The Los Angeles Lakers are just a few weeks out from kicking off their 2025-26 NBA season with a home game against the Golden State Warriors. It will be year number 23 for LeBron James, who for the first time in his career is entering a season where he is clearly not the number one option on his team (that distinction belongs to newly re-signed Luka Doncic).
Recently, the Lakers held their annual media day, and James spoke on what keeps him motivated this far into his illustrious career, per the NBA on X, formerly Twitter.
“The love of the game is still high. The love of the process is even higher… That’s what continues to push me to play this game,” said James.
Indeed, James has long shown an enduring commitment to the game of basketball, spending millions of dollars per year to keep his body in the best shape in can be. This has resulted in James still being widely viewed as a top 10 or 15 player despite being nearly 41 years of age.
Can the Lakers compete?
Coming into this offseason, it was clear that the Los Angeles Lakers had several points of weakness to address that were thoroughly exposed in their unceremonious playoff loss vs the Minnesota Timberwolves.
The biggest question marks for the Lakers were their point of attack defense on the perimeter, as well as their frontcourt depth. Los Angeles attempted to shore up those areas by signing Marcus Smart and Deandre Ayton on the buyout market. It remains to be seen whether or not those signings will make a difference this year for a Los Angeles team that is entering the first full year of the Luka Doncic era.
It will be interesting to see how head coach JJ Redick handles the starting lineup, as Austin Reaves and Doncic proved to be untenable defensively as a backcourt last year, but adding Smart to that lineup could make the Lakers very small compared to other teams.
In any case, the Lakers will kick off their 2025-26 season at home against the Warriors on October 22 at 10:00 PM ET.
