LeBron James Does Not Make Sense

He has been around too long, at this point, for the normal basketball superstar attention cycles of boom-and-bust to be relevant anymore. The Decision and its well-earned vitriol was more than fourteen years ago; he had already earned two of his four MVP awards by then. The last of those MVP awards came the year Giannis Antetokounmpo was drafted; Giannis is in his 12th season and has played more than 800 NBA games. And yet here James is, being absurd.

Wednesday night against Memphis, LeBron had 35 points, 12 rebounds, and 14 assists, for his third consecutive triple-double; only Nikola Jokić (who was born more than a decade after James) has more this season. He is averaging 24.3 points, 8.1 rebounds, and 9.4 assists per game this season; the latter ranks third in the league.

LeBron is the oldest player in the NBA. Literally, the oldest — not the oldest who actually plays, non-Udonis Haslem division kind of thing; just the oldest. He will turn 40 in 46 days, at the end of December. If you skip a couple of guys who basically don’t play anymore (Garrett Temple, Joe Ingles) you would need to add up the scoring average of the next four oldest guys in order to get past LeBron’s 24 per game; those four guys play a collective 92 minutes per game, while Lebron plays 35 (which, somehow, is 14th in the entire league).

We’ve been doing “he can’t keep this up much longer, right?” sorts of takes for at least six or seven years now, a period during which he won his fourth title and came in second in MVP voting twice. His head coach on the Lakers now is JJ Redick, who was drafted three years after LeBron, played a full 15 years in the league, and retired three years ago. He was easily the most important player on the gold medal-winning U.S. Olympic team this summer, barring an occasional Joel Embiid or Steph Curry takeover; the most important player on the team they beat in the final, Victor Wembanyama of France, was born the year after James was drafted. You could do this sort of thing all day.

I don’t really have a point here. I recognize that “LeBron is good at basketball” is not some revolutionary take, and that plenty of basketball fans are kind of over it. They shouldn’t be.