Kevin Arnovitz: Andre Agassi's autobiography, "Open," eloquently shares the physical and mental anguish of the aging athlete. On the first page of the introductory chapter, Agassi introduces himself as a heaping bundle of bones, muscles and joints who now wakes up every morning as a "stranger to myself."
"I'm a young man, relatively speaking," Agassi writes. "Thirty-six. But I wake as if ninety-six. After three decades of sprinting, stopping on a dime, jumping high and landing hard, my body no longer feels like my body, especially in the morning. Consequently my mind doesn't feel like my mind."
Though LeBron James is still only 34 until Dec. 30, no high-performance athlete in the world has performed more quick sprints, sudden stops, explosive jumps and hard landings over the past 20 years. James has played more than 56,000 minutes in more than 1,400 regular-season and playoff games, and this doesn't include international competition, years in high school and AAU tournaments, during which teenagers routinely play multiple games per day, and his relentless training regimen.
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For all of his transcendent attributes as the greatest basketball player of his generation, James' durability over the course of his career might be the most impressive. During his first 15 NBA seasons, he rarely missed time because of injury. But last season, he was out five weeks before the All-Star break because of a strained left groin and shut it down for good in late March as the Lakers faded from postseason contention, with James never fully recovering from the winter injury.
By virtue of playing his final game on March 29, James will enter the 2019-20 season with something he has never enjoyed -- a six-month sabbatical from high-level basketball. After eight consecutive years of enduring his most intense competition of the year between mid-April and mid-June, James' only physiological objective this spring and summer was recovery.
This means James and the rest of us are about to learn the answer to a question that, for 15 years, has been nothing more than a hypothetical:
What does LeBron James with more than half a year of rest look like?
Will all those biomechanical stunts that have been signature features of James' dominance be more potent than ever? Will his capacity for all that sprinting, leaping and force be rejuvenated as he struts his rebuilt body into Lakers training camp Friday? Will his recovery combined with a more calculating load management program produce an athlete whose more selective output at its very best is as potent as any player's in the NBA?
The last time James won a championship, he played in only 16 games over a 57-day period in 2016. The final weeks of the Cavs' season and their march through the Eastern Conference en route to a seven-game series with the Golden State Warriors was hardly a vacation, but anyone who watched James in the 2016 NBA Finals observed an athlete in a rare state of vigor, punctuated by the chase-down block of Andre Iguodala.
It's possible that James' 2019 hiatus will be nothing more than a brief delay of the inevitable. One of the characteristics of age is the unsatisfying results of regeneration. Injuries that used to heal at 100 percent now recover at 94 percent strength. Aches that were once temporary now linger permanently. And where did that lag between second and third gear come from?
But James has rarely been subject to the limits that inhibit other superstars, and his physical exceptionalism is his defining trait. In 2019-20, we could learn exactly how much it distinguishes him.