Los Angeles Lakers: 5 steps to building a contender with Kyrie Irving
By Robert Marvi
4. LeBron James needs to delegate
The self-proclaimed king and “Greatest of All Time” is 34 now. While he regained his explosiveness not long after returning from his groin injury and continued to put up his usual eye-popping stats, he needs to be conserved to give the team its best chance of winning an NBA title.
Throughout his career, LeBron has always been the main ballhandler on his team. Doing so, especially in today’s uptempo NBA, while still having to score 25-30 points a game and also get 7-8 assists, takes a lot out of you.
Letting Ball, and to a lesser extent Irving handle at least some of that responsibility would go a long way in keeping LeBron fresh for the playoffs and extending his prime. Irving would also help with that by becoming the Lakers’ go-to-guy in crunch time, something that LeBron has never been consistently good at.
Now don’t get me wrong, LeBron should and will still handle the ball a significant amount of time both in the Lakers’ transition game and in their halfcourt sets. But his usage rate, which has been over 30 percent for the last 14 seasons in a row, needs to come down a bit. He should spend more time running the wing on fast breaks and posting up.
If all this happens, LeBron won’t have to sit out games here and there for “load management”, because reducing and delegating some of his responsibilities could account for that “load management.”
Instead, between Christmas and March, if the Lakers’ medical staff feels that he needs a break, they can play him around 20 minutes a game here and there in games against lesser opponents in which they won’t need him to bring his A game for them to win.
Of course, when LeBron first came here last July, he talked with Magic Johnson about doing exactly what I just talked about, but it didn’t really materialize, and instead, Ball found himself playing off the ball much of the time in the halfcourt game. So another key will be LeBron putting his ego aside for the good of the team, which is something he hasn’t consistently done.