A suddenly familiar oof for the Lakers

The climb out of no man's land is proving difficult in familiar ways.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

Marie Antoinette and Her Children; Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun; 1787

You may recall that during the Lakers’ stunning comeback against the Mavericks on Sunday, LeBron James seemed to injure his foot … and then kept playing. LeBron is known to be as resilient as a cyborg in terms of apparent injuries, but it turns out that despite finishing the game this one was a bit serious. ESPN reports that LeBron could miss “several weeks” dealing with his latest ailment. The team hasn’t put a label on the particular injury. It’s not the same foot that’s been costing him games this season.

That sure puts a cloud over the Lakers’ intriguing performance since the trade deadline. There are only several weeks remaining in the regular season, and the Lakers remain outside the Western playoff picture at 29-32. They are tied in the loss column with two play-in teams (the flailing Wolves and Pelicans). The Lakers have played just above .500 with LeBron available this season and five games below without him. That obviously has to change for the Lakers to have a shot at getting into the tournament.

The good news for L.A. is that they have a number of games against the teams they need to outperform to get into the play-in. They control their own destiny. They just won’t have their best player for most of that quest, it appears.

This isn’t particularly new to the Lakers’ version of LeBron, by the way. With this injury news, four of the five lowest availability regular seasons of his career will have come in his Lakers’ tenure.

The orange bars are below 90% availability. The red bars are below 75% availability. Every other season featured LeBron playing at least 90% of his team’s regular season games. This season, he currently sits at 77% and will finish much lower unless he bounces back within two or three weeks.

Put another way, LeBron had only missed more than 10% of his team’s games once in his career before joining the Lakers. He’s experienced that in four of his five Lakers seasons. In the single season in L.A. with 90%+ availability, the Lakers were the No. 1 seed and won the title.

LeBron has taken Father Time to triple overtime. But Father Time is undefeated.