His 40th birthday will arrive in December, and perhaps then the appreciation of LeBron James will begin to approximate his colossal accomplishments. For many, the other numbers that define him as a basketball player have not elevated his stature, but maybe his delivery of All-Star performances at an age that diminished so many past greats will be convincing.
At 39, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar saw his scoring average decline by 25 percent.
At 39, Michael Jordan played for a sub-.500 team.
At 39, Tim Duncan averaged 25 minutes a game.
At 39, Oscar Robertson had been retired three years.
At 39, LeBron scored 25.7 points, grabbed 7.3 rebounds and passed for 8.3 assists per game. He produced five triple-doubles in the 2023-24 regular season. He surpassed the 40,000-point mark, remarkable given no player in league history even had approached 39,000.He appeared in his 54th playoff series, although this one did not last long, with James and the Lakers falling 4-1 to the reigning champion Nuggets.
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There has yet to be a number, though, that fully resonates with the portion of the public passionate about NBA basketball in general but indifferent to James’ broad spectrum of achievements. On social media, he is derided for criticism of game officials, shot selection and even, according to one Twitter fantasist, for having “ruined a generation” of youth because how he plays basketball has led to “the soft, whiny, entitled display we see on college campuses.”
No, really. Dude said this in public.
This is the world James has owned and occupied since entering the league in the fall of 2003, a world in which he no doubt has legions of fans but inspires far more antagonists than any athletic superstar of the past half-century. Certainly there existed a universe of football fans who grew weary of Tom Brady’s habit of crashing the Super Bowl, but as he approached his seventh ring, you would find few unwilling to acknowledge his greatness.
James is into his third decade in the public eye, and the most scandalous episode involving him either remains the continued insistence his oldest son, Bronny, is an NBA-ready prospect despite a college scoring average of 4.8 points or the acceptance of the vainglorious nickname, “King James”. The only headlines for LeBron are those that encompass his basketball career or his gift for making lucrative business decisions. He is a tabloid’s worst nightmare: a celebrity who, privately, is boring.
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Ordinarily, this would make him almost universally popular. James, though, found the wrong side of a large number of sports fans because of two factors:
1) He arrived not long after MJ ceased to be. Michael Jordan still is with us, of course, and blessedly so, but the MJ who ruled over the NBA in the 1990s played his final game just before James entered the league. Michael became the unchallenged hero to a generation of basketball fans who do not wish for their childhood memories to be superseded.
2) Unlike Jordan -- who famously declared “Republicans buy sneakers, too” around the time he was asked to support the Senate campaign of Harvey Gantt, who was opposing longtime segregationist Jesse Helms – James eagerly has supported liberal political causes. He publicly supported Barack Obama's presidency, campaigned for Hillary Clinton and was critical of Donald Trump’s campaign and work in the White House. James advocated for stricter gun laws and, in 2014, wore an “I Can’t Breathe” t-shirt during a pregame warm-up following the death in New York of Eric Garner during an encounter with police.
Although James has been less politically active lately, you’ll still find right-wing commentators happy to take shots at whatever failures develop for him on the court. Although he scored 30 points, passed for 11 assists and was one rebound short of a triple-double – it was a pretty big rebound, because he was underneath the bucket for the late-game Aaron Gordon offensive board that helped determine the outcome – there will be such criticism of his work in Monday’s defeat.
His agent, Rich Paul, said he believes James has “2-3 years left”, but if Monday is the last we see of James, perhaps that muscular lefty layup he conjured over Nikola Jokic with 1:33 left will serve as a lasting reminder of what he could accomplish with a basketball.
There have been so many moments of greatness that have been set aside over the years.
There was the 25-point, 9-assist debut against the Kings that made it clear he could cover the leap from St. Vincent-St. Mary High in Akron to the Cavaliers without sacrificing a smidge of his stardom, unlike such legends as Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant, who needed time to adjust.
There was the insanity of Game 5 in the 2007 Eastern Conference finals, when James scored the final 25 points of a double-overtime victory against the Pistons, his 48 points breaking a 2-all series tie and sending an otherwise meager Cavs team to their first NBA Finals appearance.
25 straight points 😳
— ESPN (@espn) May 31, 2021
LeBron went off against the Pistons in the Eastern Conference Finals 14 years ago today 👑pic.twitter.com/qnrXldgVY6
There was the corner 3 off a baseline inbounds pass with 1.5 seconds left to beat the Bulls and tie their 2015 second-round series at two games each.
There was the triple-double in Game 7 of the 2016 Finals against the Warriors, which helped present Cleveland with its first major-sports championship in more than a half-century.
There were the four total championships and the staggering 10 appearances in the NBA Finals.
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For me, it was the moment I first saw James in an afternoon game at Sonny Vaccaro’s ABCD Camp in July 2001. James was not far removed from winning his second of three state championships, and not long away from being featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
This is what I wrote following that game:
“Some baby boomers who’ve got me by a few years make a big deal of the first time they saw The Beatles on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' Now, I’ve got a moment to compare with that.
“Watch James make one routine trip down the court and the whole package hits you at once: the size, the skills, the awareness, the competitiveness. The volume of his talent is staggering, even breathtaking.
“All that you’ve heard about his ability is true, except that it may be incomplete. The first thing that came to mind upon watching him was this: Magic Johnson’s head on Michael Jordan’s body.”
Those two are almost universally embraced now for their myriad successes as athletes and businessmen. So perhaps it’s not the 40th birthday James must reach, but the 50th or 60th before the breadth of his ability and achievements is acknowledged.
If we see no more of him in an NBA uniform, he’ll have shown us as much as anyone who’s ever played.
One day, that will be understood. And accepted.
