LeBron James: Injury A Reminder Of Greatness
By Joshua Howe
Both LeBron James’ birthday and the New Year have already been painful for Cleveland Cavaliers fans. Moments that were supposed to be fun and filled with excitement became moments of panic and concern.
James’ injuries came to light on Dec. 31, when it was revealed that he had both left knee and lower back strains. Adding to this grim news was James reluctantly admitting that he had been playing hurt all season so far.
The Cavaliers will miss James for the next two weeks, and are now 1-1 since his injury news came out.
The schedule isn’t kind to the Cavs either. They just played Dallas (and lost), and will prepare themselves for the Houston Rockets, Golden State Warriors, Sacramento Kings, Phoenix Suns and Los Angeles Clippers in the time James is expected to be sitting on the bench in a suit.
The misery doesn’t end there. Other key Cleveland players, like Shawn Marion (ankle), Kevin Love (back spasms) and Kyrie Irving (knee) are all playing banged up, while Anderson Varejao is out for the season after tearing his Achilles.
With no LeBron on the court, the Cavaliers are worse off in every way. They drop in offensive rating from fourth with him, to 20th without him and they fall in defensive rating (somewhere they can’t afford to get worse) from ninth with him, to 29th without him.
All of this results in the Cavs dropping in net rating from seventh with James, to 27th without him.
Those are some staggering numbers.
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LeBron hasn’t missed this many games ever in his career. Previously, the most he’d missed was a stretch of five games back in 2007-08 when he injured his finger.
So now we, as fans, must prepare ourselves for two LeBron-less weeks of NBA basketball. But I think we can look at this as an opportunity. One that we can use to take a step back and realize how spoiled we’ve been as basketball fans to watch James for his entire career without ever seeing him miss a beat.
LeBron isn’t one of those guys who takes games off just to take games off. He doesn’t want to stop playing. He loves the game too much. He still enjoys the regular season. It’s still fun to him.
So you know when he takes this many games off, he isn’t playing around. He’s really hurt.
It’s sobering to see a player like James, who has already logged 34,364 minutes in his career at the age of 30, finally appear mortal.
He used to play game after game in which he’d continuously rack up 40 minutes a night and still look like he was ready to go for a run afterwards. There was even a fuss made when he was playing for the Miami Heat about how he biked to home games just because he could.
Compared to us normal humans, he was unstoppable.
Over his career, James has played a total of four seasons where he recorded more than 40 minutes a night. All four of those seasons were in a row, one after the other. James has also never played less than 37.5 minutes a game, which he recorded in 2011-12 and so far this season.
Had it been any other player taking all of those minutes, we might have complained a long time ago that LeBron was being driven into the ground by his coaches. But maybe he fooled them just as well as he did us by looking invincible, unbreakable.
LeBron is in his 12th NBA season now. He’s 30 years old. And from where I stand, there are two paths to take, one of which he’s already on.
The first path is that of Dwyane Wade.
Wade never averaged a single season where he played 40 minutes a night, but his attacking play style, which is similar to James’, has aged him extremely quickly. Every fall he bounced back up from, every super athletic play he made, every contortion in mid-air around larger defenders has left him hobbling in 2015 at the age of 33.
Wade is a shell of the former player he was. It happens. But none of us expected it to happen so quickly. Heck, he was still Flash when LeBron first joined him in Miami back in 2010. He was the best player on the Heat in the 2011 NBA Finals.
But time, and injuries, take their toll. Miles on Wade’s body and the way he played the game finally wore him down. He’s managed to adjust his game now, shooting more floaters and turnaround jumpers, but he’ll never be the same as he once was.
Arguably, LeBron has taken more damage than Wade has throughout his career from hard fouls. The difference between the two is James is bigger and stronger than Wade. But when opponents discovered they couldn’t stop James from scoring by fouling him like most other players, they did what they thought they must: hit him as hard as possible.
Over the past couple seasons, the popular way to stop James has been to wrap him up in a bear hug and hope that he doesn’t still manage to rip his arms right up through yours.
Then there’s the second path, that of Tim Duncan.
Duncan has only ever played one his 18 seasons where he averaged more than 40 minutes a night.
In San Antonio, the franchise found a way to always keep him fresh even as his athleticism (which was never mind-boggling) and quickness began to slow.
They built strong teams around him, ones that would be able to help pick up the slack so that he could rest more often. They also locked up a brilliant coach, who now gives Duncan full nights off and manages to keep everyone on his squad as energetic as possible by spreading minutes around evenly.
In his 12th season, Duncan played 33.7 minutes a game and since then that number has never been passed. Because of this, The Big Fundamental has been able to stay relatively healthy and play when needed. He’s even won a championship in that time.
James has never had such luxuries, or a coach that understands his exact needs such as Popovich does Duncan. But it’s time he has some.
James was supposed to get something like that in Miami, with both Wade and Chris Bosh there to help him out, but it never panned out the way things did in San Antonio. Excluding their first season together, Wade was constantly bogged down with injuries that eventually led him to being next to worthless in the 2014 NBA Finals. Bosh played fine most of the time but did disappear in some important games.
Even the role players in Miami, though obviously very good, never seemed to be quite as great as those in San Antonio. It may have appeared that they were, but James was almost always carrying the load and helping make his teammates look good; which is, admittedly, exactly what he was supposed to do.
It was most obvious last season, after that 61-point career night of James’ against Charlotte, that he was gassed. He still managed to drag his team forward and into the playoffs, and even then to the Finals. Once he got there, he played great, but it wasn’t enough to overcome San Antonio’s team effort.
And in that series, Tim Duncan, then in his 17th season, looked less tired than James.
Cleveland might not have the club San Antonio has or had, but they do have a new head coach with some sense in him. Hopefully that sense is enough to get him to stop playing LeBron so many minutes when he does return from injury, because this time he may just be run into the ground for good.
It’s time to get LeBron on the Duncan program.
We’ve been spoiled so far, watching King James night in and night out look like some sort of basketball deity. But at some point, we can’t expect that from him anymore. We can’t expect him to forever remain 26 years old.
LeBron James is 30 and we’ve been pampered for 12 straight years.
It’s time we realized it.