Kieran Shannon: There’s only so much one man can do, even LeBron James
LeBron James put up 39 points for the LA Lakers in their Christmas Day clash at home to the Brooklyn Nets, but it still wasn’t enough as they lost 122-115 at the newly renamed Crypto.com Arena. Picture: Jayne Kamin-Oncea/Getty Images
He’s now spent more than half his life playing in the NBA.
LeBron James was a week short of being 18 and a half when his name was called out as the first pick of the 2003 draft. On Thursday he’ll turn 37, making him one of only four currently contracted players in the league to reach that threshold and reminding the rest of us that not even the greatest conditioned athlete in the history of the sport can go on forever.
The way things have been going lately in La La Land, James has to be feeling his age.
It’s not that he’s been playing old — over his past eight games, no one in the NBA has scored more than his average of 30.6 points per game — but that his team is: Four of the other eldest dozen players in the league are fellow LA Lakers.
And they don’t include Russell Westbrook, a once phenomenal, if always flawed, guard the Lakers gambled on this past off-season, who is now 33, an obvious misfit for this team and in irreversible decline.
Or Anthony Davis, who was supposed to be the heir to the throne of King James, or at least a successor to the lineage of Shaq and Abdul-Jabbar, a generational big-man talent, but who at 28 already seems to have peaked; while he’ll always have the bubble that was Florida 2020 and the ring to show for it, his subsequent slump has more in common with how Dwight Howard disappointed upon moving to Hollywood to team up with Kobe than when O’Neal did.
Indeed there are a lot of echoes here of Bryant’s and LA’s 2012-13 season, one that started with such promise upon the signing of an exceptional if ageing guard (for Westbrook now, read Steve Nash then) and an All-NBA centre in his supposed prime (for Davis now, read Howard) to combine with a slightly declining but still world top-five player. The expectation was that they’d bounce back to challenge for a championship they’d won only a year or two earlier, but by Christmas they had lost more games than they had won.
In the final third of that season, Bryant would go on one of the greatest — and the last — individual tears of his career to finish the league’s third-leading scorer and secure his team a playoff spot, but only after logging over 40 minutes a night, a ridiculously high load for a player of his age. It ultimately caught up with him: In the closing minutes of the third-last game of that regular season, a game against a fledgling Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors, Bryant, after just hitting consecutive three-pointers to tie the game, tore his achilles tendon. Naturally that ruled him out for the playoffs, which the Lakers would exit after being swept in the first round. But it still provided a typical, iconic Bryant moment: After collapsing in anguish, Bryant would still manage to rise to his feet to nail both free-throws, his 32nd and 33rd points of the night, that ultimately separated the teams, before hobbling off.
James is now similarly raging against the dying of the light, less so on his career and greatness winding down as his and his team’s championship window, or even their playoff prospects.
His team’s game on Christmas Day against a depleted Brooklyn Nets typified his brilliance and his team’s mediocrity, bordering on dysfunctionality. At one stage in the third quarter they trailed by 24 points only for James to drag them back to level terms by scoring 39 points (and thus overtaking Bryant as the NBA’s all-time leading scorer on Christmas Day). But then a series of brainlock plays by Westbrook on both ends of the floor allowed the Nets to rip off the last seven points of the game.
It meant that over the Lakers’ last five games, James has averaged 31.6 points and 9.8 rebounds a game, phenomenal individual stats from any player, let alone in their 19th season — and yet the Lakers have lost all five, by an average of 15. There is so much only one man can do, even when that one man is LeBron James.
In a way, though, this is as much on him as it is on the Lakers front office, not least for how much the latter confers with — even defers to — James. Like everywhere else he’s gone since taking his talents to South Beach, James has had a major say in the recruitment — and the discarding — of the talent around him. For the most part he has used that sway wisely, but not so much this past offseason or two.
It brings to mind a line from that other NBA-heavy film made in 1995 that featured cameos from Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing. In the shadow of Space Jam, a lot of people forget Forget Paris in which Billy Crystal forsakes the buzz and travel of refereeing in the NBA to live a domestic life with Debra Winger’s Ellen and mind her senile, irritating father — played by William Hickey, who you’ll remember best as Don Corrado Prizzi from Prizzi’s Honour — who constantly taunts him with the breezy refrain, “You asked for it, you got it. You asked for it, you got it. You asked for it…”
Looking at the plight of James, it’s as if in 2021 he has remade more than one NBA film from 25 years ago. You asked for veteran teammates, you got it. You asked for all the young guys to be shipped out, you got it. You asked for Russ, you got it.
And what’s more, LeBron’s stuck with him. It’s one of the great mechanisms — and ironies — of American sport that most of its major leagues, such as the NBA, are quasi-socialist with their salary cap preventing a powerhouse like the Lakers buying championships the way a Chelsea or Man City can. You can still pay the best players top dollar — like the Lakers have in James, Davis, and Westbrook — but that just means you’ve little to pay the rest of your roster. Which is where the Lakers find themselves. They’re locked into paying Westbrook a further $47m next season, a contract no one will want to take on, as much as the Lakers would now love to offload it.
There are worse plights than James’. Although the expectation upon him coming to LA was that he would have more than just one championship challenge in his five years there, he did translate it into a championship, and not just any, but one that came the same year the franchise and the sport mourned the death of Bryant.
Like Cristiano Ronaldo, who turns the big 3-7 himself in just five weeks’ time, he is still a remarkable performer and specimen, playing at an elite level with possibly the biggest, or at least most storied, franchise in the entire sport. Neither may be what they were two, four, eight years ago, but they can still routinely pull out Bryant-2013-like dramatics and last-minute match-winning efforts, astonishing considering it’ll be 20 years ago this autumn since Ronaldo first stepped over a ball at Old Trafford and James slammed one down in the NBA.
They can still win games, quite often on their own. Just not championships.
They’re no longer the right age, or at least no longer in the right place, to do that.
