Relative to other NBA players, LeBron James has enjoyed tremendous fortune throughout his 22-year career. He has won four championships for three different franchises. He has remained sufficiently healthy through more than two decades to set league records for career points and minutes. He has shared the court with a number of all-time greats, and he even lucked into landing reigning scoring champ Luka Doncic as his latest legendary co-star.
But one corner of LeBron’s game has been tremendously unlucky, even as his Los Angeles Lakers rise up the Western Conference standings.
Let’s investigate a statistical curiosity even stranger than a 40-year-old averaging 25 points, 9 assists and 8 rebounds. We’ll examine a new wrinkle in James’ profile, the remarkable reasons behind it, and the implications for the Lakers’ title chances and James’ future.
LeBron’s bad luck: A perplexing plus-minus mystery
James isn’t playing through the typical degree of misfortune that hits every NBA player. This is something else entirely — a once-in-a-decade level of lousy luck hindering the greatest player of the century.
For the first time in James’ career, his team has been worse with him on the court. His minus-0.8 net rating, per Cleaning the Glass, is 9.2 points lower than when he sits, as the Lakers boast a plus-8.4 net rating without the four-time MVP. At the team level, that number would slot fourth in the league, just behind the elite contender trio of the Oklahoma City Thunder, Cleveland Cavaliers and Boston Celtics.
It makes sense that James’ presence would always improve his teams. In fact, after adjusting for opponent and teammate quality, James has the best career on/off differential among all players in the 29 seasons for which we have full play-by-play data.
But this season, Los Angeles has better offensive and defensive ratings with James on the bench. And the only Lakers rotation players with a worse plus-minus are Cam Reddish and rookie Dalton Knecht — two players they were comfortable losing in the now-rescinded trade for Charlotte Hornets center Mark Williams.
Tuesday’s much-anticipated game against Dallas provided a perfect encapsulation of this pattern. The Lakers outscored the Mavericks by 13 points in 11 minutes with James on the bench, but were outscored by five points in his 37 minutes. Although James led his team with an efficient 27 points, he was the only Lakers starter with a negative plus-minus.
Perhaps these data points are evidence that James is finally slowing in his 40s. Perhaps they’re an indictment of the Lakers’ competitive status under first-year coach JJ Redick.
Or, perhaps LeBron is now the NBA’s unluckiest player.
The unluckiest spot: Look beyond the arc
One major source of luck in the modern NBA is 3-point percentage, which can vacillate wildly from game to game and lineup to lineup. And when James is on the court this season, the Lakers are making fewer 3s — even though James himself has one of the best 3-point marks (39.6%) in L.A.’s rotation.
With James on the court, the Lakers are making 34.4% of their 3-point attempts, which would rank 25th in the NBA. Without James, though, they’re up at 38.1%, which would rank third. This gap emerges even though the Lakers are generating better looks when James is playing — “butt-naked, wide-open” looks, in forward Dorian Finney-Smith’s telling — according to Second Spectrum tracking based on factors like shot distance, defender location and the player shooting.
The problem is that James’ teammates have inexplicably struggled from distance when sharing the floor with him and have caught fire when he rests. Other than the now-departed Anthony Davis, every teammate who’s spent at least 400 minutes with James has shot meaningfully better when he’s on the bench.
Directly off James’ passes, the Lakers have made just 31.3% of their 3-point attempts, according to Second Spectrum — the worst mark among 28 players with at least 300 assist opportunities. When James passes to a 3-point shooter who’s not wide open, they’re all the way down at 23.2% — the worst mark for any player in the entire tracking era (since 2013-14) with at least 150 such passes.
In general, this is the first season in which James has ever had a negative on/off split on offense, meaning his team has scored more efficiently when he’s off the floor. But this unprecedented occurrence is because of bizarre 3-point luck, not because the Lakers actually have a better offensive process without him.
The effect is even more pronounced on the defensive end. Lakers opponents are making 37.0% of their 3-point attempts when James is on the court, which would rank 27th — but when James is on the bench, Lakers opponents are making just 32.0% of their 3s, which would be the stingiest in the league.
This difference might make some intuitive sense, because you could expect that James’ waning defensive effort in his 40s is leading to more open 3s for his opponents. But Second Spectrum tracking shows the opposite is true. The Lakers heavily contest more 3-pointers when James is on the floor (51% of opponent attempts) than when he’s off (46% of attempts).
And Lakers opponents have a worse expected 3-point percentage when James is playing.
This disparity is reminiscent of a mini-debate during the contentious 2016-17 MVP race, which underscored the unpredictability and flukiness of 3-point defense. That season, the San Antonio Spurs were much better on defense when prime Kawhi Leonard was off the court — but because of rotten 3-point luck, not any fault of Leonard’s.
James’ rotten luck has compounded because it’s occurring on both ends. According to Cleaning the Glass — which strips out garbage time and end-of-quarter heaves — the Lakers are shooting 4.2% worse from distance with James on the court, and their opponents are shooting 6.1 percentage points better. Add those two figures together, and you get a 3-point “luck score” of negative-10.3%.
To be fair, this isn’t a measure of pure luck because it involves some skill; elite offensive players, for instance, should have a positive on/off 3-point differential because they’re making shots and setting up their teammates with open looks. But that only makes James’ current predicament even more surprising.
He has never had anywhere near this sort of luck in any previous season.
A 3-point “luck score” of negative-10.3% is an anomaly not just for James, but for all NBA players. The last player with a worse score in at least 1,500 minutes played all the way back in 2010, when 3-pointers were much less common than they are now. In other words, James is currently experiencing the worst 3-point luck of any player in the modern pace-and-space era.
That aberration more than accounts for his poor performance in surface-level on/off stats. The gap between the Lakers’ point differential when James is on the court (minus-32) and off the court (plus-109) is 141 points.
But based on the expected and actual 3-point percentages for both the Lakers and their opponents, we can estimate a 263-point swing against James from 3-point luck alone. The underlying numbers indicate the Lakers should have a positive scoring margin with James, and a negative margin without him — as is the case with most star players throughout the league.
Once again, the Lakers’ win over Dallas on Tuesday offered evidence of this peculiar trend. With James on the court, the Lakers made just 21% of their 3-point attempts, while the Mavericks sank a scorching 40%. When James went to the bench, however, those percentages nearly flipped, to 42% for the Lakers and 25% for the Mavericks.
The gap between James’ on-court (minus-five) and off-court (plus-13) differentials against Dallas was 18 points. And based on an analysis of Second Spectrum tracking, 3-point variance in that game accounted for a 17-point on/off swing.
How Luka can help turn LeBron’s luck around — just in time for the playoffs
James’ statistical aberration results in a few takeaways, both for this season and beyond.
It suggests the Lakers should play better with him going forward, as his bad luck regresses. Indeed, the win over the Mavericks aside, his 3-point luck has already started to shift, with more equal on/off splits since Jan. 15 — during which span the Lakers are an NBA-best 15-4, with the league’s best defensive rating.
Better numbers with James on the court augur well for the Lakers’ chances in the playoffs, when starter workloads increase. It remains to be seen how Redick handles a postseason rotation, but over the past two seasons, James’ minutes per game increased from 35.4 in the regular season to 39.2 in the playoffs. The Lakers can’t afford to keep losing ground when he’s on the court if they want to advance, but better luck suggests they should win James’ minutes going forward.
The flip side of the likely positive regression in James’ minutes is a likely negative impact on the LeBron-less minutes; opponents probably won’t keep underperforming their expected shooting percentage by such a large margin when James is on the bench, especially after the departure of Davis, the Lakers’ best defender.
But now Doncic can buoy the lineups without James, hedging against any luck-based decline.
With better luck and Doncic in the fold, the Lakers profile as a legitimate contender. James should also enjoy an uptick in his on-court numbers when he plays with Doncic. In an admittedly tiny sample, the Lakers have a plus-9.4 net rating when the two stars share the court, per Cleaning the Glass, which ranks in the 88th percentile of lineups leaguewide.
Beyond the implications for the title race, James’ on/off 3-point splits will also be important to understand when considering end-of-season awards voting. For instance, the player impact metric from BBall Index — which blends box score and on/off data, and is aptly named LEBRON — would rank James as only the 26th-best player in the league this season, but the stat’s built-in “luck adjustment” bumps him all the way up to 16th.
That’s essentially the difference between making an All-NBA team and not doing so. James is already the oldest All-NBA player ever, and a bad-luck plus-minus shouldn’t stand in his way of breaking his own record this year.
James is eligible for a new contract this summer, if he declines his $52.6 million player option. A potential three-year extension would carry James through his age-43 season, which could be a concern because only two players in NBA history (Vince Carter and Robert Parish) have played double-digit games at that age.
But James hasn’t displayed any meaningful signs of slippage. Even the first negative on/off split of his career is actually a sign of historically terrible luck, not any problem with James himself.
Source: espn.com