LeBron Passing Scoring Record & Meaning to Me
LeBron James is at 38,230 total points in the regular season with the record in sight. Yes, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s record of 38,387 is there for The King to surpass.
What’s even more impressive is it took Jabbar 1,560 games (57,446 minutes played) and James is currently at 1,405 games (53,547)
(As of 1/28/23)
Based on his career scoring average of 27.2 points per game, James would need 6 more games to break the record. That would put him on pace to reach the milestone on Feb. 7 against Oklahoma City. NBA.com
Now, I distinctly remember my late Poppa telling me way back in 2003 when I was just a little boy, “There’s this player his name is James Lamar and he’s supposed to be really good.” This was back when the Cavs were going to have the number one pick in the draft back in the day.
Yes, he mispronounced his name, but that made it better looking back on the memory.
Now, we have had our ups and downs with LeBron James over the course of the last two decades and that’s for sure with him playing his first years in Cleveland followed by leaving for Miami, coming back to Cleveland, winning the title, leaving again for Los Angeles where he is currently… It’s been quite a career.
I consider him the greatest to ever play the game of basketball and I think when he passes this record it will reinforce that idea.
LeBron coming back to Cleveland and winning the championship coming back from down 3-1 against the Golden State Warriors is the signature of his career and always will be. The scoring title will be a close second.
A lengthy quote from James on the title:
“As it gets closer and closer, I think I’ll start to feel it more and more,” LeBron said after the Lakers’ recent contest against the Los Angeles Clippers. “But I was asked earlier to really try to put myself in that moment, but I’ve gotten to this place by not really thinking about it. I’m just trying to be in the moment and play the game the right way. Even tonight, as well as I shot the ball, I was trying to distribute to my guys and that’s just always how I’ve played the game throughout my career. But I don’t know, we’ll see when we get there. We’ll see will it hit me. Just over the last couple years since we won the championship, a lot of accomplishments have happened in a losing effort so it’s been very difficult to kind of digest some of my own accomplishments because I don’t want to celebrate losses.”
I believe that this passing of the record certainly cements LeBron’s career and along with the Cleveland Championship allows everything to come full circle.
A lot of players never live up to the massive hype that was given way back in the day before their careers. When my poppa was telling me about this basketball player, it was just an idea…
King James lived up to it and what an incredible career that will be finished off with this incredible record and then some!
