Sacramento Kings coach Mike Brown was fired on his way to meet his team at the airport, Anthony Edwards was fined again — this time a cool $100k — for profanity, Amen Thompson picked Tyler Herro up and skipped him like a stone over the hardwood floor, the Suns and Mavs got into it too, and D’Angelo Russell was traded to the Nets (again) in exchange for Dorian Finney-Smith and Shake Milton. It was a busy weekend in the NBA.
But let’s not focus on the chaos. Let’s instead look to a milestone within the milieu of the NBA’s theatrics, one that’s sat looming, casting a long shadow over the league for years now and especially over LeBron James, who turns 40 today.
James is a rare athlete in many ways. He’s been dominant in every decade of his career — and it’s rare enough to pluralize “decade” when discussing the length of an athlete’s career — and at one point was the greatest athlete on the planet. He’s won NBA titles, Olympic gold medals, has played a huge role in furthering athlete autonomy and reshaping the public’s perception of what an athlete can do and be off the court (or field, rink, etc.) in terms of political and social awareness and advocacy. He’s the first ever NBA athlete to play alongside his son at a professional level and he’s advanced, even introduced, the concept of recovery and physical and mental longevity for an athlete.
He’s also still capable of forcefully taking your breath away with a rousing block, dunk, and the ability to toss his team on his back and take control of the game — he’s still averaging 23.5 points, 9 assists and 7.5 rebounds per game.
James’ rarest attribute though is something of a double-edged sword: his longevity. The quality of longevity, pure staying power, James has maintained throughout his career is the kind of consistency we just don’t see in sports yet he’s made it feel routine, totally normal.
The gift of this for basketball fans has been having James as both a metronome and a backdrop for over 20 seasons. Other players have taken what he’s done and made their own improvisations, but he’s the rhythm that drives the game like he’s the mountain set at the horizon, offering a perennial sense of direction. What happens when these two constant factors aren’t there anymore?
It’s a question that’s loomed larger with every season, growing all the more existential, but one James has been able to bat away by being himself. That is, not showing any signs of his professional mortality. He’s said he has no plans to play “until the wheels fall off”, that he respects the game too much to show up to it as anything less than his best. That admission is a rare thing for an athlete too, especially James, who the audience appetite for will never abate. Still, there’s ego and there’s pride, and the latter for James is coming into sharper focus.
Where a younger James might have left the Lakers by now for a team on a more ambitious and complete competitive trajectory, James has stayed. He’s leaned into the myth-making the franchise is famous for, while keeping a quieter — if it’s even possible for him, and for him in L.A. — presence in the locker room and a lighter hand with the mechanics of the team. It makes sense, considering most clarity is found in retrospect and James now has a wealth of years to sift through.
James will be the 32nd player in NBA history to play after turning 40, a number I bring up because compared to all the others where he stands out as singular, here he has pretty good company. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan, Tim Duncan, they all experienced the same shift into a quieter, but not diminished, competitive force by virtue of simply hitting a number. However James decides to leave the game, I wonder whether hitting this milestone lends a new relief. That he’s made it, over it, and in doing so gets another act, however long he wants it to be, to play without pressure. To play free.
