Photograph by Rich Storry / Getty
LeBron James began this N.B.A. season, his twenty-third, as a punch line. When it was announced, in October, that he would miss a number of early games because of sciatica, a cartoon showing him struggling to get out of the bathtub went viral. On “Inside the NBA,” Charles Barkley said that the injury report should list James’s condition as just “old. O-l-d, with an extra ‘D,’ too.” By early December, James was out again; this time, the injury report cited arthritis in the left foot joint, in addition to the nerve pain in his leg. James is hardly the first N.B.A. player to suffer from arthritis—Shaquille O’Neal got it in his big toe—but that didn’t exactly dispel the impression that he had become, well, oldd.
James turned forty-one at the end of that month, an age at which many people start to notice the normal degeneration of their tendons and joints. Time comes for us all, of course, and it comes with some ferocity when you have played more than sixty thousand minutes of high-contact professional basketball. Suddenly, LeBron looked, if not his age, then at least a rough approximation of it. Instead of ripping through seams of the defense as he bullied his way to the basket, he often stayed above the key. Instead of hunting shots with the ball in his hands, he focussed on being a playmaker (a visionary one, granted—he’s still LeBron James). Instead of using his dense mass and lightning quickness to dominate on defense, he sort of stood around. The Lakers had begun the season 10–4 without him; with him, they began to flail.
They still won most of their games, but unconvincingly—over all, toward the end of February, they had given up more points than they’d scored. They’d suffered a number of humiliating blowouts. And whether or not they were actually any good, it looked clear that they were better without James. No one questioned that the team’s best player was now [Luka Dončić](https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/what-is-lost-in-luka-doncics-glow-up), a perennial M.V.P. candidate. When Dončić and Austin Reaves—who had emerged in James’s absence as the team’s No. 2 option—played without James, the offense dazzled. (Defense was another story.) But when James joined them, the offense struggled, and when James was on the court with Dončić but not Reaves, it stunk. It’s true that these small playing-time samples can produce misleading results; it’s also true that the Lakers’ offense looked good when James played without Reaves and Dončić. Nonetheless, more and more people began to wonder if James’s time in Los Angeles was nearing its end. The Lakers were making no secret about their plans to build for the future around their younger stars, with or without James. Rumors flew that when his contract was up this summer, after the inevitable early-round playoff exit, James would bolt.
This past Wednesday, against the Houston Rockets, James played in his one-thousand-six-hundred-and-tenth N.B.A. game. When he played his first, in 2003, not all of his Laker teammates had been born. (One of them, after all, is James’s son.) The previous evening, I spoke to Sean Bryan, a primary sports-medicine doctor at the Hospital for Special Surgery, about what happens to the body as it grows older: osteoarthritis, slowing reflexes, decreased flexibility, inflammation. Much of it, Bryan said, is chronic and impossible to reverse.
There was, I thought, something oddly reassuring about the idea that James was not immune to the physical effects of aging. It put me in mind of our common mortality, etc. Then, the next night, I turned on the Rockets-Lakers. James scored the game’s first points, a three, and proceeded to put on a show: thirty points on thirteen of fourteen shooting. Six of his shots were dunks. One of them, in the second quarter, was so acrobatic that even a young James might not have pulled it off. James’s teammate Marcus Smart flung an errant lob, and James, who’d lost his defender with a vicious backdoor cut, leaped to the level of the backboard, leaned back to catch the ball as it sailed out, and then, still soaring, reversed his arm’s momentum to finish the slam. My awe had barely subsided when, two minutes later, James got the ball, raced just past the free-throw line, and took flight. The closest Rockets defender, Reed Sheppard, could do nothing as James hammered another dunk. Being old myself, I went to bed before the game was over, while the Lakers went on to beat the Rockets, for their seventh straight win.
The Lakers left Houston that night and landed in Miami, checking into the team hotel around 5 _A.M._ James was listed as questionable for that night’s game, with left foot arthritis. (“Every back-to-back for the rest of the season is T.B.D.,” he’d said in January. “I’m forty-one.”) But, after receiving treatment on the foot, he decided that he was ready to play in his one thousand-six hundred-and-eleventh N.B.A. game, tying the record for the most ever, held by Robert Parish. James scored nineteen points, on eight of twelve shooting, and had fifteen rebounds and ten assists. The Lakers won again.
James wasn’t the star of the night: that was Luka Dončić, who scored sixty. But what James has begun doing is just as impressive, and not only because he is doing it on arthritic joints. When Dončić arrived in Los Angeles, via a shocking trade with the Dallas Mavericks last season, James, no matter what he said publicly, struggled, on the court, to cede the team to the younger star. This was understandable: he had always been better than everyone else he played with. He had tremendous physical and mental gifts, but he was also a master at exercising control. With the Dončić trade, the Lakers had communicated to him, without warning, that his time in charge was over.
He didn’t entirely hide his displeasure. “We understand the difficulty in winning now while preparing for the future,” Rich Paul, James’s agent, said in a statement last summer, when the N.B.A. star opted into a one-year contract. “We do want to evaluate what’s best for LeBron at this stage in his life and career.” But just a couple of weeks ago, when James returned from another stretch on the sidelines, and played against the Chicago Bulls, he did something unexpected: he spent the first quarter setting screens and moving without the ball, and he didn’t take a single shot. Then, in the third, he helped the Lakers take over the game. “It is a sacrifice,” he acknowledged, of adapting his style to orbit other stars. But he was focussed on what benefitted the team. “The team is most important,” he said. “Everybody’s successful when we win.” He’s still getting big individual numbers sometimes—though not in the way he used to, by bending the game to his will. Now he’s scoring in transition and waiting for the ball to reach him in an advantageous situation, after he’s made a hard cut or found himself in a prime spot on the floor. It helps that he can still see the advantage quicker than anyone else on the court.
When I asked Bryan, the sports-medicine doctor, how James and a handful of other athletes have been able to extend their success well past the age when most players retire, he cited sleep and nutrition, stress reduction, and good recovery techniques, not to mention the right kind of genes. Then he brought up something I wasn’t expecting: emotional intelligence. The small group of champions who defy expectations are, by definition, resilient. They’re particularly good at responding to bad days, Bryan said.
I listened to him a little skeptically. No one could self-help their way into dunking like LeBron James at forty-one. But there is something to the idea. “Part of the evolution of him on this team, and particularly in this stretch, has just been his patience,” the Lakers head coach, J. J. Redick, said last week, after James had taken fifteen shots or fewer for the eighth straight game. James knows the ball will come to him if he does the right things and waits for it, Redick went on. He understands that there’s still time. ♦