LeBron James is playing some of his career-best basketball early in his sixteenth season and shows no signs of slowing down.
What an odd feeling it must’ve been for Cavs fans attending LeBron’s return to Cleveland as a Los Angeles Laker.
They gave the King a warm welcome home, and he met that welcome with a comfortable 32pts, 14rebs, and 7ast’s – and a Lakers win, which was touch and go until mid-way through the fourth quarter.
Unfortunately for Cavs fans, LeBron is thriving with his new team. The Lakers have won eight of their last ten games and continue their climb up the Western Conference standings.
After a rocky start, the best chef in the game is finding balance with his new ingredients.
LeBron has found some chemistry with Lonzo Ball. They seemed to have a mind-meld in the Cavs game. The defence has considerably more potential than the 2017/18 Cavs did. And the addition of Tyson Chandler has given the team rotation a more logical balance and defensive versatility. Since Chandler’s arrival, the Lakers are a top-10 defence, boasting a 105.2 defensive rating (via stats.nba.com).
As for the King himself, things are going well, even by his stratospheric standards.
In the month of November, he is shooting 53% from the field, and nearly 50% from three, averaging 30pts per game. His assists and rebounds are down, but still solid at 6 and 7.6 respectively.
Many critics have said that in stuffing the triple-double category, LeBron has made himself more difficult to play with from a teammate and winning perspective. Thus, his current averages are closer to the kind of player he needs to be, even though we know he can dish 10+ assists a game if he wants to.
Regular-season LeBron is constantly re-calibrating his effort, minute-to-minute, game-to-game, to ensure dominant play paired with maximum durability. He is a master of this process.
The last time LeBron played less than 60 games of the 82-game regular season was, well, never. The least games he’s played in any season over the last sixteen, is 62. That’s still a good amount of games, and that number is an anomaly. He usually lands somewhere in the range of 75-82.
Never in the history of basketball have we seen someone master the gruelling 82-game NBA schedule like LeBron has.
For the current season he is only 17 games in, but LeBron has fine-tuned this process once again. He only averaged 33.8 mins per game during the aforementioned 10-game run, and during that time he leads the league with 29.9pts per game.
Now that LeBron finds himself in the West, and it seems he has “flipped the switch” earlier than usual, this may become the most physically taxing season of his career. He’ll need to expend more energy during the regular season to land a comfortable playoff seeding and reserve more energy for a more talented playoff pool than he has faced since 2008.
If anyone can pull it off, it’s the King.
