Even though LeBron James should be winding down in Year 23, the Los Angeles Lakers need him as much as ever as the 2026 NBA Playoffs quickly approach. The Lakers finished the 2025-26 season as the No. 4 seed and will play the Houston Rockets in the first round.
While Los Angeles edged out Houston in the regular season, they’ll have to face them without Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves who are out for the foreseeable future. While James faces a Herculean task of leading the Lakers without his costars, he couldn’t help but express how excited he is for the games to come.
“Listen, the postseason is about to be, as the young kids will say, lit,” James said on the latest episode of his Mind the Game podcast. “This shit is gonna be litty, it’s gonna be crazy, I’m looking forward to it. Me, personally, like, I don’t know how many more postseasons I got left in my career and we talked about this awhile ago, like, getting ready for the postseason, like that moment. It doesn’t matter what you did in the regular season. That shit is out the window now. It doesn’t matter. It starts again, this is it. I’m excited, man, I can’t wait.”
The playoffs are the best time of the year in the NBA calendar as the games finally matter and the stakes are higher than ever. For Los Angeles and James, they enter the series against Houston as understandable underdogs given the state of their roster.
Some feel the Rockets were the best-case scenario for the Lakers in the first round due to their own offensive struggles but the group ended the regular season playing some of its best basketball to date. The Houston trio of Kevin Durant, Amen Thompson and Alperen Sengun can cause trouble for L.A. on both ends of the floor, so James will need to be at his absolute best if the purple and gold have any hopes of advancing.
James has accomplished a lot in his historic career, but notching another series win this shorthanded would be a massive feat on his resume.
LeBron James bummed not to play Stephen Curry for entire 2025-26 season
James will get to face off against Durant in the playoffs for the first time since the 2018 NBA Finals. James and Durant are two of the biggest stars of their generation, a list that also includes Stephen Curry.
Unfortunately for basketball fans, James and Curry didn’t cross paths throughout the regular season and James expressed how disappointed he was not to see his rival on the floor.
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