When LeBron James stepped onto the floor for game two of the Western Conference semi-final against Oklahoma City, he had already written history - the 41-year-old veteran became the first basketball player in the NBA with 300 playoff dunks. Nobody before him had reached that number, and only nine players in history have crossed the 200 mark.

The number sounds abstract until you translate it into human terms. James is in his 19th playoff campaign. That means in the moment he entered the league, most of today's NBA players were still in primary school, and some weren't even born yet. It's no surprise teammates consult him like a textbook, while he at 41 is still beating their defenders.

The numbers from this season are serious. Without Luka Dončić, who is recovering from injury, LeBron is carrying the Lakers on his back - 23.3 points, 8 assists and 6.7 rebounds per game. In the first round they took down the Houston Rockets, and now comes the Thunder - the reigning champions, the team that doesn't go down easily.

The question everyone is asking themselves but nobody asks out loud: how far does this go? LeBron is the old version of the sport - the era when a player could stay best in the league for two decades, without major breaks, without surgeries we don't know about. In an era when careers are cut short by injuries and the increased pace, he is an anomaly that will be hard to repeat.