During last year’s Finals, basketball overlord LeBron James played the underdog for the first time in his career. Instead of a fully optimized basketball cyborg, we got a more compelling—if far less attractive—LeBron James, one whose herky-jerky moves in the paint and brute drives to the basket belonged to a crafty vet, not a freak athlete. Leading an undermanned and overmatched Cavaliers team against the high-octane Warriors, James came mighty close to pulling off an upset.

It was a remarkable glimpse into what the future holds for LeBron James, whose prime is winding down and who will have to retool his game in a way that accepts new limitations. What’s more, while the two chips in Miami cemented his reputation as an all-timer, James’s prophetic return to Cleveland reset expectations. He’s determined to follow through on this promise to finally bring a championship to the most losing-est city in sports.

Yet between the sheer might of the West and James’s brushes with mortality, the clock is most certainly ticking. You couldn’t ask for a richer narrative. So the question is, why do so few people seem to care?

Maybe we’ve just gotten used to taking LeBron James for granted. James himself has long been the game’s great inevitability. From the moment he came into the league, his superstardom seemed all but assured. It was just a matter of time before he eventually won a title. And his game, which was so expansive and flamboyant in his early years, evolved into a highly strategic attack that allows him to leverage his vast skill set while taking very few risks.

This season has been different. James, now 31, relies less on sheer explosiveness and often wills his way, rather than dances, to the basket. But there’s nothing melancholic about this. We’re seeing LeBron 3.0 emerge before our very eyes. And so far, he’s been effective as ever. The Cavs sit atop the Eastern Conference at 56–22, on pace for more wins than last year, more wins than LeBron had in three of his four seasons in Miami. They’re pretty much a lock to make the Finals again, despite nettlesome distractions like David Blatt’s firing and some wacky business around LeBron’s social-media accounts.

The unstinting success might actually be part of the problem: You’d never know it from looking at LeBron’s box scores, or the team’s record, that James is changing on the fly and the Cavs are under such intense scrutiny. The output is the same, which makes the novelty factor still practically nonexistent. Compare this to the cosmic ascent of Stephen Curry and the Warriors, or a Spurs season that’s historic in its own right, and LeBron’s near-invisibility makes sense.

Of course, this depends a lot on your vantage point. The basketball cognoscenti is certainly checking for LeBron and the Cavs, if nothing else because—as they proved in last year’s Finals—they’re one of the few teams capable of making the Warriors play on their terms. There’s a big difference, though, between a sense of obligation and sincere interest. The young LeBron James was the most dynamic player in the sport; in Miami, the evolution of his game and the hype surrounding that team made him the focal point of the league. Even last season, the return to Cleveland and adjustment to a new team and coach ensured that LeBron James stayed in the forefront of basketball consciousness. This year, he’s just part of the landscape.

We shouldn’t expect this to change until James and the Cavs square off against whoever comes out of the West. Cleveland should cruise through the playoffs until the Finals; given how exhausted LeBron was by that point last year, it wouldn’t be surprising if Tyronn Lue closely monitored his star player’s minutes. If the Cavs drop a few games along the way, we’ll shrug and blame the length of playoff series or chalk it up to James taking it easy.