The Lakers open their first-round series against the Rockets on Saturday at Crypto.com Arena with the season hanging on LeBron James. Luka Doncic is out with a Grade 2 hamstring strain, Austin Reaves is sidelined by a Grade 2 oblique strain, and the fourth-seeded Lakers now face a fifth-seeded Houston team that is heavily favored to advance.
That makes James, who is 41, the entire story for a team that started the season with him sidelined by sciatica and ended it with another burst of urgency. He closed the regular season with his 70th conference player of the week nod, a reminder that even in a 23-year career, he can still tilt the conversation. The Lakers would likely shut the book on the year unless James can stretch the series long enough for Doncic and Reaves to recover.
The weight of that challenge is obvious because James has spent his career making the impossible look temporary. He has won four NBA titles and three gold medals, and he has already shown he can play through pain that would flatten most teams. Last postseason, he suffered a grade 2 sprain of the medial collateral ligament in his left knee in the deciding loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves. Before that, he and the Cleveland Cavaliers came back from a 3-1 deficit to beat the 73-win Golden State Warriors in the 2016 NBA Finals, a run that included back-to-back 41-point games in Games 5 and 6.
He also left his most famous imprint in Game 7, when he scored 11 of his 27 points in the fourth quarter and delivered the chase-down block that set up Kyrie Irving's game-winner. James later said on 's More Than An Athlete in 2018, “I was like, ‘That one right there made you the greatest player of all time.’”
The tension around this Lakers team is that the pieces that were supposed to define it are not available when the bracket begins. Doncic played in only 64 games this season, one short of the 65-game mark the NBA typically uses for award eligibility, even though he was viewed as a leading candidate for MVP and a lock for his sixth All-NBA team. Reaves, too, is out indefinitely. So the burden falls almost entirely on James, and on whether a 41-year-old star can turn one more playoff series into a bridge rather than a farewell.
That is why Saturday matters more than a standard opening game. If the Lakers can survive long enough, the season could still be rescued by health. If they cannot, this will read less like a playoff run than a missed chance that never got a fair fight.