Photo: Jayne Kamin-Oncea/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters

On Saturday, LeBron James became the first player in NBA history to score 40,000 points. This is an incredible, almost mind-bending accomplishment. To put it in some perspective: If Stephen Curry, one of the best scorers in NBA history, wants to reach 40,000 points, he will have to average 25 points a game, his current career mark, while playing a minimum of 70 games a year for the next 16 seasons, or until he is 51 years old.

NBA-statistics expert Kirk Goldsberry visualized just how remarkable LeBron’s feat really is:

This is what 40,000 points looks like. Congrats, LeBron. pic.twitter.com/yx8xvbmtnE

— Kirk Goldsberry (@kirkgoldsberry) March 3, 2024

Here’s another thing that happened in that game on Saturday, something a lot less amazing and a lot more familiar: LeBron lost.

He has won four NBA championships with three different teams, including one with the Lakers to conclude the bizarro COVID-bubble 2020 season. But I’m not sure LeBron has ever been further away from a title than he is right now. Despite the presence of peak-of-his-powers fellow future Hall of Famer Anthony Davis, his Lakers are currently tenth in the Western Conference. The team seems ticketed for the play-in game (a concept LeBron once despised) and consistently falters against the top-tier teams in the conference — particularly the defending champion, Denver Nuggets, which beat the Lakers for the eighth consecutive time the night LeBron scored his 40,000th point. In no realistic universe are the Lakers anything resembling a championship contender. They are an average, even mediocre team. That LeBron is still their best player, that he is doing things no one his age has ever done in NBA history, is remarkable and unprecedented and still sort of beside the point: It’s not enough. The Lakers just aren’t that good.

Considered in the context of NBA history, this could be seen as a tragic, even pathetic end to a career. We’ve seen plenty of that before. Michael Jordan’s last two years, in Washington, were so feeble and embarrassing that we as a society seem to have collectively decided they didn’t happen. Kobe Bryant scored 60 points in his final game, but the three seasons that preceded it were difficult to watch; the Lakers missed the playoffs all three seasons and lost a stunning 65 games during Kobe’s final year, still the worst year in franchise history. Shaquille O’Neal ended his career playing six total minutes in the playoffs for the Celtics. (In case you forgot, he was briefly “the Big Shamrock.”) Time, as they say, is undefeated. But all told, we don’t usually talk about how these stars’ careers ended. We’d rather remember the good years.

What has been the most noteworthy about LeBron’s final few years in the NBA is how decidedly un-tragic this all seems. Part of this is because LeBron is so much better than any other superstar has been at the end of their career. But it’s more than that. One of the most refreshing aspects of LeBron’s career, as I’ve written before, is how he’s the first post-Jordan superstar who has felt comfortable, really from the beginning, not defining himself in comparison to MJ. (Other than his number, anyway.) This is the trap Kobe fell into for the first few years of his career, which occasionally even felt like Jordan cosplay. Jordan’s megalomaniacal intensity, his obsession with not just winning but dominating and humiliating anyone who dared to challenge him, was oppressive and stifling and even monotonous, and it led to a whole generation of NBA discourse that mostly boiled down to Quién es más macho? It also, as we saw from The Last Dance, led to Jordan living a pretty miserable existence and having, inevitably (time being undefeated and all), a crash landing at the end of his career, his body no longer being able to keep up with what Jordan’s relentless soul demanded of it.

That’s not the way LeBron has handled things. He has won, a lot, but he has also lost, and while he’ll send the occasional passive-aggressive emoji tweet around the trade deadline, he generally handles defeat like someone who understands that it’s something that happens no matter how hard you try, even to a winner with nothing left to prove. His career is not building its way toward another championship at its climax — though presuming he resigns with the Lakers this offseason as expected, his team will have some draft picks it could trade for another superstar to make one last run — and while he doesn’t seem resigned to this, he does seem comfortable if that’s how it turns out. He has long said he’s much more interested in playing a final season with his son Bronny James than anything else, even implying he’d sign with whichever team drafts him. And while that possibility has been complicated by Bronny’s health issues and an unspectacular freshman year at USC, it’s telling that it’s viewed as a far more logical end point for LeBron’s career than a fifth NBA title would be. Jordan ended his career bitter, angry, and alone. LeBron looks as though he’s going to end it side by side with his son.

It’s just another example of the way LeBron has mapped out his career — and life — in a far more human, relatable, and downright sane way than Jordan ever did. It is as if he realized, early on, that he’d be forever compared to the man, understood (unlike Kobe, at least until the end) it was a battle that could not be won, and released himself from that burden by doing things his own way. LeBron is winding up his career as one of the best players in the league, but that’s not the most impressive thing about his swan song. What’s impressive is that he’s going out on his own terms, mostly independent of the historical debates we keep trying to drag him into. Somewhat ironically, this will probably only buoy his legacy after he’s gone, especially since future superstars can follow his example and do things their own way. Jordan or LeBron? We’ll forever argue who’s better. But I don’t think there’s any sort of debate about who you’d rather be.