In the long, storied history of the Los Angeles Lakers’ rivalry with the Boston Celtics, there have been plenty of L.A. losses more difficult for the Lakers to swallow than Saturday’s 111-101 setback.
But that doesn’t make the end of an eight-game winning streak, punctuated by the exit of LeBron James due to a groin injury, any easier for Los Angeles.
ESPN’s Dave McMenamin reported that “it is too early to project an accurate timetable,” though he added that a source suggested James could be facing a weeks-long absence.
Never mind the remainder of a four-game road swing that began with Saturday’s loss and sends the Lakers to face fellow Finals hopefuls Milwaukee and Denver; “weeks” at this juncture of the season could extend into the playoffs.
Even as Luka Dončić has settled in and regained his MVP-level form since coming over in a trade from Dallas, Los Angeles remains a team reliant on James as much as its newly acquired superstar. Among the championship contenders with a little more than a month until the postseason begins, the Lakers might be the most dependent on two primary superstars.
Before James left Saturday’s game, that reliance was ironically evident—ironic in that, while Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown combined for 71 Celtics points, the play of Derrick White highlighted a certain X-factor Los Angeles may not consistently have in its current state.
White scored 10 points, passed for seven assists, grabbed five rebounds, had a steal and a block, and finished with a game-high plus-17 plus-minus rating. Los Angeles has an effective third scoring option on the perimeter in Austin Reaves, but a do-everything spark plug may be a key quality missing from this Lakers lineup.
Of course, the complementary pieces are irrelevant if James is not at or near his best physically. And at 40 years old, it’s natural to wonder how much more effectively James can continue to rebound near a pre-injury physical peak.
James has largely been an ageless wonder into the latter stages of his career. Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was on the losing end of some of those aforementioned gut-wrenching losses to the Celtics—but also responsible for making Boston fans’ complexions turn as green as their team’s uniforms on plenty of occasions—had been the previous benchmark for longevity.
Even as The Captain remained a key fixture on Lakers Finals runs in the late 1980s, though, Magic Johnson had clearly taken the reins as the team’s driving force. Dončić is a star comparable to Magic both in style and ability, but very much an equal to the senior James.
Never was James’ Father Time-defying play more evident than in the days leading up to this visit to Boston. Amid the Lakers’ winning streak, James became the NBA’s first 50,000-point man. Then, in defeat on Saturday, he exited for the locker room one assist shy of his 152nd career triple-double: 22 points, 14 rebounds and nine assists.
In that regard, there’s a perhaps eerie and certainly unfortunate parallel to draw with another Lakers legend, Kobe Bryant. Bryant, nearing the end of his 17th season, was in the MVP race and third in the NBA in scoring when he dropped 34 points in an April win over Golden State.
Bryant also ruptured his Achilles in that game, and the all-time leading scorer in Lakers history was never the same the rest of his career.
The good news in James’ case is that even the less optimistic possibility of a weeks-long absence, as ESPN suggested, is significantly less damaging long-term than an Achilles injury like the one Bryant sustained.
The sobering part of James’ injury—both for the Lakers and NBA fans in general—is that it’s a stark reminder the time we have left to take in arguably the greatest, and certainly the most enduring, career in league history is limited.
