The turn this Lakers’ season took, it should go down as one of the franchise’s great what-ifs, coulda-woulda-beens, we’ll-never-knows …
Shared regret for a legion of Lakers fans who were, for the full 15-2 month of March, vibing with their team, screaming excitedly like 6-year-olds and riding hard on the MVP campaign trail for Luka Doncic.
But then things got twisted — Doncic’s grade 2 hamstring strain and Austin Reaves’ grade 2 oblique strain — and now it should be obvious: With two of their three best players sidelined indefinitely, we should expect the Lakers to shut the book on this season soon, unless …
Unless LeBron James can pull off the second-greatest feat of his 23-year career.
Unless he can carry the Lakers past the heavily favored Rockets in a best-of-seven series that starts Saturday at Crypto.com Arena.
Unless the Lakers’ last standing superstar — in what could be his last stand on this team or in this league, no one really knows — can hold the door long enough for Doncic and Reaves to recover and reenter the fray for Round 2.
Read more: Luka Doncic eligible for NBA’s postseason awards after league, NBPA rule in his favor
Yes, the Lakers are leaning on a 41-year-old who started the season sidelined because of sciatica.
Their season rests entirely on the broad shoulders of the team’s willing third wheel.
It’s all up to the guy who capped the regular season by earning his 70th conference player of the week nod, who has won four NBA titles and three gold medals, but who wouldn’t have been able to finish the first round last postseason if it had taken the Minnesota Timberwolves more than five games to beat the Lakers. Recall, James suffered a grade 2 sprain of the medial collateral ligament in his left knee in the deciding loss.
So you shouldn’t hold your breath. But you also shouldn’t count out LeBron; the kid from Akron has beaten the odds before.
He would tell you he’s been beating them the whole time, coming from where he started to where he is now, a billionaire basketball player-slash-businessman, he’s scored more points than anyone, ever. He makes history every time he steps on the court, including sometimes with his son Bronny.
If the famous meme is to be believed, even LeBron can’t believe this is his life.
He does, however, believe he’s the G.O.A.T.
Said so in a 2018 episode of ESPN’s “More Than An Athlete” as he reflected on leading the Cleveland Cavaliers back from a 3-1 series deficit to beat the 73-win Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals two years earlier: “I was like, ‘That one right there made you the greatest player of all time.’”
No team had won more regular-season games than Stephen Curry’s squad in 2016. And no team had rebounded from a 3-1 deficit in the championship round until LeBron’s Cavaliers. That was largely thanks to his back-to-back 41-point efforts in Games 5 and 6, and his meeting the moment in Game 7, when he scored 11 of his 27 points in the fourth quarter and had the iconic, series-saving chase-down block that set up Kyrie Irving’s game-winner.
A beat-up, fourth-seeded Lakers team beating the ascending, fifth-seeded Rockets in the first round won’t top that. Nothing will.
Nor will it make a difference in the great G.O.A.T. debate; if that 3-1 comeback didn’t do for you what it did for LeBron in your personal pantheon of top players, there’s no point having the conversation.
But winning this series against an athletic, physical, long Rockets team that has won nine of its last 10 games? Slot that in as the second-most impressive achievement in James’ decades-long career.
Read more: How do the Lakers match up against the Houston Rockets entering their playoff series?
Creating a real problem for Houston and doing it without Doncic, who had 36 points and 40 points, respectively, in the Lakers’ most recent victories against the Rockets?
Rebounding from dreadfully depressing injury news to knock out the NBA’s best rebounding team?
Nothing but the 3-1 comeback would come close. This would be more astonishing an accomplishment than his other three championships, including the one with the Lakers in the challenging confines of the Orlando bubble.
It would rank higher than LeBron’s 45-point explosion to save the Miami Heat from elimination against the Boston Celtics in 2012, or the game in which he scored 29 of the Cavaliers’ last 30 points to topple the top-seeded Detroit Pistons in the 2007 Eastern Conference finals. Or any other major victory on which your dart might land.
It would be that monumental of an upset. That unlikely an outcome. That epic.
And that’s why almost no one outside of the Lakers believes in them.
All six of CBS Sports’ experts picked Houston; NBA.com has the Rockets winning in five games, the Athletic has it happening in six games. Eleven of ESPN’s 12 prognosticators went with the Rockets, and the betting sites all have them as heavy favorites, with DraftKings favoring Houston by 4.5 points in Game 1 — in Los Angeles.
Let’s be real, rational thought portends the obvious: It’s a wrap.
Unless …
Unless James can juke Father Time and pull off another odds-defying dead lift for the ages.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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