Zach KramDec 18, 2025, 07:00 AM ETCloseZach Kram is a national NBA writer for ESPN.com, specializing in short- and long-term trends across the league’s analytics landscape. He previously worked at The Ringer covering the NBA and MLB. You can follow Zach on X via @zachkram.
play1:40Stephen A.: LeBron’s winning pass a perfect example why he’s a top-2 playerStephen A. Smith credits LeBron James for ignoring his double-digit scoring streak and passing to Rui Hachimura for the winning 3-pointer.
Should Lakers be concerned over LeBron’s start to the season? (0:42)Zach Kram identifies a few key areas where LeBron James’ productivity has decreased this season. (0:42)
Stephen A.: LeBron’s winning pass a perfect example why he’s a top-2 playerStephen A. Smith credits LeBron James for ignoring his double-digit scoring streak and passing to Rui Hachimura for the winning 3-pointer.
Stephen A. Smith credits LeBron James for ignoring his double-digit scoring streak and passing to Rui Hachimura for the winning 3-pointer.
LeBron James is like no other player in NBA history. The career scoring leader set yet another record when he became the first man to play 23 seasons in the league.
The 2025-26 version of James is also like no other previous version of himself. Sciatica forced him to miss opening night for the first time in his career. After sitting out the Los Angeles Lakers’ first 14 games, he has shown more inconsistency and a different play style than ever before.
With his 41st birthday just 12 days away, he looks mortal. And he’s taking a clearer backseat to teammates Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves for the 18-7 Lakers.
Let’s examine how James looks different this season compared to the past two decades — and what that means for the Lakers, who need an elite version of the future Hall of Famer if they want to contend in a top-heavy Western Conference.
Jump to a topic: A surprising decline in scoring A different playing style His rest-of-season prognosis James-Doncic-Reaves trio hasn’t worked
James, in contrast, averaged at least 25 points for 20 consecutive years after his rookie campaign, dipping only slightly to 24.4 last season.
That longevity and consistency helped James pass Abdul-Jabbar on the career leaderboard. The Hall of Fame center scored more points during each player’s peak age range, but James got a head start by entering the NBA right out of high school and never really declined — until now.
James’ 6.8 PPG drop is the largest among any of the 47 players who averaged at least 20 PPG last season. (At the same time, Reaves’ 7.6 PPG increase is the largest for any 20-point scorer last season.)
A large part of that decline is a deterioration of James’ historic consistency. He has three games with at least 20 points this season, but he has also had games with 13, 11, 10 and eight points. That eight-point outing, most famously, ended his record 1,297-game streak of double-digit points in the regular season.
Generally speaking, production in the NBA is a function of efficiency and volume — and James’ scoring downturn is the result of problems on both ends of that equation. GeniusIQ tracks the expected effective field goal percentage for every player in the NBA, based on factors such as shot distance and defender location. And in every season of the tracking era (since 2013-14) until now, James had overperformed his expected eFG%.
In 2025-26, though, James has slightly underperformed his shot quality for the first time on record.
On top of his efficiency dropping, James is also receiving fewer opportunities to score. In every previous season of his career, his usage rate was at least 28%, and he ranked among the league’s top dozen players in each of his first 20 seasons. In his 21st and 22nd seasons, he fell only slightly, to 21st and 14th place, respectively.
But if James had enough playing time to qualify in his 23rd season, he’d rank just 47th with a 24.2% usage rate. He was next to superstars such as Donovan Mitchell, Victor Wembanyama and Stephen Curry on the usage leaderboard last season; now he’s among No. 2 options Jerami Grant, Jaren Jackson Jr. and Derrick White.
The pattern is the same across every play type; basically, every graph of James’ usage stats looks like this:
There’s some year-to-year variation from the start of the tracking era through last season, but generally tremendous consistency over that span — especially considering that James aged from 29 to 40 in that time. But then comes the 2025-26 season and a sudden drop-off.
James is still productive and efficient when he does run the offense. He ranks in the 83rd percentile in iso scoring, and in the 92nd percentile on picks. He’s just not receiving nearly as many opportunities, instead picking and choosing his spots more than ever before.
What does this new-look version of James mean for the rest of his — and the Lakers’ — season? Has Father Time actually caught up to the man who for so long seemed to defy his influence?
The good news for James is his shooting will likely improve as the season continues — even if not all the way back up to his norms from previous decades. His true shooting percentage is 53.9%, which would represent his worst mark in a full season since he was a rookie, but full-season stats can obscure streakiness in smaller stretches. Within the past decade, James has had worse true shooting marks in nine-game spans in:
In every previous instance, he emerged from his slump and ended the season just fine. Three of those seasons ended with trips to the NBA Finals. And even though he’s dealing with unprecedented age and injury issues, there’s no reason to think he can’t rebound again in the next several months
Stephen A.: LeBron’s winning pass a perfect example why he’s a top-2 player
For instance, James’ free throw percentage is down to a career-low 62%. He missed two technical free throws against Phoenix on Sunday (before making two of three from the line to win the game after a 3-point foul in the final seconds). But it would be exceedingly strange if a career 74% shooter on more than 11,000 attempts suddenly started struggling this badly from the line.
James has also made just 29% of his 3-point attempts. He had hit 37% of his 3-point tries over the past five seasons, and such a sudden, dramatic drop-off is unlikely at the same time he is making a high percentage of his midrange jumpers. Advanced pose data from GeniusIQ shows no glaring changes in James’ body measurements that would suggest his legs have abandoned him on his long-range attempts.
Even if James’ production might tick back up closer to his career norms, however, his play style has probably changed for good.
Statistics around usage and play types tend to be “sticky” — meaning, in statistical parlance, that the early trend tends to remain true over time. In other words, don’t expect James to start driving and isolating and using dozens of screens per game again.
Here’s another data point supporting that theory: Out of nearly 1,000 games James has logged in the GeniusIQ database, he has tallied fewer than five picks just five times. One was in November 2013, one was in the 2023 playoffs, and three have come this season.
It makes sense that Lakers coach JJ Redick would structure his rotation with at least two of his big three on the court at all times; indeed, those lineups have accounted for 90% of the Lakers’ minutes across these games. (The 10 minutes without any member of the big three were all in low leverage.)
Just last season, Redick generally made sure to stagger Doncic and James after the midseason trade for the former. James played 55 minutes by himself in games with all three creators in 2024-25.
The most worrisome part for Los Angeles is that its big three doesn’t seem to be working as expected. When James, Doncic and Reaves have shared the court this season, the Lakers have been outscored by 10 points in 132 minutes.
That continues a concerning trend. In the 2024-25 regular season, that trio outscored its opponents by just two total points in 423 minutes. And then the Lakers were blown out in the playoffs, with a minus-24 margin in five games against the Minnesota Timberwolves.
Overall, the James-Doncic-Reaves trio is minus-32 in 695 minutes together. It has a negative-2.2 net rating, according to Cleaning the Glass. James, Doncic and Reaves are less than the sum of their parts.
The defense has unsurprisingly been an issue when the three offensively oriented stars share the court. The Lakers’ 120.5 defensive rating in those 695 minutes, per Cleaning the Glass, would place them near the bottom of the overall team rankings.
But the offense is also a reason for concern. The theory of the Lakers’ case is that their offense could be so dominant with Doncic, James and Reaves together that it could compensate for any defensive weakness. But instead, the big three’s offensive rating is only 118.3 — a good number, certainly, but far from a dominant one. That’s the same as what the Spurs’ ninth-ranked offense has done this season.
For comparison, look at another famed trio of star playmakers. In their limited time together in the 2020-21 season, the Brooklyn Nets’ Kevin Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving had a scorching 129.5 offensive rating — more than 10 points ahead of the Lakers’ big three.
Or look at what Doncic and Reaves have accomplished when playing together without James: a plus-15.3 net rating and 122.9 offensive rating in 585 minutes. That duo struggled last postseason, but Doncic and Reaves have absolutely torched their opponents in the regular season when James isn’t sharing the court with them.
The ultimate problem, then, isn’t that James is at long last starting to show his age. The problem is that James, Doncic and Reaves aren’t meshing as well as they need to compete with the best teams in the West.
Should Lakers be concerned over LeBron’s start to the season? (0:42)Zach Kram identifies a few key areas where LeBron James’ productivity has decreased this season. (0:42)
Zach Kram identifies a few key areas where LeBron James’ productivity has decreased this season. (0:42)