LeBron James Is Playing Way Too Many Minutes
LeBron is crossing some huge career thresholds — are there real dangers on the horizon?
LeBron James finally passed Michael Jordan on an all-time list on Monday night. No, not the career scoring list. Definitely not a title ranking, and certainly not a feuds-with-Barkley list.
LeBron James passed Michael Jordan in career minutes played. Including the postseason, we have now seen more LeBron basketball than MJ.
In fact, LeBron is playing more minutes than he has in years, and the minutes are starting to add up in a hurry. But just how bad are the minute totals and how worried should we actually be?
So far this season, James has played 1,652 minutes in 44 games, not counting the three he sat out. At 37.5 minutes per game, LeBron is leading the entire NBA in time on the court. That’s more minutes per game than MVP favorite James Harden, Bulls workhorse Jimmy Butler, and the whole haven’t-we-seen-this-before Thibs trio of Towns, Wiggins, and LaVine.
Oh sure if you account for those three rest games, LeBron is “only” top 10 in total minutes played this season. But that’s still a whole lot of minutes — especially in a regular season when a satisfied James was finally supposed to turn the reins over to Kyrie and Love to carry the load and keep him fresh for the playoffs.
LeBron James is still young, in human years. He just turned 32 a month ago. But LeBron is not human, and in this case that may be a bad thing. NBA players are better conditioned now than ever, but they’re also playing a faster, more athletic game and they’re playing more of it all year round. And in the NBA, age ain’t nothing but a number anyway — it’s all about minutes played, and LeBron has played more regular season minutes in his career than James Harden and Stephen Curry combined.
Last week, LeBron passed 40,000 minutes of regular season basketball in his career. Just how many minutes is that? It’s more than all but 17 players in the Basketball Hall of Fame. LeBron has played more regular season minutes than Charles Barkley, Dominique Wilkins, Larry Bird, Jerry West, and Elgin Baylor. By season’s end, he’ll have passed Michael Jordan and Bill Russell too.
In fact, at the tender age of 32, LeBron ranks seventh among all active players in minutes played. He’s played more NBA minutes than Pau Gasol, Tony Parker, Zach Randolph, and Richard Jefferson. He’s nearly equal to Jason Terry and Andre Miller (he’ll pass both in the next month) and he’s only a season behind Vince Carter. Read that list again. Those players are ancient. They’re the old veterans signing cheap deals to play a role off the bench or have their careers rejuvenated in San Antonio.
And history says that 40,000 minutes matters. It’s extremely rare for a player to make an All Star appearance after passing the 40k mark — so rare that Jordan, Kareem, Malone, and Wilt are the only four Hall of Famers in history to do so. That means no post-40k All Star appearances for Hakeem, no Moses, no Stockton or Reggie or Payton. A few future Hall of Famers have joined the post-40k All Star list — Kobe, Dirk, Duncan, KG, and Kidd — but that’s still just nine men in history to make an All Star Game after hitting 40,000 minutes.
That’s nine times ever that a post-40k player was even among the top 25 NBA players for a season — and that’s not even taking into account the fan vote skew for superstars late in their career.
And that’s not even taking into account one other pretty huge variable: the playoffs.
In addition to those 40k regular season minutes, LeBron James has played 8,383 minutes of playoff basketball. That’s the most of any active player. It’s almost a thousand more playoff minutes than Tony Parker and two thousand more than Dwyane Wade.
Those 8,383 playoff minutes are the equivalent of three additional regular seasons of wear and tear added to LeBron’s workload. In fact, it’s almost certainly worse. Playoff basketball is even more rugged and high energy, and it only gets tougher the deeper you go — and LeBron has played in the last six straight Finals, in case you forgot.
Would you believe that, at just 32 years of age, LeBron James has played the fourth most playoff minutes of any player in history? He’s played more playoff ball than Pippen and Shaq, more than Wilt and Russell, more than even Jordan. Only Kobe, Kareem, and Duncan have played more playoff minutes — and by July that list will be down to just Duncan.
Add it all up and LeBron has played 48,513 minutes of professional basketball, 21st most of any player in NBA history.
Forgot the 40k barrier; LeBron will pass 50k by the end of June. He’s barely behind Pippen, Shaq, Hakeem, and Moses in minutes played. Remember Celtics Shaq or Raptors Hakeem? That’s LeBron’s NBA age. That’s ancient.
And that’s not even taking into account 13 All Star Games, 24 Olympic games, and 22 FIBA America and World games — that’s another 59 competitive games — along with all those qualifiers, extra practice time and scrimmages, endless exhibitions, and more. Nor is it taking into account LeBron’s high school career, where he might have done more than any teenager in history.
LeBron may be a machine, but the machine has been running at maximum capacity 10 to 12 months a year for the better part of two decades.
There are no perpetual motion machines. Even the best machines break down.
Ah, but hasn’t this been the plan all along? LeBron and the coaching staff wanted his minutes to peak mid-season before waning the rest of the way as he heads toward the playoffs.
Let’s do a little math. The Cavaliers have 35 games remaining. If LeBron plays 32 of them at around 34 minutes per game (a reasonable drop-off), he’ll finish the season with well over 2700 minutes played. That would still be his highest minutes total since Miami and his second highest in the past six years. Even with a few more games off and a real minutes restriction, it’s still a lot. It’s still too much.
Plus it’s not exactly getting the job done right now anyway. The Cavs just went 7–8 for the month of January and only played four winning teams during that stretch. LeBron played every single one of them and averaged almost 39 minutes a game. That’s a problem.
Which part is the problem though? It’s not the losing that hurts — it’s that LeBron is getting run into the ground and they’re still losing. If LeBron had missed the entire month of January and the Cavs played .500 ball, everyone would be feeling pretty great. Instead, the Cavs are losing a lot and LeBron is using up precious minutes on a ticking timeline.
Still, it’s not exactly time to hit the panic button in Cleveland. For all their recent losing, the Cavs are 32–15 and atop the entire East. As bad as January was, they played at a 64-win pace before that, and just .500 ball the rest of the way gets them to 50 wins and the 3 or 4 seed in the Eastern Conference.
With 35 games left, even a ghastly 10–25 finish would almost certainly get Cleveland into the Eastern playoffs. So why not cut LeBron’s minutes way back, say 28–30 minutes a game, and maybe take a ten or fifteen game vacation in there too? Call it a strained calf or something.
And sure, they’d be the 7 or 8 seed, but would it really matter? No one in the East is beating a healthy and rested Cavs team. Is Cleveland really worried about an extra series against Boston or Toronto? Maybe LeBron has to play an extra couple road games in May, but that’s more than a fair trade for the 400 minutes of mileage he wouldn’t have added during the regular season.
Maybe LeBron should take a cue from his old Miami teammate, Dwyane Wade. While the two were together in Miami, Wade averaged just 62 games a season — that’s 20 extra vacation days each year. Instead of following Wade’s cue, LeBron is on pace to play about 35% more minutes this season than Wade averaged in their seasons together.
Isn’t it supposed to be LeBron’s turn to rest up and save himself for the playoffs now? Isn’t this entire season about getting just four Ws in June anyway? Why is LeBron getting run into the ground?
It’s easy to just shrug off all these numbers because LeBron is LeBron, a physical specimen unlike anything we’ve seen in NBA history. He’s never really dealt with any serious injuries, and his body is showing no signs of breaking down or even aging all that much. Maybe LeBron really can play like this forever.
How quickly we forget.
Only a few years ago, another NBA legend seemed like he would last forever. At age 34, he was third in the league in points per game with 27.3 and, like LeBron, averaging a career-high assist rate. He had played 14 straight All Star Games and was grinding his way toward the all-time scoring record. His name, of course, was Kobe Bean Bryant.
Kobe averaged 38.7 minutes a game that season, just a hair short of Luol Deng’s league lead. It was April 12th and the playoffs grew near. Kobe was over 54k minutes for his career but no one in basketball had a training regiment so well documented. No one in all of sports took better care of their body than Kobe. Kobe was indestructible.
Until he wasn’t.
It was a simple pop, he said. After 54,000 minutes of professional basketball, Kobe’s Achilles simply gave out. His season was over, and his career was never again the same. Kobe returned the following season but played only six games after suffering a lateral tibial plateau fracture, then played through a torn rotator cuff part of the next season before shutting it down before finishing up his career last year.
After the Achilles tear, Kobe only played another 107 games in the NBA. His scoring and shooting each dropped by over 25% and he stumbled to the finish line at just 18.9 points per game and 37% field goal percentage that final stretch. He never played another playoff game.
One day Kobe Bryant was a top-5 MVP candidate at 27 points, 6 assists, and 6 boards a night, still at the top of the game, gritting through another long season. And in the next moment, it all disappeared forever.
Kobe was 34 when he tore his Achilles, just two years older than LeBron. He had just crossed the 54k minute mark, only about one season ahead of James.
Not that long ago, Kobe Bryant was still a bona fide NBA superstar. And it all went away in a pop.
We tend to shrug off LeBron’s huge minutes because he’s LeBron, a superhuman that has always been able to do anything he wants.
But the truth is that LeBron has logged more wear and tear on his body at a grueling physical style than any player in NBA history by age 32. Maybe more than any athlete in history at this age.
We’re used to seeing LeBron defy history by now because we’ve been watching him do it for 15 years, but even Superman had his kryptonite. No one lasts forever — not even LeBron. It’s just not possible.
And LeBron is quickly reaching the stage of history where no man has ever gone before. LeBron needs a break. He needs a vacation, and maybe a mental one too based on a few recent outbursts and his usual media antics. You can root for or against LeBron, but the man is a one of a kind legend we’ll never see again, and history says he’s nearing his expiration date.
Far be it from us to impose a minutes restriction or two-week ban on the greatest athlete of this generation. But let’s be sure to appreciate the unparalleled greatness of LeBron James while we still have him. He won’t be around forever, and forever might come much sooner than you think.
Then again, this is LeBron we’re talking about, and when has he ever followed the rules of physics? Maybe we’ll continue to see LeBron James play top level basketball for a very long time.
Not just one more great year. Not two, not three. Not four, not five, not six, not seven…
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