LeBron James has graced the NBA courts for 23 remarkable seasons, etching a legacy that’s nearly complete. While there’s room for him to pad his record stats even further, and perhaps snag another championship, these achievements would be more about embellishing than defining. Winning a fifth title as part of a team effort in his 40s won’t hold the same significance as his earlier triumphs when he dominated the league. Those days are largely behind him.

During the height of his career, fans and analysts made up their minds on whether they thought James surpassed Michael Jordan in greatness. Nothing in his 40s is likely to sway those opinions. Although James has maintained an impressive level of play longer than Jordan did, comparing an aging LeBron to Jordan’s time with the Wizards doesn’t captivate much interest. The debate over who’s superior at their peak remains open, but no new developments are on the horizon.

The recent first-round playoff series, where James’ Los Angeles Lakers ousted the Houston Rockets in six games, adds a new chapter to his story but doesn’t alter the broader debate. The Lakers were considered a long shot with +425 odds against the Rockets, marking the biggest upset in James’ career. While the odds didn’t factor in Kevin Durant’s health status, the Rockets still lost Game 2 with Durant playing.

The Lakers faced challenges of their own, missing Luka Dončić for the entire series and only having Austin Reaves back for the final two games. Despite averaging 116 points per game during the regular season, the absence of Dončić and Reaves meant the team was missing significant scoring and playmaking contributions. The impact of Dončić drawing defenders and setting up plays cannot be overstated, as many points originated from the opportunities he created.

Quantifying the Lakers’ loss in this series is complex. They navigated the season with an evolving offensive strategy, which included a more reserved role for James as the year progressed. Despite this, a 41-year-old James and coach JJ Redick managed to retool the team over three weeks, overcoming a 52-win Rockets squad in six games. While the Rockets were not at full strength, this achievement remains noteworthy.

Lakers overcame injuries while Rockets failed to adjust

The Rockets had their own setbacks, losing Fred VanVleet before the season and failing to adjust effectively without him. The subsequent loss of Steven Adams further weakened their lineup. Despite ample resources for restructuring, the Rockets couldn’t replicate the Lakers’ adaptability. The Lakers had made a strategic trade for Luke Kennard, while the Rockets kept their abundant draft picks. Houston’s roster boasts young talents eager for larger roles, whereas the Lakers, aside from James, were a mix of players previously overlooked by other franchises. Marcus Smart and Deandre Ayton were free agents after being waived, and Kennard was on his fifth team. Meanwhile, Bronny James faced skepticism as a so-called nepotism draft pick.

The Rockets even had time. They’ve known about VanVleet’s injury since September and Adams’ since January. The Lakers lost Dončić and Reaves on April 2. They did in weeks what Houston couldn’t in months.

LeBron James promised the Lakers everything, then gave them every last ounce

Sam Quinn

There are plenty of Lakers figures — Redick especially — who deserve plaudits for that, and there are even more Rockets figures who deserve blame. But boil this down, and it was possible because the Lakers had James, the greatest problem solver in the history of basketball, on their team. And even if James is not who he once was physically, he’s the sort of player and thinker capable of taking disparate parts and turning them into a cohesive team. He’s been doing this for decades. 

How different is this, really, from leading the 2007 or 2018 Cavaliers to the NBA Finals? The stakes are lower, but the principle applies. No matter who you have on your roster, James is going to maximize them.

There are exceptions, of course. The 2011 Finals stand out as the most notable, and it’s the biggest stain on an otherwise spotless resume. The 2022 Russell Westbrook debacle, a combination of injuries, poor roster construction and all manner of locker room issues, stands out as well. There are certainly individual players who had to take smaller roles besides him — Chris Bosh and Kevin Love being the obvious examples.

But whatever full team you give James, he’s going to take it to its absolute ceiling. He knows how to make the most of the rosters he has, even if individual components of those rosters aren’t always happy with where he thinks they fit into it. Since that 2011 Finals loss, he’s made the Finals eight more times. He lost a few more years due to injury, and Nikola Jokić proved an insurmountable foe for a stretch, but he didn’t lose a series in which his team was favored again until 2025 — when he was 40 and his roster was so thin that his coach played an entire second half using only five players. 

Merely having James is no longer an automatic trip to the Finals, but it’s an assurance that your team will be as good as it can feasibly be. And in this series, that was better than the Rockets.

Differences between LeBron, Kevin Durant on full display

That’s part of what made the Rockets such an interesting foil for a series like this. James really only has two remote historical peers left in the NBA, Stephen Curry and Durant, and since the latter left the former, his teams have pretty consistently underachieved. Not all of that is his fault. He didn’t cause the pandemic that split up the Nets, of course. But he didn’t hold that team together, either. He couldn’t lift up a Suns team with two other star-level talents. They lacked role players, but the sort of talent downgrade Phoenix made swapping him out for Dillon Brooks, Jalen Green and a pick shouldn’t lead to an eight-win improvement.

The Rockets didn’t have Durant for five of the six games in this series. They did have him for 78 of the 82 regular-season games. What does it say about his presence that none of Houston’s highly-touted young players grew in the ways we hoped they would playing beside him? How much responsibility does he bear for the lack of resiliency the Rockets showed early in this series? Certainly not all of it. Probably some of it. Stars, whether they want to be or not, are culturally load-bearing.

The Lakers won a series they should have lost because they had James on their team, and he managed to unlock the absolute best from players like Kennard, Smart and Rui Hachimura. The Rockets lost in the first round of a season that started with championship expectations primarily because of injuries, but also, to some extent, because the Hall of Famer they imported to create those championship expectations wasn’t able to create or sustain a culture that empowered his young teammates in the same way.

There are basketball reasons for that (James is a legendary playmaker and Durant, almost two decades in, still struggles with double-teams) and there are intangible ones (Durant not being on the bench for Game 3, even to receive treatment, hardly suggested an especially close team, and we now know the Durant burner scandal was addressed and ultimately tabled in the locker room), but the end result is the same. The difference between the two is that Durant has historically been a solo artist, while James has built a career making his teams the absolute best they could be.

That’s not going to convince you to rank James ahead of Jordan if you weren’t already there. It’s just a nice encapsulation of what his presence has meant for the past 23 years. James’ undermanned team faced the undermanned team of one of his greatest rivals, and James won the matchup handily. 

It may not change his legacy, but it epitomizes what that legacy is all about.