I don't want to talk about it. I doubt you want to talk about. But we should probably talk about it. LeBron James' defensive effort so far in 2025-26 has been pretty abysmal, and he's making decisions (on both ends) that don't look or feel like decisions LeBron James would have ever made before.
Just how locked in is James in year 23?
To be fair, doing anything for 23 years would be tiring, and the wear and tear on James' body shouldn't be understated. But it's not like the Lakers are cruising along on defense and LeBron's effort on that end is optional. The Lakers couldn't stop a team trying to shoot a beach ball into a golf hole, so LeBron's wavering effort as both an on-ball defender and a team defender are hurting the team in a considerable way.
LeBron James isn't helping the Lakers' defensive struggles
I don't want to single out LeBron here. About 90 percent of the Lakers lineup needs to look in the mirror and ask themselves about their own defensive efforts. It's a snowball effect. But James, aside from being the most famous player on the Lakers, has always been at least a passable defender.
No matter what metric you look at so far this year, that's no longer the case. LeBron has a defensive box plus-minus of minus-0.4, and the eye test backs up that number. James can still get a chasedown block on occasion, and his basketball genius lets him read passing lanes for steals, but on a possession-by-possession basis, he looks uninterested a lot of the time, and physically unable to catch up with ballhandlers lots of other times.
Again — James is 41. No one should expect him to be the All-Defense player he has been six times throughout his career. But on the Lakers' 26th-ranked defense, no player, no matter how illustrious their career has been, can afford to phone it in on that end.
If the Lakers' starting lineup looks how everyone thinks it will (Reaves, Doncic, James, Rui, Ayton) when everyone is healthy, there's literally no room for error on the offensive end because of how rough that group will be defensively.
We can be thrilled to still be watching LeBron James play in 2026 and still expect him to contribute more on the defensive end. I don't think that's unfair to ask of a starter on a team that wants to win an NBA title.