Cleveland Cavaliers MVP LeBron James acknowledged his career is defying conventional wisdom as to how long a player’s prime is supposed to last.

“They always kind of talked about the NBA prime is like 27 [until] like 31, 32. That’s if you’re lucky, you’ll get to that point,” James, 33, said Wednesday. “I don’t know. I’ve just never really bought into that. I’ve never bought into a ceiling, either. You guys [in the media] talked about what’s your ceiling, and I’ve always kind of told you guys that I don’t really have a ceiling. I want to just try to maximize as much as I can and be as good as I can.”

He also discussed the Kyrie Irving Trade: 

“Even if you start back to the summertime where I felt like it was just bad for our franchise just to be able to trade away our superstar point guard,” James said, via ESPN.com. “A guy that I had been in so many battles with over the last three years, and obviously I wasn’t a part of the communications and know exactly what went on between the two sides. But I just felt like it was bad timing for our team.”

 “I felt like the odds were against us from the summer,” James add. “And then you know we come into the season, and our All-Star point guard that we got from Boston wasn’t able to play until January. We just had so many things going with our team. We shuffled in different lineups, we shuffled in different players, we made a trade at the deadline, and I can’t sit here right now and say that the Finals was a part of my thinking.”

Cleveland Cavaliers star LeBron James sat down with Rachel Nichols to discuss his 9th NBA Finals appearance, his relationship with Dan Gilbert and more in the interview below.  

LeBron didn’t say much when this whole thing went down, so not sure why he’s bringing  it up now, unless he’s using it as just another reason to leave Cleveland.