changes for me. Just back to the old ways.\u201d<\/a> Don\u010di\u0107 and Reaves are out indefinitely. If James can prolong the Lakers\u2019 run, that pair may have time to come back and restore the team to its best possible form, but there are no guarantees.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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<\/a> in overtime. There\u2019s simply no other group in the NBA who have it in them, even those teams who spent most of the season trying to lose<\/a>. On top of that, Kevin Durant recently hurt his knee in practice, forcing him out of Saturday night\u2019s series opener, which the Lakers won 107-98. The Rockets\u2019 offense is poor at the best of times, but removing KD is like taking the bacon and bread off a BLT.<\/p>\n

And look, James did not carry the Lakers in Saturday\u2019s 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.<\/a>) 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\u2019 first 19 points. He hit a long three in the fourth quarter, then a ridiculous fadeaway over Amen Thompson<\/a>, the Rockets\u2019 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\u2019s legs to maintain Lakers possession. James played 38 minutes. He finished with a +11 on-off rating, the best on either team.<\/p>\n

Saturday was no anomaly. James\u2019 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\u2019d 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<\/a> for a loose ball as if he was a teenager again; the Lakers wound up winning in overtime. Before Don\u010di\u0107 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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been clear since before this season even started that the Lakers won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

But maybe he\u2019s just not fazed by any of it, or having to play without Don\u010di\u0107 and Reaves. \u201cI\u2019ve been in every situation you can ever imagine as a basketball player,\u201d he said after Game 1. And he has. The bar for his career being set at \u201csurpass Michael Jordan\u201d when he was still in high school didn\u2019t deter him. The venom aimed at him after the Decision, as if he\u2019d committed a serious crime by cheesily announcing his move to the Miami Heat, didn\u2019t do long-term damage. He responded as well as was possible to the disaster that was the 2011 finals. A meaningful portion of NBA<\/a> fans\u2019 aggressive certainty that basketball is actually an individual sport hasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Perhaps, with time, playing on so many less-than-ideal teams may even end up benefiting James\u2019s legacy \u2013 in some calmer world, when we can soberly agree that most of those finals losses weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LeBron James must be so sick of this. If he wanted to experience being the best player on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618949,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-618948","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basketball","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-basketball","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618948","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=618948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}