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Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James will sit out Saturday’s home game against the Sacramento Kings with an illness, ESPN’s Dave McMenamin reported.
James missed Friday’s practice with the same illness, according to McMenamin.
Dave McMenamin @mcten
LeBron James will miss Saturday’s game against SAC with an illness, sources told ESPN. It will be his third missed game of the season. The illness kept James out of Friday’s practice, too.
The absence will mark James’ third missed game of the season.
Early into the 2024-25 NBA season, James laid out a goal of appearing in all 82 of the Lakers’ regular season games. It was a lofty goal considering his age (39) along with the fact he made 70-plus appearances just once in his first six seasons in L.A.
By early December, head coach JJ Redick alluded to how the target was unrealistic.
“I don’t know that’s in the best interest of him and us if he does that, but if he’s feeling well and feeling good, then he should play,” the coach told reporters after a 109-80 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Dec. 2. “But we obviously want to … manage that as best we can.”
James was subsequently sidelined for two games later in the month due to soreness in his left foot, a problem he said has been nagging him at times for multiple years.
With the four-time MVP, there isn’t one major injury that precipitated a wider trend. Instead, the minor knocks he might’ve shaken off earlier in his career are becoming harder and harder to overcome as he has gotten older.
That’s a major problem for the Lakers because so much of their championship formula rests on James staying healthy and playing pretty close to his peak. Granted, both of those things happened in 2023-24 and it couldn’t prevent L.A. from losing to the Denver Nuggets in the first round of the playoffs.
Even having James miss a few games here and there could have a big impact with how tightly packed the Western Conference is. Losing what were a small handful of winnable games could be the difference between a top-six position and having to claw out of the play-in tournament.
