Is LeBron James now the NBA’s best third option?

Each week during the 2025-26 NBA season, we will take a deeper dive into some of the league’s biggest storylines in an attempt to determine whether trends are based more in fact or fiction moving forward.

Last week: The list of NBA title contenders is longer than you think

Fact or Fiction: LeBron James is the NBA’s best third option

You know what’s fun? Watching film of Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James. Seeing him carve up the Miami Heat’s zone defense from the jump was chef’s kiss.

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He’s so freaking smart and so freaking strong — and so freaking talented — that he can still make an incredible impact, even at 41 years old, when he’s a step slower (and lower) than he was when he was working as a perennial MVP candidate for a couple decades.

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He’s playing different now, mostly as a third option. He once was, of course, always his team’s leader in usage, facilitating nearly every possession one way or another. Even earlier this season, he was orchestrating the second-most plays on the Lakers, trailing only 27-year-old Luka Dončić, and the gap was not as sizable as you would like it to be.

After all, (and I don’t know if we mentioned this but) LeBron is 41 years old. It seems only natural that you would want to increasingly take the ball out of his hands and give it to Dončić, an MVP candidate in his prime, or Austin Reaves, another in-his-prime star.

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But it’s not always that easy. This is LeBron James, who for 20 years controlled every aspect of his career, including about a third of his team’s possessions — the load of a superstar. It was as if he needed to hear the criticism that the Lakers were performing better without him, and they were, in order for him to accept a role as a tertiary option.

The Lakers began a recent nine-game win streak with three victories without James, running their performance in non-LeBron minutes to +0.6 points per 100 possessions. Meanwhile, they had fallen to -0.4 points per 100 possessions with him on the court.

James has flipped that on its face in eight games…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/is-lebron-james-now-the-nbas-best-third-option-195039275.html

Author : Ben Rohrbach

Publish date : 2026-03-27 19:50:00

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