Unlike MJ, LeBron James ended his career with dignity

On Saturday, LeBron James became the first player in NBA history to score 40,000 points. This is an incredible, almost baffling achievement. To put it in some perspective: If Stephen Curry, one of the best scorers in NBA history, wants to reach 40,000 points, he has to average 25 points per game while playing at least 70 games a year, which is where he currently is. Career scoring continues for the next 16 seasons, or until he is 51 years old.

NBA statistics guru Kirk Goldsberry put it into perspective just how extraordinary LeBron’s feat was:

Something else happened in that game on Saturday that was less surprising but more familiar: LeBron lost.

He has won four NBA championships with three different teams, including one with the Lakers in 2020’s bizarre COVID-19 bubble season. But I’m not sure LeBron has ever been further away from a championship than he is now. Despite having future Hall of Famer Anthony Davis in his prime, his Lakers currently sit in 10th place in the Western Conference. The team seemed to have qualified for the play-in tournament (a concept that LeBron once despised) and consistently struggled against the top teams in the conference, especially the defending champion Denver Nuggets, who were in LeBron’s fray. Brown scored his 40,000th point that night, beating the Lakers for the eighth consecutive time. In any realistic universe, the Lakers don’t look like championship contenders. They are an average, even mediocre, team. LeBron is still their best player, and he’s doing things that no one his age has ever done in NBA history, which is extraordinary and unprecedented, but still kind of misses the point: It’s not enough. The Lakers really aren’t that good.

Given the context of NBA history, this could be seen as a tragic, even sad, end to a career. We’ve seen this a lot before. Michael Jordan’s final two years in Washington were so debilitating and embarrassing that we as a society seemed to collectively decide that these things weren’t going to happen. Kobe Bryant scored 60 points in his final game, but the three seasons before that were difficult to watch; the Lakers missed the playoffs in three seasons and lost in Kobe’s final year Dropping a staggering 65 games, this remains the worst year in franchise history.Shaquille O’Neal ends his career by playing a total of six minutes in the playoffs Celtics. (In case you forgot, he was briefly known as “The Big Clover.”) As they say, time is undefeated. But all in all, we don’t usually talk about how these stars’ careers ended. We would rather remember the good old days.

The most notable thing about LeBron’s final years in the NBA is A-It all looks miserable. Part of that is because LeBron is so much better at the end of his career than any other superstar. But it doesn’t stop there. As I’ve written before, one of the most refreshing aspects of LeBron’s career is that he’s the first post-Jordan superstar to feel comfortable from the get-go, no Define yourself compared to MJ. (Except for his number, anyway.) This was the trap that Kobe fell into in the first few years of his career, and it even felt like Jordan’s role play at times.Jordan’s hubris, his obsession not only with winning but with dominating and humiliating anyone who dared challenge him, was oppressive, suffocating, even monotonous, and led to an entire generation of NBA rhetoric that mostly boils down to for Who is more manly?

As we have seen, it also last danceleading to Jordan living a pretty miserable life and inevitably (temporarily undefeated and all) crash-landing at the end of his career, his body no longer able to keep up with the demands that Jordan’s ruthless soul placed on him.

This is not how LeBron handles things. He wins a lot, but he loses too, and while he occasionally sends passive-aggressive emoji tweets around the trade deadline, he generally handles losing like a man who understands that no matter how hard you try, Failure happens. , even for a winner with nothing to offer. His career isn’t culminating in another championship at its peak — although assuming he resigns from the Lakers this offseason as expected, his team will have some draft picks to make one last move on another superstar. Bounce – even though he didn’t. He seemed unfazed by it, but if that’s what happened, he did look comfortable. He has long said he is more interested in playing a final season with his son, Bronny James, than anything else, even hinting that he would sign with whichever team drafts him. While Bronny’s health issues and underwhelming performance in his freshman year at USC complicate that possibility, it’s telling that this is considered to be the biggest break in LeBron’s career. A fifth NBA championship is a more logical endpoint. Jordan ended his career bitter, angry, and lonely. LeBron looks like he’s going to end it all alongside his son.

This is just another example of LeBron framing his career and life in a more human, relatable, and cerebral way than Jordan ever could. It’s like he realized early on that he would always be compared to this man, understood (unlike Kobe, at least until the end) that this was an unwinnable battle, and did things to get rid of that burden. Things go their own way. LeBron ended his career as one of the best players in the league, but that wasn’t the most impressive thing about his swan song. What’s impressive is that he’s gone out on his own terms, largely unaffected by the historical debates we’ve been trying to drag him into. Somewhat ironically, this may only strengthen his legacy after he’s gone, especially since future superstars can follow his example and do things their own way. Jordan or LeBron? We will always argue about who is better. But I don’t think there’s any debate about who you want to be.