Two months after his 38th birthday, 19 days since setting the NBA’s all-time scoring record and a week following a record-tying 19th All-Star appearance, LeBron James is still giving Father Time a game for the ages.
In a span of less than two hours Monday, news snowballed from the Lakers ruling James out for a vital game against the Memphis Grizzlies to reports that his right foot injury will likely sideline him for “an extended period of time” (multiple weeks even) to his own confirmation that this, indeed, “F*n sucks.”
Just as his 12th-place Lakers were showing signs of life, having won four of five games since an active trade deadline, James is waging battle with the one opponent he cannot beat, and they are headed for another overtime. What becomes of the Lakers in his absence is an afterthought.
The basketball vitality of one of the all-time greats — perhaps the all-time great — is in serious peril.
Even with James, the Lakers faced a narrow path to avoiding a second straight lottery appearance, let alone emerging from the opening round of the playoffs for the first time since their championship in 2020. His latest absence is further evidence that the bubble title was the anomaly, not the injuries around it, and we are now years into a natural decline that comes with age, whether James or anyone else will admit it.
Relative to the rest of his remarkably durable career, James’ tenure in Los Angeles has been plagued by injuries practically from the start. On Christmas 2018, two months removed from his Lakers debut and five days before he turned 34, James strained his groin. His ensuing 17-game absence marked the first significant injury of his career; he had previously never missed more than 13 games in any one season.
James played 156 straight games prior to the groin strain, including two grueling Finals runs, a league-leading 3,026 minutes in his final season with the Cleveland Cavaliers and his first 34 games with the Lakers.
Since then, his longest streaks without the benefit of an offseason are the 24 straight games he played en route to a title in the bubble and the 25 consecutive he played before his left knee swelled in January 2022.
So when James said of the stretch run at his pregame All-Star news conference on Feb. 19, “It’s 23 of the most important games of my career for a regular season,” his “hope I can figure out a way to just make sure that I’m available on the floor every single night” was just that: hope against an…