Five days later, the Lakers are taking on the Western Conference-leading Thunder again, and this time they won’t even have LeBron James in the lineup.
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James, who is managing a left foot injury, will miss Tuesday night’s showdown in L.A., the Lakers announced hours before tip-off.
ESPN’s Dave McMenamin reported that, more specifically, James is dealing with left foot soreness. L.A. has already clinched the Pacific Division title and a spot in the playoffs. At 50-28, the Lakers are currently fourth in the West. They’re only a half-game back of the Denver Nuggets, whom they hold a tiebreaker over.
L.A. has four regular-season games remaining. That includes Tuesday’s game versus the Thunder, which marks the first of three games in four nights for JJ Redick’s injury-riddled squad.
Dončić is nursing a left hamstring strain, and the Slovenian superstar is reportedly in Europe seeking specialized medical treatment to speed up his recovery from a setback that interrupted an MVP-caliber campaign. In his first full season with the Lakers, Dončić has posted a league-leading 33.5 points per game. He went off in March, averaging 37.5 across the month, but now he has to wait and see if he’ll even be eligible for the NBA’s end-of-season awards.
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Since he finished one game shy of the league’s 65-game minimum for those honors, Dončić’s camp applied for an “Extraordinary Circumstances Challenge,” citing the two games he missed for the birth of his second child.
Dončić’s injury diagnosis is a Grade 2 hamstring strain, and he’s out indefinitely at the moment. Reaves, meanwhile, is working his way back from a Grade 2 oblique strain and is reportedly expected to miss four-to-six weeks. Like Dončić, Reaves has enjoyed a career year in 2025-26. He’s averaging 23.3 points, 5.5 assists and 4.7 rebounds per contest.
Dončić and Reaves are the Lakers’ top scorers this season. James is third on that leaderboard. After a 134-128 defeat to the Dallas Mavericks on Sunday, the 41-year-old described the gut check he experienced when learning his teammates’ injury news.Advertisement
“It was a shot to the heart obviously and to the chest and to the mainframe with Luka,” James said, via McMenamin. “We got that news kind of quick. … AR was kind of dealing with the [oblique] pain. … We knew he was going to get an MRI, but, yeah, I woke up from my nap yesterday and then saw that news, and I was like, ‘S***.’”
Now James, too, will be out of the Lakers’ lineup for their latest bout with the Thunder.
James, a 22-time All-Star in his NBA-record 23rd season, has appeared in 57 games this season. He missed the first 14 with sciatica, a pain that travels along the sciatic nerve, which runs from the lower back, through the glute and down the leg.