Someday, the Los Angeles Lakers were going to be without LeBron James, the question of “when” looming over the organization and paralyzing them from either pushing all in or fully embracing a future without him.
The unexpected opportunity to acquire Luka Doncic last season set the team fully on a new path forward, with James’ continued presence on the roster no longer the team’s guiding star.
Still, the news Thursday that the 40-year-old James would miss at least the next three to four weeks because of a sciatic nerve problem on his right side was fairly jarring.
James had already been held out of training camp practices and the first two preseason games this month because of nerve irritation in his glute. Now he will miss the entire preseason and at least the first five games of the regular season based on the current timeline.
The words “at least” were not specifically used in the team’s announcement but were strongly implied when it said James would be reevaluated in three to four weeks.
And we can take to heart the things we have heard in private and public in the buildup to the season regarding James’ health plan -- most notably that James was going to take a different approach in his 23rd preseason in an effort to have him as healthy as possible at the end of the year and not at the beginning. And with that information, it seems more than safe to assume that the Lakers will be conservative with James’ recovery; that could mean more time for recovery or ramp-up (or both) after that three- to four-week time frame.
Four weeks plus, say, one week for a ramp-up would have James out of action until early November. In some ways, this only forces the Lakers to stick to their plan, which, when it comes to James, has been notoriously difficult to adhere to. Coaches have talked about minutes restrictions and lessened workloads in training camp for years, only for James to have a 40-minute night by the seventh game.
The injury could keep James from his 22nd straight All-NBA appearance by cutting into the chunk of games he is allowed to miss under the league’s 65-games-played rule for awards.
The Lakers will likely lean on some combination of Rui Hachimura, Jake LaRavia and Jarred Vanderbilt to help fill the impossible hole left by the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. None of those players will be asked to do any of the things James does; they will, though, be asked to do more of what they do well in extended minutes while the Lakers are without one of their stars.
Vanderbilt, healthy for the first time in two summers, has looked good early this preseason and gives the Lakers some defensive toughness and versatility they desperately need.
Same goes for Austin Reaves, who has played well as the primary offensive player over the last two seasons when the Lakers have been minus James or Doncic or even, before that, Anthony Davis. He was already set for a big offensive role this season, but he will enter the season as the Lakers’ second-most-important playmaker.
Scouts watching the Lakers in their preseason debut in Palm Desert left impressed with how Reaves held up as the primary offensive option. More of that in the non-Doncic minutes is suddenly even more critical.
The biggest thing that comes from this, though, is a chance for the Lakers to more fully lean into the reality they chose for themselves in February: Doncic drives everything they do. When healthy, Doncic is one of the NBA’s biggest floor-raisers, even if the roster isn’t built perfectly around him. He is good enough to handle any stretch of challenges, including a first chunk of the schedule when the Lakers will not be whole.
This, of course, is his team to lead long-term, and whether the Lakers were going to explicitly say it or not, it was always going to be on James to figure out the best ways to make it work around Doncic more so than the other way around.
That new reality was not supposed to be thrust on them this quickly, and certainly not on opening night (a game James has never missed). But now that he is out, the Lakers are squarely on their road forward.
And James, whenever he is healthy, will need to catch up.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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