lebron-getty.png
Getty Images

LeBron James has been playing the cryptic media game for so long now that even his most explicit statements generate months of whispers and speculation. "LeBron wants to compete for a championship," Rich Paul said when James opted into the final year of his contract with the Los Angeles Lakers. Well, there you go. Sounds easy enough. LeBron wants to win. And then the statement continued: "He knows the Lakers are building for the future. He understands that, but he values a realistic change of winning it all."

Now why would he say that? Did he not think the Lakers had a realistic chance of winning a championship? Is this his not-so-subtle way of telling them they have work to do in order to get there? Does he want them to make a specific trade? Does he want them to trade him? Is there something he wants from the organization that he can't publicly demand? How on Earth did a statement that began with the words "LeBron wants..." create so many questions about what LeBron wants?

We've never really gotten clarity. James went dark for most of the summer. His media day quotes were pretty benign. Eagle-eyed opening night critics suggested his body language appeared disengaged from the team he still plays for. His coach indirectly addressed those concerns by praising his efforts behind the scenes. And he still hasn't even played yet. James is currently recovering from sciatica that is expected to keep him out until the middle of November. All we know for now is that he will miss the five-game road trip that the Lakers will embark upon starting Saturday.

Well, that's all we know about his status, at least. We know a good deal more about the team we've watched play nine games and win seven of them. They have sole control of the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference. It's come against an easy schedule, sure, and their 13th-ranked net rating suggests that they aren't quite as good as their record. But think about all of the players they've missed in these wins:

Every member of the projected opening night rotation has missed time except Jake LaRavia and Rui Hachimura. On Wednesday, the Portland Trail Blazers handed the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder their first loss of the season. Two nights earlier, the Lakers beat those same Blazers on their home floor with more than 63% of their payroll out. The Lakers just keep winning. The players they do have are proving capable of scaling as far up or down in terms of usage as the team needs. The players Rob Pelinka added in the wake of James' explosive statement have all exceeded expectations. Dončić has scored more points in his first five games of a season than any player besides Wilt Chamberlain ever has. JJ Redick is emerging as a Coach of the Year favorite. It's too early to say anything definitively, but the Lakers look like the championship contender James said he wanted.

It's hard not to see similarities to the 2007 Laker offseason. Kobe Bryant publicly demanded a trade. He pouted through the early season, but the team played well. They traded for Pau Gasol. The rest is history. The situations aren't entirely analogous of course. We know of no trade request on James' part and this team's version of the Gasol trade came before the drama when the Lakers acquired Dončić last summer rather than afterward. But the feeling is similar. Bryant wanted to win. The Lakers gave him a winner. James, at a far later point in his career, says that he wants to win. The early signs here suggest that the Lakers can indeed win.

And if they can't yet, perhaps they've come close enough to justify a nudge. The recent Lakers have made a bit of a habit of forcing their teams to prove that they're worthy of meaningful deadline investment before actually pulling the trigger. In 2023, that meant waiting until February to use a first-round pick and get off of Russell Westbrook. That investment led to a Western Conference finals trip. Last year, it was Dorian Finney-Smith around New Year's before the Dončić atomic bomb a month later. The Lakers are sitting on a tradable 2031 first-round pick right now. The expectation had been that they would hold it until the summer, when they can combine it with their 2026 and 2033 picks to potentially chase a star. Now? They might be so good that it's worth spending that pick to go for it in the present. Maybe that's what James wants.

We still don't fully know and, inevitably, the fun vibes of the early season are going to wear off. That has little to do with James and more to do with the reality of a long NBA season. Injuries will pile up. Teams will adjust to the Lakers. The schedule will get harder. Their luck in close games will flip. There will be losing streaks. There will be frustrations. James has a history of getting passive aggressive in those moments. That strain can make things harder on vulnerable teams.

But these Lakers have already overcome quite a bit of adversity. They've earned buy-in from James that may or may not have already been there. Even if they're imperfect, and most teams are, they're the team best equipped right now to give James the title shot he seemingly wants. After all, the only team that has won more games than they have thus far this season is the Thunder, and any team trading for him would have to send out roughly $50 million in matching salary to get him legally. The question we've spent the past five months asking is how much James actually wants to be a Laker. But the question the past five days or so has presented is just how much better these Lakers can get when they're at full strength with a healthy James.

Maybe the answer is championship-caliber and maybe it isn't. We likely won't know for certain until the spring. But short of opting out of his contract and signing for the minimum in Cleveland, these Lakers seem to give James a better shot at winning than any of the other realistic suitors he might have had, especially at the salary he still commands. Remember those Dallas rumors from early July? For the time being, it certainly seems as though James dodged a bullet.

There's not going to be a grand moment of reconciliation. That would require an admission of strain that isn't coming. Bryant never held a press conference to announce he'd retracted his trade request. Things just went well enough for it to disappear. The hope is that something similar can play out here. That James will return in the somewhat near future satisfied that the Lakers have built or at the very least are in the process of building the championship contender he wants to play for and this promising season can proceed on schedule. If it doesn't? Well, then we have to start wondering once again what it was that James wanted out of that July statement that won't go away, because if it was as simple as a desire to play for a championship contender, well, the Lakers have so far more than held up their end of the bargain.