AP – As his NBA career approaches the dawn of its third decade, LeBron James plays almost exclusively alongside teammates who grew up watching him dominate their game.
He has played against the sons of his basketball contemporaries, and he has played against one of his own 18-year-old son’s former high school teammates.
Signs of time’s passage are all around the 38-year-old James, yet the new top scorer in NBA history is defying all conventional wisdom about growing older in his mercilessly athletic sport.
The big fish is his fifth NBA championship, which is somehow just eight wins away from being caught at the close of a tumultuous Lakers season.
Even getting this close to James’ 11th career NBA Finals appearance is incredible, considering these Lakers started the season 2-10 and sat at 26-32 in mid-February, shortly after James broke Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s league scoring record.
Indeed, no basketball player has ever stood on the sport’s biggest stages as often and as long as James, and he has repeatedly thrived under the spotlight of 16 NBA postseasons and three Olympics.
The Lakers’ elimination of the Warriors was James’ 41st career playoff series victory, passing Derek Fisher for the most series wins by one player in NBA history.
He has played in a league-record 278 postseason games, and his 7,912 career playoff points are nearly 2,000 more than Michael Jordan (5,987) atop the NBA’s career playoff scoring list. He’s even the fourth-leading rebounder in NBA playoff history with 2,511 boards – that’s a whopping 1,120 more than the next-highest active player Draymond Green.
The Lakers’ achievements are even more impressive because James missed a full month down the regular-season stretch due to a right foot injury that still limits his explosiveness. Los Angeles went 8-5 without him and then went 6-2 after he returned in late March.
One play-in victory and two commanding playoff series wins later, the seventh-seeded Lakers are four wins away from another Finals for the four-time championship series MVP.
