At halftime on Saturday night, LeBron James had ten assists. It was a career playoff high, in his twenty-third NBA season, at the age of 41.
The Lakers beat the Rockets 107 to 98 in Game 1. The main event was not the scoreline. It was the time signature.
Both teams arrived at the first whistle missing the players their offences were drawn around. Luka Dončić, the Lakers' declared future, had torn a hamstring on 2 April. Austin Reaves was out. Kevin Durant, Houston's principal scorer, was a late scratch with a bruised knee.
One of them collapsed. The other did not.
MISSING A STAR EACH
Houston had built their machinery around Durant. Without him, first-option passing became second-option passing. Shots fell slightly later in the clock. Bodies arrived slightly further from where they needed to be. They shot 37.6% from the floor. The nine-point margin understated how much the Lakers controlled the game.
The Lakers ran an offence with a 41-year-old at the top of it. He had eight assists in the first quarter, a career playoff high for a single frame and a Lakers franchise record for the play-by-play era. That is the part of the story everyone is telling. The interesting part is that he installed the skill in 2019
SIX YEARS EARLY
He was 35 then. Anthony Davis had arrived in Los Angeles, and his presence gave LeBron a reason to facilitate more and score less. He did. He led the NBA in assists at 10.2 a game, the first time in his career, and won the title. Nothing about that season required him to become a point guard. He could have scored thirty a night and been celebrated for it. He chose the other thing.
It was not his first reinvention. He had shifted from sole scorer to co-star during the Miami years, and deepened the facilitator role on his return to Cleveland. Those earlier shifts were responses to team compositions. The 2019 one was a choice layered on top of a team that already worked.
Six years later, Dončić tore a hamstring and the Lakers' planned offence stopped working. LeBron stepped into the initiator role the team suddenly needed, and it was not a learning curve. He had already been up the curve once, at peak, when nothing was wrong.
This is the part of reinvention nobody writes about. Most discussions of career shifts make it sound like willingness. Can you let go, accept the reframing, become a smaller version of yourself. Those are useful questions once you have a smaller version of yourself to become. The quieter question is whether you built it, and when.
INSURANCE YOU DON’T CLAIM
Optionality develops in prosperity. The returns are invisible until something goes wrong, and most performers are too busy capitalising on what currently works to install a second mode. The people who stay relevant for twenty-three years are almost always the ones who learned a skill they did not need, while they still had the bandwidth to learn it properly.
Crisis-reinventions are shallow. They come out looking rushed, and they are. There is not time to be deep when the hamstring has already torn.
Houston on Saturday was the other version. A team with one way to score, and no inner alternative when it was unavailable. The Lakers had one that was six years old, tested by a championship, and perfectly suited to a playoff game played with the first choice absent.
The Rockets lost Game 1 because Durant was out. The Lakers won it because of a decision a 35-year-old made in 2019 to lead the league in assists when nobody was asking him to.
TRY IT YOURSELF
💪 Name one skill or mode of operating your team does not currently need. What would it take to start installing it now, while the current way of working is still producing? The question is not whether you should — it is which one, and when.
🧱 Picture the crisis version of acquiring it. Who gets hired in a hurry, what gets cut, how shallow does the resulting capability turn out to be. That is the version you get if you wait. The one you build while nothing is wrong is a different kind of thing.
⏳ Which of your "we don't need that" answers is really "we're doing too well to bother"? The more successful the current mode, the more invisible the cost of not preparing for its replacement.
LeBron's 2019 assists title was an unforced reinvention. Six years later, it was the thing that kept the Lakers playoff-relevant. The modes that pay when everything breaks are the ones you built while nothing was wrong.he thing that kept the Lakers playoff-relevant. The modes that pay when everything breaks are the ones you built while nothing was wrong.
FURTHER READING
📚 Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck — Why Some Thrive Despite Them All by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen
The companies that survive shocks are the ones that build reserves and alternative modes during calm periods — a discipline Collins calls "productive paranoia". The institutional version of LeBron's 2019 choice.
🗣️ Morgan Housel: Get Rich, Stay Rich The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish, Episode #195 (28 May 2024)
Housel's framing of unused capacity as the thing that looks most irrational in prosperity and most obvious in hindsight — the financial-side echo of "insurance you don't claim".
🧑💻 "Managing Oneself" by Peter F. Drucker, Harvard Business Review, 2005
Drucker's argument that a long working life requires more than one career, and that the second career has to be built while the first is still working, not after it stops.
SOME FINAL WISE WORDS
"Change before you have to."
Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric
Until next time
Business lessons from the world of sport
