LeBron James, by any imaginable measure, has played more NBA basketball than any human in history. He is the league’s all-time leader in minutes, games and seasons. When a player reaches the league as an 18 year old, it’s usually safe to assume you’ll have seen everything he’s got by the time he’s 41. But a bit more than a week ago now, James showed head coach JJ Redick something he’d never seen before.

The Los Angeles Lakers trailed the Denver Nuggets by one with around one minute left in the fourth quarter of a critical game. Cam Johnson fired away from 3 for a shot that might have iced the game and, even though he missed, the rebound looked as though it would settle right back into the hands of Jamal Murray. That is, until James threw himself onto the court in an attempt to take back the ball. He couldn’t quite secure it, but he turned an offensive rebound for Denver into a jump ball that eventually led to a critical Marcus Smart steal on the way to perhaps their biggest victory of the season.

For Redick, this was new. “After the game, I said, ‘In 23 years of watching you play in the NBA and the three years I watched him play in high school, I never saw him make a full-out extension dive like that,” the Lakers coach explained, before revealing that James confirmed as much. “It’s awesome. I know he’ll feel that tomorrow, but that’s a winning play.”

Winning plays are, of course, old hat for James, but not this sort of winning play. James spent the first two decades and change of his career as the star around whom his teams needed to orbit. He orchestrated every possession on offense. At his best, he also took on the tougher available matchups on defense and even as he aged into more of an off-ball role on that end of the floor, he still used his unmatched basketball IQ to direct traffic and make plays. His teams have needed him available for as many of the 48 playable minutes in as many of the 82 scheduled games as humanly possible. Taking a needless injury risk like a full-extension floor dive for a loose ball just wasn’t worth it. He had role players for that.

Things changed when the Lakers traded for Luka Dončić. For the first time in his career, James was no longer the focal point of his team. The ascending Austin Reaves deprived him even of sidekick duties. Reaves, after all, basically has to play a star’s style. The entire value proposition of employing him depends on his usage being high to offset his defensive deficiencies. Even Redick acknowledged recently that “the best thing for our team is [James] being the third-highest-used player.”

As Kevin Love and Chris Bosh can likely attest, being the No. 3 option on a potential contender is a far cry from a standard star’s duties. Even at 41, James is still a star-level talent. He’s perfectly capable of summoning star-level performances when they’re needed. But as the Lakers have rounded into form with a nine-game winning streak that has the entire basketball world rethinking their ceiling, something fundamental has shifted not just in Lakerland, but in James’ entire career. He doesn’t have role players anymore; he is one.

We of course need to define our terms here. James is not, say, your run-of-the-mill, 3-and-D supporting piece or a grunt work forward whose value is entirely absent from the box score. In the six games since returning from a recent three-game absence, James is still averaging a wholly respectable 19 points, 7.3 rebounds and 5.5 assists per game on better than 60% shooting. 

A role player, in the specific context we’re using the term here, does not mean squeezing into a narrow, archetypal role. It means carving out an entirely new one based on the needs of the team that he has. James said himself that he watched Reaves and Dončić thrive while he sat and so he “was able to come back and see how I fit best with those guys because they were playing so dynamic off one another” upon his return. He once subtweeted Kevin Love by telling him to “stop trying to find a way to FIT-OUT and just FIT-IN.” That is, essentially, what is happening here. James is going out of his way to contort his game to suit Dončić and Reaves. For most of his career, teammates did that to fit next to him. Now he’s doing it more than he ever has to fit in with his two star teammates.

So what does that mean? Even when he laid out the reality of James as the third option, Redick made it clear that he would still be “a high-usage player relative to your average player.” This is, broadly, true. James has a 21.3% usage rate in the six games since he’s returned, not terribly far from Reaves at 22.6% and certainly above an average starter. But there are a lot of ways to “use” a possession. For most of his career, James functioned as a primary ball-handler. He used possessions pounding the rock, isolating or running pick-and-roll to get his offense moving. This is how Dončić, spotting a monstrous 41.1% usage since James returned, generally functions, and how Reaves does to a lesser extent.

But it’s not really what James is doing now. At this stage, he’s functioning as a play-finisher and as a connector. Consider the following numbers. In all four of the data points we’re about to cover, we will track four different time periods: the 2019-20 season, when James was still in his prime and led the Lakers to a championship, the 2023-24 season, when James last led an offense for a whole year, his first 44 appearances this season, and then his last six after coming back from that recent absence. The goal here is to track the downward trends:

2019-20	4.85	3.85	5.7	28.9
2023-24	4.07	3.33	5.3	48.9
2025-26 (first 44 games)	3.34	2.47	3.9	55.1
2025-26 (last six games)	2.38	1.29	1.3	74.5

The trend lines here are all moving in the same direction. James is holding the ball less, taking less time to survey the defense and instead punishing it with quick decisions to pass, dribble or shoot. This makes plenty of intuitive sense. When James has functioned as a primary creator, he’s spent his time and dribbles creating advantages for teammates. Now, he’s getting the ball with advantages that Dončić or Reaves have created, and nothing kills an advantage like giving the defense time to reset. James is keeping things moving while operating from those advantages. Those head-down drives we’ve forever associated with him? Those are way down. He’s not creating his own points to nearly the same extent. In each of his first 22 NBA seasons, James made more unassisted shots than assisted ones. In this six-game stretch, around three-quarters of his shots have been assisted.

So if James isn’t actually creating his points, where are they coming from? Well, Synergy Sports tracks 11 different ways a player can “use” a possession, meaning take a shot, draw a foul or turn the ball over. Using those same four windows of time, let’s look at how James is using his possessions, measured in percentages.

Transition	20.5%	22.6%	27.3%	33%
Post-Up	9.8%	11.2%	12%	11.7%
Spot-Up	6.6%	9.4%	12.2%	10.7%
Cut	3.5%	4.6%	6.4%	10.7%
Pick-and-Roll Ball-Handler	26.1%	19.1%	12.1%	8.7%
Pick-and-Roll Roll Man	1.1%	5.7%	3.2%	6.8%
Putbacks	2.9%	2.6%	2.1%	5.8%
Isolations	18.1%	13.8%	11.6%	3.9%
Miscellaneous	5.6%	4.3%	5.5%	3.9%
Off Screens	2.7%	3.1%	6.6%	2.9%
Handoffs	3.3%	3.5%	0.9%	1.9%

These aren’t a perfect measure of what’s happening in an offense because they measure only how a possession ends, not everything that happens within one, but they are still a useful snapshot, and these numbers paint the same picture as the first set. James has all but cut isolations out of his game lately. He has as many field goals off of putbacks as he does as a pick-and-roll ball-handler. This is no longer a player taking the sort of shots or running the sort of offense that a star runs. This is a player who is reinventing himself around the teammates that he has.

So what does that mean? The standout number from this six-game stretch is that transition figure. Around one-third of his possessions have come there. This has been a quiet but important LeBron trend for years now. More and more of his offense has shifted towards the break because, as he’s gotten older, it’s gotten harder for him to create in the half-court. On a Dončić team, the ability to generate transition offense is critical because he rarely runs. The most common sight of this six-game stretch for the Lakers has been James leaking out after an opponent’s shot for two easy points on the other end.

In the half-court, the Lakers are increasingly relying on using James as the screener in pick-and-roll. James has been arguably the NBA’s most dangerous short-roll threat since his partnership with Kyrie Irving in Cleveland, though given his ball-handling duties, it’s rarely been more than a change-of-pace weapon. 

His new dance partner is Austin Reaves, who he’s been developing this chemistry with for quite some time. With less on his plate as a ball-handler, it’s been a look the Lakers have been able to lean on more heavily. Reaves has reached that critical level as a creator in which there’s no perfect solution to defending him off of a ball-screen. Go under and he’ll happily pull up from 3. Chase him over and he’ll get you on his back and draw a foul. So more often than not, he’s drawing two on the ball even if it’s only for a quick show.  Even that split second in which he has the attention of two defenders is enough for Reaves to find James, who’s either going to rampage to the basket for an easy bucket or foul or he’s going to dice a defense on a quick 4-on-3.

Similar principles can apply even when James isn’t the one setting the ball screen. Take this fake handoff set-up from Marcus Smart to Reaves. There are only two players on the ball, but Alperen Sengun is acting as the low man in the corner and needs to keep his eyes set on Reaves, who he assumes is about to get the ball going downhill. Meanwhile, Jake LaRavia cuts across the court for the express purpose of fooling Dorian Finney-Smith into assuming James is about to run back up to the top of the key — a reasonable fear since James can obviously create for himself or just fire the open 3. It’s all window dressing to set up the lob from Marcus Smart, giving James one of his biggest highlight dunks of the year.

This is an example of the Lakers using Reaves’ gravity to set up James, but the effect is even more powerful with Dončić. Four Rockets collapse on Dončić and Deandre Ayton on this pick-and-roll, but Ayton’s roll was the decoy. The real threat was James flying in from the corner. There are only a handful of scorers in the NBA dangerous enough to make Kevin Durant forget that he’s guarding LeBron James, but Dončić is one of them and the Lakers are weaponizing that.

This is playing out even more for James as a passer. Many of his assists are coming on plays like this: Dončić collapses the defense and passes it out to James. He then either attacks a compromised defense, weakens it further and then passes into an even better shot, or just jets the ball to the even more open man, knowing that the defense will rotate towards him.

Part of what makes James so effective in this role is that he’s never been a role player before. He’s LeBron James. If Dončić gets the defense into rotation and then the ball swings to maybe the best basketball player who’s ever lived, that defense is going to panic, and suddenly a minor advantage Dončić creates is a huge one James can build off of. This is the best version of two star ball-handlers in the same offense. It’s not your turn, my turn; it’s your turn turns into my turn. Two legends building off of one another. James has entirely handed primary creation duty off to Dončić and Reaves, yet can still be an enormously valuable secondary creator off of them. He’s spent his whole life creating these sorts of advantages for others. Now he’s starting possessions with them and taking them even further.

There’s no real precedent for a shift like this. James has only a handful of historic peers to begin with. Though their careers ended prematurely, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird never transitioned from offensive engines into supporting offensive pieces. Neither did Michael Jordan, as his first two retirements came at the peak of his powers and by the time he returned for a third stint, his Wizards rosters were so bad that he had no choice but to be the focal point. Kobe Bryant got hurt and spent the end of his career on lottery teams. There are lesser Hall of Famers who’ve become role players on winners — players like Jason Kidd and Gary Payton come to mind as somewhat recent examples — but among MVPs, this never really happens. 

Even someone like James Harden for the Cavaliers now doesn’t really count. Part of Cleveland’s rationale for acquiring him was to cover for Donovan Mitchell’s playmaking deficiencies. The Cavaliers needed a point guard next to him. More often than not, players like this can only really function as centerpieces. Russell Westbrook was a superstar, and then he was nearly impossible to fit onto an existing, competing team as a role player. There was no in-between. Star skills and role player skills can be very different, and trying to translate those skills from one end of that spectrum to the other while scaling down in usage can be pretty precarious. 

This is the ironic difficulty in calling James a role player. This “role” doesn’t really exist. He’s making it up as he goes. He’s clearly not functioning in the ways that stars typically do anymore, but there’s no real term for what he is at the moment. A popular comparison has been Draymond Green, but Green has never remotely scored at the level James is even now. Is LeBron James now the LeBron James of Draymond Greens?

I’ll borrow a concept Green’s coach, Steve Kerr, used to describe a different player, Josh Hart, during the buildup to the 2023 FIBA World Cup. “People ask ‘What position does he play?’ He plays winner,” Kerr said. That echoes the “winning plays” sentiment that Redick mentioned on that loose ball James dove for. The Lakers haven’t lost since James returned and fully embraced this style, and even that doesn’t quite do justice to what is happening here. 

The entire theory of the Lakers as a contender this season rested on being so good offensively that their defensive shortcomings wouldn’t matter. In his first 44 games this season, the Lakers scored 113.4 points per 100 possessions with James on the floor and were outscored in his minutes, leading some to argue the Lakers were better without him. In this six-game stretch, they’re scoring 120.6 points per 100 possessions. It’s an admittedly tiny sample, but that would be both the third-greatest regular-season offense in NBA history and the highest individual offensive rating James has posted in his career if stretched over a full season. That’s the dominant offense theory of this roster coming to fruition. He’s far from the only reason it’s happening, but he’s buying into what the team needs fully, and it’s hard not to feel as though it’s trickling down.

Think about Deandre Ayton. It’s been less than a month since ESPN reported that Ayton had bristled against the idea that the Lakers were trying to turn him into Clint Capela. But Ayton has been great recently, embracing the less glamorous, Capela-esque screening, rebounding and defending like the Lakers need him to do in order to win. Less than a week ago, he told The Athletic that he had accepted that the Lakers didn’t need him to be the scorer he wanted to be. “I just started looking in the mirror and said ‘Yo bro, … you’re not that guy.”

It’s probably easier to accept that you’re not that guy when you’re watching LeBron James of all people actively choose not to be that guy. If arguably the most accomplished basketball player of all time is willing to take a smaller role in order to win, it’s easier to accept that you should too. The entire team is clicking right now. Dončić is mounting a late MVP campaign in part because there’s suddenly complete clarity in his partnership with James. It’s his team now, and everyone else is fitting perfectly into the roles the Lakers envisioned for them. This is the best they’ve played all year, bar none. Even if the individual numbers don’t show it, that’s true for James as well. A transition like this has been a necessity since Reaves’ early season breakout.

It took most of the season, but James figured it out. James has been a winner throughout his career, but always on his terms, always as the superstar. At 41 and with Dončić on his team, that just isn’t his best path to winning anymore. He’s not the most physically gifted player in the NBA at this point, but he’s still probably the smartest, a basketball genius capable of creating this new role on the fly. That “winner” moniker feels like the only appropriate way to describe it. James has won throughout his career, but he’s done so, in the simplest of terms, by just being the best player. 

Now he’s something different, something subtler. He’s completely reorienting his game in a way he’s never needed to in order to give a team built around Dončić and Reaves the best chance of winning. For most of his career, his play defined his teams and all they needed were players to support him. Now he’s the supporting piece, and his play is defined by what his team needs. Even after 23 years, LeBron James is still evolving, and that evolution is giving new life to a once seemingly dead Lakers season.