Los Angeles Lakers: Why the NBA MVP is LeBron James’s for the taking

LeBron James can still score however he wants

We can too easily forget that LeBron James is 36. He scores with effectiveness that almost nobody in the history of the NBA has been able to, regardless of their age. It’s not just a number, but he makes it look that way sometimes.

While he’s still ferocious and unstoppable in the paint, James has diversified his scoring portfolio. He is shooting a career-high 6.6 3-pointers per game and doing so at a preposterous clip, hitting 41.2 percent from long range. That rate is just a touch behind Duncan Robinson’s 41.9 percent, and ahead of Stephen Curry’s 39.2 percent.

You could call this a page out of the “Blake Griffin’s Tactics For Career Preservation And Elongation” book, but the truth is LeBron has been on this path for a while. He’s shooting a career-high percentage of his field goal attempts from 3-point range, but it’s been a smooth increase over the past half-decade or so. In Griffin’s case, injuries forced him to pivot quickly into a shooting threat, and his 3-point rate (percentage of field goals taken from 3-point range) skyrocketed from .116 in 2016-17 to .323 in 2017-18.

For James, his 3-point rate is .356 this season, and it was .326 last season, .299 the season before that, .257 and .254 the two seasons before that with the low point being his second season back in Cleveland at .199. LeBron James has been on his own preservation and elongation path for a while now, and nobody has ever done it better than him.

One other interesting note is that while his free throw rate has declined over the years, his 3-point rate has increased. So while it’s become harder to get to the rim at will and draw fouls over the years as his decline has slowly set in, he has countered it by taking more 3s and hitting them with more efficiency.

Just masterful work.