LeBron James injured his groin Tuesday, forcing him to miss most of the second half of the Los Angeles Lakers’ massive win over the Golden State Warriors. The Lakers weren’t supposed to beat the Warriors, not on their home court, and definitely not so resoundingly, but even the baby Lakers put a scare in Golden State last year multiple times. Plus, it’s well-documented how the Warriors appear to coast through the regular season, having reached the NBA mountaintop so often in recent years.
No, the more surprising outcome of the Christmas day contest was that an injury forced LeBron James to miss a significant portion of a basketball game, and now James could potentially miss the next few games as he recovers.
James hasn’t missed an NBA game since April 12, 2o17. Throughout his career, he has missed a grand total of 71 regular-season games out of a possible 1248, meaning he has played in 94 percent of his team’s games. A few of those absences were late-season contests when playoff seeding was already locked and many of them came in a self-imposed hiatus in the winter of 2014 when he decamped to Miami and watched his newly-formed Cavaliers team disintegrate in his absence.
He has never missed a playoff game, even though there have been well-publicized ailments that hampered James, including when he broke his hand out of rage after Game 1 of 2018 Finals, when he played through an injured elbow in 2010 (spawning the oh-so-clever nickname “LeElbow,” which was almost as good as when he was nicknamed “LeBronze” post-2004 Olympics), or when the air conditioning failure in AT&T Center forced him out of Game 2 of the 2014 Finals.
It has become routine to see James knocked up during a game, suffering what appears to be an injury that would sideline a normal human for a couple of weeks but very casually shake it off and return to the court. He is a basketball cyborg not merely in terms of his talent but also his superhuman capacity to stay healthy. As the old adage goes, the best ability is availability, and James has that in spades.
That’s why it was so jarring to see James legitimately wounded, audibly expressing the sentiment, “I felt a pop.” It was a moment in which we had to, really for the first time, come to grips with LeBron being mortal, which is … not something I particularly appreciate.
In his 16 years of NBA service, LeBron James has been the one constant in the league. Superstars have come and gone, superteams have formed and disbanded. Rule changes have shifted the balance of power from the post to the perimeter. James, however, is still as good as he ever was.
He is not quite at the peak he was when he won MVP in 2012-13 or when he delivered Cleveland its first title in 2016, but he still commands a place in the discussion of the best players in the game. James went toe-to-toe against Kevin Garnett, Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, Dirk Nowitzki, Kevin Durant in Oklahoma City, Steph Curry, and Kevin Durant in Golden State. Every single contender that has formed in the last decade-plus of the NBA has had to game plan for how it will deal with LeBron James. Every. Single. One.
James has started fantasizing about one day playing with his son in the league, even if he is “super-trash” at that point, but it’s hard to ever imagine a time when James won’t be able to affect the outcome of a basketball game. The player who entered the league with a pass-first instinct could end up as the leading scorer in the history of the NBA, and he’s been a dominant defender when he cares to engage himself on that end of the floor.
It’s impossible to talk about the NBA in the 21st century without mentioning LeBron James. He is a part of every narrative that has shaped the league in the last 16 years. Watching him suffer even a minor injury, exposing the smallest flaw in his armor, is hard to process. Even if he only ends up missing a game or two, the thought of James not being able to play basketball forces a recalibration of what the entire NBA looks like.
Maybe there’s a tendency to be hyperbolic at the end of the calendar year, but LeBron James has existed for 16 years in a way that suggests he is anything but mortal. It’s weird to see 2018 go out on a note that reminds us that’s not the case.
