Nylon Calculus: Is LeBron the healthiest star ever?
By Ian Levy
Perhaps more than anything else, LeBron James projects a physical robustness.
It’s not just the size and the speed and the strength, or the fact that he’s never really suffered a serious injury in just over 13 NBA season, James just looks and plays like he’s indestructible. All due respect to Shaquille O’Neal and Dwight Howard, if the measure is physical invulnerability James may hold the crown.
It’s an esoteric question but that lining up of perception and data is the kind of thing that drives us here at Nylon Calculus. So, is LeBron James the healthiest star ever?
As James begins his 14th NBA season, he has clearly slowed down some. Statistically he is far off his peak, at least from a volume standpoint, and you can see him pacing himself this year, letting Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love carry the scoring load so that he can stay fresh for when he’s needed most. In terms of reflecting on his health history, he has avoided any significant injuries but also never played 100 percent of his teams’ games in any season.
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We don’t really have a way to measure player health other than the logical end point — playing in basketball games. By this simple measure, LeBron doesn’t really stand out. He ranks just 45th in total games played through a player’s first 13 seasons, coming in behind guys like Boris Diaw, Andre Miller, and Clifford Robinson, none of whom really project an air of physical health. Even if we sort by minutes instead of games, LeBron ranks just 8th.
And this is one of the many fascinating quirks of LeBron’s career. He began his career really young and was very good, very quickly. This is one of the reasons he has a shot at passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, and he’s already passed Michael Jordan as the NBA’s all-time leader in VORP.
We can see that interplay between longevity and productivity by looking at his VORP year-by-year. The graph below also shows the average VORP by season for the NBA’s ironmen — the top-30 players in games played by their 13th season.
The first and most obvious takeaway is that LeBron is very good. The ironmen group includes many hall-of-famers, including Karl Malone, John Stockton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Gary Payton. But rolling in the Kevin Willis’ and A.C. Green’s brings the whole group down to a reasonable curve.
From their seventh season (the peak for this group) to their 13th, the ironmen lost, on average, about 45 percent of their value by VORP. LeBron James lost only about 30 percent. That difference is probably minimized even further in our perception by the relative starting points. Losing 30 percent of his peak value means LeBron went from being the best player in the league to one of the five or six best players in the league.
The height and shape of LeBron’s aging curve is what makes the strongest statement about his indestructibility. Remember that VORP is a statistic that takes into account both the quantity and quality of a player’s production. If a player becomes less productive, their VORP suffers. If they play fewer minutes, their VORP suffers. If we look at the best VORP seasons in NBA history by age, we find LeBron has consistently been in the mix.
James was among the most productive young players ever but has largely been able to maintain that throughout his career. His first returned season in Cleveland was the only time he fell out of the top-10 in VORP for that age. He followed that up with the third-best season ever by a 31-year old.
This season, in his slightly more constrained role, LeBron has still been very effective and, assuming he doesn’t miss a significant number of games, will likely finish with a VORP between 6.0 and 8.0, somewhere in between his first two seasons in Cleveland (second time around). If he does in fact fall within that range it would be one of the five best seasons ever by a 32-year old.
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So, to the question of whether James is the healthiest star ever, the answer is probably not. We can likely hand that imaginary trophy to Karl Malone and/or John Stockton. Still, LeBron’s ability to stay on the court and maintain an elite level of productivity as his body ages is something we’ve never really seen before.