After suffering a groin strain on Saturday against the Celtics, LeBron James looks set to miss multiple weeks.
The Lakers will enter the toughest stretch of the season without LeBron James in the coming weeks.
After exiting Saturday’s loss to the Celtics with an injury in the fourth quarter, LeBron James will miss at least a week with a groin strain, as reported by Shams Charania of ESPN.
Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James is expected to miss at least 1-to-2 weeks with a groin strain, sources tell ESPN. James will wait for the groin injury to calm down over the next 24 hours and receive another evaluation. pic.twitter.com/17mWxsaXN3
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) March 9, 2025
Charania appeared on ABC on Sunday morning to add a bit more context to the injury as well.
“Sources tell ESPN LeBron James is expected to miss at least one to two weeks with this strained groin,” Charania said. “Typically with these soft tissue injuries, it leads to weeks-long absences and it could be a potentially extended period of time here for LeBron James when he has an evaluation here over the next 24 hours. But unlike in 2018 when LeBron James had that groin tear, I’m told he did not hear a pop last night in Boston.”
The upcoming two weeks for the Lakers will be daunting, to say the least. The team will continue it’s four-game road trip with games in Brooklyn, Milwaukee and Denver. The latter two contests also start a stretch of six games in eight days with a trio of back-to-backs.
If LeBron does return in just one week, he’ll be back for the Lakers returning to Los Angeles for a five-game homestand. If it’s two weeks, then he’ll be back at the end of that homestand and just in time for the Lakers to head out for another road trip.
So far this season, he has played 58 games, leaving him just seven games shy of becoming eligible for postseason awards. As long as he returns by April, he will have enough games remaining to earn eligibility.
Fortunately, the Lakers happen to also have a 26-year-old generational superstar they can rely upon during this stretch. The pair of Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves will be heavily relied upon during this stretch, but they are a perfectly adequate duo to still pull out some wins during this span.
With Saturday’s loss, the Lakers are the No. 3 seed, a half-game back of the Nuggets. They are one-and-a-half games up on the Grizzlies and two games up on the Rockets. There’s a five-game gap between them and the No. 6-seed Warriors and a five-and-a-half game difference between them and the play-in.
Basically, the length of LeBron’s injury and the Lakers’ spot in the standings afforded them some cushion to absorb an injury like this and, almost certainly, not have to worry about the play-in game.
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