We don’t yet know where LeBron James will play his next NBA game. We do know that it won’t be with the Lakers. His time in Los Angeles is finished after eight seasons.
I was on air when this news broke, and it wasn’t long before the legacy question took over the segment. How will LeBron’s time with the Lakers be remembered? Did he do enough for a statue? For his No. 23 jersey to be pulled up into the rafters?
For me, the jersey retirement is a given. It’s happening. But he’s not a statue guy. Not in that franchise. The bar is too high with the six statues Lakers being Kareem, Magic, Kobe, Shaq, Elgin Baylor and Jerry West. Of those names, only Kareem and Shaq ever played for another franchise, and they won a total of eight championships in the purple and gold. The rest were Laker lifers. You will never think of another franchise when you see their name.
For LeBron, the Lakers were the third and, to date, most insignificant stop on his long NBA journey. He will never do anything to exceed his legacy in Cleveland. He will never win more championships with one franchise than he did with the Heat. His impact on the Lakers, frankly, wasn’t that much more than Anthony Davis, allowing for the fact that Davis never would’ve come without LeBron, who did revitalize the Lakers as a preeminent destination. That was important in coming out of the post-Kobe haze.
All that stated, LeBron accomplished more with the Lakers than anyone could have reasonably expected, even if it never really felt like a seismic impact akin to his Miami Decision or Cleveland homecoming. He was 35 when he went to L.A. The thought was he would play out that first and last contract and walk off into a Hollywood ending. Instead, he stayed, and played at an All-NBA level, for nearly a decade. He became the all-time leading scorer in a Lakers uniform. He won a championship in a Lakers uniform.
A bubble championship. But a championship nonetheless.
Without the benefit of years to look back on his Lakers tenure with proper perspective, it feels, in the moment, like there are really only two seasons to regret from LeBron’s eight in Los Angeles.
The failed back-to-back in 2021
We all talk about Rob Pelinka letting Alex Caruso and, to a lesser degree, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope get away from the 2020 title team, but they were still with the Lakers that next season, and having picked up Sixth Man of the Year Montrezl Harrell to replace the departed Dwight Howard, they were sitting pretty in the No. 3 seed in the last month of the season with every reason to believe they could make a run at back-to-back titles.
Then came March 20, 2021, when Lakers fans will tell you Solomon Hill deliberately dove into LeBron’s legs. It isn’t even close to true. LeBron lost the ball and Hill was going for it and the mechanics of the interaction simply led to Hill crashing into LeBron’s lower half. Nonetheless is was a massive blow to the Lakers’ season.
LeBron wound up missing the next five weeks with an ankle injury he maintains he has never fully recovered from. In that time, the Lakers dropped from the No. 3 seed to the play-in tournament.
Still, the Lakers wound up leading the Phoenix Suns 2-1 in their first-round series before Anthony Davis suffered a groin injury in the first half of Game 4. Davis missed Game 5 and only managed five minutes in Game 6 before pulling the plug. The Lakers lost all three games after the Davis injury to drop the series to a Suns team that made it to the Finals.
That was a championship Lakers team, and equally important it was a wide-open championship race that the Milwaukee Bucks wound up winning by the length of Kevin Durant’s big toe. LeBron’s injury sunk L.A’s playoff seed. The Davis injury sunk their season. And after that, Caruso and Caldwell-Pope were discarded, and the Lakers were never the same kind of threat.
The late-season 2026 injuries
This past year’s Lakers almost certainly weren’t going to win the title or probably even make the Finals. Having to go through Victor Wembanyama or the Oklahoma City Thunder with Deandre Ayton as your starting center was a bridge too far. That stated, for LeBron to miss out on the opportunity to find out what a playoff run alongside a fully healthy Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves could look like will forever be a shame.
The Lakers were the hottest team in basketball when Dončić and Reaves both went down in a loss to Oklahoma City on March 31 with just five games left in the season. They had won 17 of their previous 19 games. The defense was inspired. LeBron was clicking as a willing and overly able supporter of Dončić.
Next thing you know Dončić is done for the season and Reaves doesn’t come back until Game 4 of L.A.’s first-round series against Houston. LeBron still got them past the Rockets, one of his true Laker feats, but there was no way they were going any farther than that without Dončić. Maybe they wouldn’t have anyway. But not being able to find out goes down as a real what-if to close LeBron’s Lakers tenure.
Again, other than that those two examples, LeBron’s run with the Lakers went about as well anyone could have realistically hoped. It bears repeating: he was 35 years old when he signed up. We know now that was basically still his prime, but, at the time, his Lakers run, at least the back half of it, was supposed to be a last-legs kind of deal.
It wasn’t. LeBron still had — and frankly still has for whatever team gets him next — a lot of greatness left in his basketball tank, and even though his best years were in Cleveland and Miami, the longevity portion of his GOAT argument was largely built in Los Angeles. It wasn’t statue-worthy. But it will definitely leave his jersey hanging in the rafters one day.
