When LeBron James broke the record for most minutes played in NBA regular seasons, his teammates Los Angeles Lakers They made fun of him. “They told me I’m old as hell,” the King joked. “The kid from Akron” entered the league with a limitless future almost 22 years ago. This Monday, December 30, with gray in his beard, he will turn 40 years old, which will make him the first player in NBA history to play in his teens, 20s, 30s and 40s.
“In some ways it is a phenomenon of nature. I’ve been around a lot of great players and he’s one of the hardest workers. He doesn’t take a day off. You meet him and he’s always dipping something or eating something with some device attached to him,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said.
James will become the 30th player to appear in a regular-season game with a “4” as the first digit of his age, and only nine played more than 51 games after that birthday. Only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (three times), John Stockton (twice), Michael Jordan, Robert Parish and Karl Malone averaged more than 10 points in a season after turning 40.
Meanwhile, LeBron continues to put up All-Star-level numbers: 23.5 points, 9 assists and 7.5 rebounds per game. Doing that at 40 is practically impossible. The only players who have had those numbers in all three categories in a season after turning 30 are James (he did it at 33 and 35) and James Harden, at 31.
“The size, the strength and the IQ… With his frame and the way he takes care of himself, he doesn’t have to be the best athlete on the planet. At one point he was, for combined size, strength, agility and explosiveness. If you want to slow down the game now and play with your brain and intelligence, you could do it for another decade. I doubt he’d be interested in that. But it could,” Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said.
Chosen with the number one pick in the 2003 draft by the Cleveland CavaliersLeBron opened a legendary career. He came to the NBA accompanied by the nickname “The Chosen One,” after his brilliant time in high school at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School. Since his debut with 25 points against the Sacramento Kings at the end of October 2003, he showed impressive talent and power, but he had to wait and suffer before celebrating his first title.
The first disappointment came in 2007, when he lost his first Finals against the San Antonio Spurs of Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker and Fabricio Oberto. After eight years in Cleveland, he formed a stellar trio with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in the Miami Heat. In 2011 they lost the final against German Nowitzki’s Dallas Mavericks, but in the following two years LeBron and the Heat crowned their sports project.
Since 2011, LeBron has reached the Finals eight consecutive times. He ran into giants like the 2014 Spurs, who defeated them 4-1 with Ginobili, and above all with the legendary Warriors cycle. His rivalry with Curry remains one of the most spectacular in NBA history.
The sweetest victory on a sentimental level came in 2016, in an unforgettable Finals decided in the seventh game against the Warriors. LeBron led the Cavaliers to a historic ring. Nobody had come back from 1-3 in a Finals. It was a liberation for LeBron, who gave his state team the first ring in its history. And with the Lakers jersey he won his fourth title, in the Finals against the Miami Heat played in the Orlando “bubble” during the coronavirus pandemic.
Nobody knows when he will stop playing. And surely what is coming is not going to be easier. James wanted to play all 82 games this season and couldn’t. He was criticized when the Lakers went through a rough patch and received a lot of criticism when his team took his son Bronny in the second round of the draft, in what many thought was simple nepotism. After all, he is the first father in NBA history to have his son as a teammate.
“It’s a lot harder, physically and emotionally, to deal with what those guys deal with night in and night out,” Golden State coach Steve Kerr said of aging NBA stars such as James and the Warriors’ Stephen Curry, who He will be 37 in March.
He is the all-time leader in NBA points.has a place in the conversation for being the best of all time, won four championships with three different franchises, was four times MVP of the regular season and four times in the Finals, won three Olympic gold medals and will soon add 21 selections for the All-Star Game. The oldest to do this, the oldest to do that. Generational wealth with a net worth that exceeds 1 billion.
James Spends more than $1,500,000 annually on your fitness and he has Mike Mancias at all times for anything his body needs. “Don’t make me feel old right now,” he said when asked earlier this month about the impending birthday. He is under contract for next season but has offered no guarantees about how much time he will play.
No one scored more points as a teenager than James. The same goes for your 20s. Only Malone and Abdul-Jabbar scored more in their 30s than James. And here comes his 40s, with James still in top form.