Reigning NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander tipped his cap to LeBron James after the Oklahoma City Thunder swept the Los Angeles Lakers out of the second round of the playoffs on Monday.<\/p>\n
Speaking to reporters on the heels of OKC’s 115-110 win over the Lakers in Game 4 to advance to the Western Conference Finals, SGA marveled at LeBron’s high level of performance at the age of 41 (beginning at the 4:18 mark of the video):<\/p>\n
“It’s amazing what he’s doing out there at this age,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “It’s very impressive. It’s hard to put it to words. He’s not very old in the grand scheme of life, but for the NBA, he’s pretty old, and he doesn’t seem like it out there. He was a force. He was the top of the scouting report all series. His size gave us issues at times. He was impressive out there. I’m not sure we’ll see anything like that again, his longevity and his greatness.”<\/p>\n
Throughout the 2025-26 regular season, Luka Don\u010di\u0107 was the Lakers’ go-to guy, and Austin Reaves even finished with a higher scoring average than James as well.<\/p>\n
Still, LeBron was highly impressive in his 23rd NBA season, averaging 20.9 points on 51.5 percent shooting to go along with 7.2 assists, 6.1 rebounds, 1.3 three-pointers made and 1.2 assists.<\/p>\n
James took his game to another level during the playoffs as well, which was needed since Don\u010di\u0107 missed the entire playoff run and Reaves missed the first four games of the first round due to injuries.<\/p>\n
LeBron started all 10 postseason games, led the team in scoring with 23.2 points per contest and added 7.3 assists, 6.7 rebounds, 1.7 three-pointers made and 1.3 steals.<\/p>\n
It is possible that Monday was James’ final NBA game, as he is set to become a free agent this offseason, but given how well he continues to perform, re-signing with the Lakers or signing elsewhere remains very much in play.<\/p>\n
James may no longer be the same player that won four NBA MVP awards, four NBA championships and four NBA Finals MVP awards, but he is still a great player who can contribute to winning basketball whether that be in L.A. or elsewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reigning NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander tipped his cap to LeBron James after the Oklahoma City Thunder swept the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":666350,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":["post-666349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666349","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=666349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666349\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/666350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}