‘We’ll see what happens’: LeBron James questions the future of the NBA after the loss | Lebron James

LeBron James entered the final game of his 20th NBA season with the highest-scoring postseason half of his career unmatched in the NBA.

He ended the night by questioning how much longer he plans to chase history after his Los Angeles Lakers. they were eliminated from the Western Conference finals.

James set a career-high 31 points in the first half of Game 4 Monday night, but missed two potential tying shots in the final minute when the denver nuggets he finished the Lakers season with a 113-111 victory.

James, 38, finished with 40 points, 10 rebounds, nine assists and immense frustration after Los Angeles’ remarkable late-season surge ended with four straight losses. Although the top scorer of nba the story talked about himself as part of the Lakers’ upcoming season, James also said that he has not been decided.

“We’ll see what happens in the future,” James said in the final response to his postgame news conference. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I have a lot to think about, to be honest. Just for me, personally, in the future of the game of basketball, I have a lot to think about.”

James has a $46.9 million contract next season with the Lakers, but is in charge of his future after surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s scoring record earlier this year. Previously, he hasn’t suggested many personal conflicts about ending his contract with Anthony Davis, and his game hasn’t slowed significantly after two decades in the NBA, though his health has become less strong, particularly in your feet and ankles.

“It’s about availability for me and keeping my mind sharp, and things of that nature,” James said. “Being present on the floor, being present in the locker room and on bus and plane trips, things of that nature. It’s challenging, for sure. It was a very challenging season for me, for our baseball club, and obviously we know what happened early on (in the Lakers’ 2-10 season opener). It was great, a pretty cool trip.”

James missed a month of the regular season with a foot injury down the stretch, but returned with a string of stellar playoff performances as the Lakers defeated second-seeded Memphis and eliminated defending champion Golden State. That didn’t matter much to James, whose frustration played out at various points after Game 4.

“I don’t like to say it’s a successful year, because I don’t play anything besides winning championships at this point in my career,” James said. “You know, I don’t like to make a conference appearance (finals). I’ve done it many times, and it’s not fun for me not to be able to be a part of reaching the (NBA) Finals.”

In his NBA-record 282nd career playoff game, James scored 21 points in a dynamic first quarter in Game 4. He added 10 more in the second while playing nearly the entire half of a do-or-die game. against the Nuggets. .

But James only had nine points on 4-of-12 shooting in the second half, and missed two scoring chances in the final minute. He made a bizarre jumper that missed badly with 26 seconds remaining, and Denver’s Jamal Murray and Aaron Gordon thwarted his final run to the rim at the buzzer.

But the first half was classic LeBron: He made 11 of his 13 shots and hit four straight 3-pointers in the highest-scoring half of his career playoffs, which began in 2003 and has included four NBA championships. James added four rebounds and four assists, and also received a technical foul after a physical exchange with Gordon as the two got locked up on the Lakers’ side of the court.

James had struggled from distance earlier in the series, going 3-for-19 in the first three games. He fixed his shot in Game 4, and even got credit for a 3-pointer in the first quarter when his high-flying pass to Rui Hachimura accidentally went into the basket.

James already had the highest scoring average in NBA history in elimination games (33.5 points per game) among all players with at least 10 such appearances.

After failing to win a title this year, James is clearly thinking about whether he wants to do it all over again. A major obstacle to thinking about retirement is his long-stated desire to play a season in the NBA alongside his son, Bronny, who will be a freshman at USC this fall and was unable to join the league until the fall of 2024 at the earliest.

“I guess I’ll reflect on my career when it’s over, but I don’t know,” James said when asked to assess his 20th season. “The only thing that worries me is being available to my teammates, and I don’t like the fact that I didn’t play as many games as I would have liked due to injury. That is the only thing that matters to me, being available to my teammates”.