LeBron James turned 40 on Monday and said he believes he could play in the NBA for several more years even though he currently doesn’t plan to do so.
“To be honest, if I really wanted to, I could probably play this game at a high level probably for about another – it’s weird that I might say this – but probably about another 5-7 years, if I wanted to,” James said. “But I’m not going to do that.”
James appears to be at peace with retiring within the next few years and intends to do so with the Lakers.
“That would be the plan,” he said of staying with the Lakers. “I came here to play the last stage of my career and to finish it off here. But I’m also not silly or too jaded to know the business of the game as well, to know the business of basketball. But I think my relationship with this organization speaks for itself. And hopefully I don’t got to go nowhere before my career is over.”
James has tried to avoid reflecting too seriously on his career, but his milestone birthday is making that difficult to avoid.
“I mean, I had a decade of the 30s so to just wake up and just be like, ‘Oh shoot, oh damn, you’re 40?’ It’s kind of laughable, really, to know where I am, to see where I am still playing the game at a high level,” he said. “Still being such a young man but old in the scheme of how many years I got in this profession. But I just think when I came into the league, obviously that’s like the first thing I thought about. You came in as an 18-year-old kid and now you’re sitting here as a 40-year-old, 22-year vet with a 20-year-old in the NBA as well. So, it’s pretty cool.”