Milestone birthday arrives for NBA’s all-time scoring leader

LEBRON JAMES AT 40

LeBron James, center, stands in the back of a Rolls Royce as it makes its way through the crowd lining the parade route in downtown Cleveland, on June 22, 2016, celebrating the Cavaliers’ NBA championship. GENE J. PUSKAR — ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE

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By Tim Reynolds

The Associated Press

When LeBron James broke another NBA record earlier this month, the one for most regular-season minutes played in a career, his Los Angeles Lakers teammates handled the moment in typical locker room fashion.

They made fun of him.

“They told me I’m old as hell,” James quipped.

By NBA standards, they’re not wrong. He was dubbed “The Kid from Akron” when the Ohio native entered the league with a limitless future nearly 22 years ago. He’s now the 40-year-old from Los Angeles with wisps of gray in his beard. His milestone birthday comes Monday, one that will make him the first player in NBA history to play in his teens, 20s, 30s and 40s.

Such a feat has happened a couple of dozen times in baseball before. It has happened in hockey — Gordie Howe was a five-decade player, appearing in the NHL from his teens to his 50s — but never in the NFL or the NBA. Until now. James is making more basketball history and creating a club all of his own.

“In some ways he’s a freak of nature,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said. “I’ve been around a lot of great players and he’s one of the hardest-working players I’ve been around. I mean, he doesn’t take a day off. He seems to not take an afternoon off. He’s always working on some part of his body. You meet with him and he’s always soaking something or eating something with some contraption attached to him.”

A 40th birthday, in NBA terms, means the on-court end is near. James will become the 30th player to appear in a regular-season game with a “4” as the first digit of his age; only nine logged more than 51 games after that birthday. He’ll be the 32nd player to play after turning 40 overall; Tim Duncan and Danny Schayes both turned 40 during playoff runs in what became their final seasons.

And for the most part, big numbers are largely nonexistent at that age. Only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (who did it three times), John Stockton (twice), Michael Jordan, Robert Parish and Karl Malone have averaged more than 10 points in a season after turning 40. Jordan averaged 22.4 points in 30 games after turning 40 in his final season with Washington; Malone is the most recent to do it, averaging 13.2 points in 42 games after turning 40 while with the Lakers in 2003-04.

James, meanwhile, is still putting up All-Star level numbers: 23.5 points, 9 assists and 7.5 rebounds per game. Forget how doing that at 40 is unheard of. Doing that at 30 is practically unheard of. The only players to have those numbers in all three categories in a season after turning 30 are James (who did it at 33 and 35) and James Harden (who did it at 31).

Nobody knows when James will stop playing. And it surely isn’t going to get any easier: James wanted to play all 82 games this season and couldn’t, was widely criticized when the Lakers went through a slump earlier this season and took tons of backlash when his team drafted his son Bronny in the second round last summer in what many thought was simple nepotism.

The NBA’s all-time scoring leader has hinted that the end is near. “Don’t make me feel old right now,” he said when asked earlier this month about the looming 40th birthday. He is under contract for next season but hasn’t offered any guarantees about how long he will play, saying he isn’t “going to play that much longer, to be completely honest” and insisting that he won’t be “playing till the wheels fall off” because he doesn’t want to disrespect the game.