LeBron James, the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, turns 40 on Monday.Photograph: Christian Petersen/Getty Images
It’s Christmas Day and a scrum of journalists surround a smiling, exhausted LeBron James in the visiting locker room at Chase Center in San Francisco, minutes after the latest installment in a decades-spanning catalog of thrilling battles with his friend and foe, Stephen Curry. James is asked, in light of all the recent hand-wringing about the state of the NBA as an entertainment product, what he thinks the “good stuff” is in the league on a given night. “LeBron and Steph”, he shoots back, grinning. And he’s not wrong. But it’s just a few days out from 30 December, which marks his 40th birthday, and the quadragenarian elephant in the room casts a somewhat melancholy shadow over the joy of the high-level basketball being played. No one, maybe not even James, knows exactly how much time is left in his illustrious NBA career. But it isn’t much.
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Since his return from a still-mysterious nine-day excused absence from the Lakers a few weeks ago, James has been playing that aforementioned high-level basketball again following a rocky spell in the beginning of the season. For maybe the first time of note, James showed flashes of true, marked decline during that stretch, putting forth his worst shooting numbers since his rookie season more than two decades ago. His recent return to form calls into question if that regression was less of a bellwether and more of an aberration, perhaps brought forth by fatigue after a summer of intense (and wildly entertaining) Olympic play en route to his third gold medal. But fluke or not, it did shine a light on a topic that has been ominously hanging over every step of James’ trajectory over the last few seasons: his imminent retirement, which he has alluded to coming sooner rather than later on several occasions, and the cavernous, face-of-the-league-sized hole that will be left in his wake whenever he does decide to hang it up.
Even Curry, who at 36 is a few years James’…
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