LeBron James has often pointed out that he enjoys spreading the ball around as much as he enjoys scoring. But as he sat just 7 points short of 30,000 for his career leading into Tuesday night’s game against the San Antonio Spurs, the notoriously unselfish superstar threw an online alley-oop to himself off the backboard.
“Wanna be one of the first to congratulate you on this accomplishment/achievement tonight that you’ll reach!” James wrote in an Instagram post that featured a photo from his high school days. “Only a handful has reach/seen it too and while I know it’s never been a goal of yours from the beginning try (please try) to take a moment for yourself on how you’ve done it!”
The post went up more than seven hours before James’s Cleveland Cavaliers tipped off against the Spurs in San Antonio, but he had good reason to be confident: He had been held to fewer than 7 points just three times in his career, and the last time came on Dec. 29, 2004 when he was 19 years old.
Sure enough, with 1 second left in the first quarter, he sank a 19-footer, giving him 8 points in the game and 30,001 in his career.
Moments later, N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver issued a news release saying “Congratulations to LeBron on reaching 30,000 points — yet another milestone in an extraordinary career that continues to inspire.”
James joined Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain and Dirk Nowitzki as the only N.B.A. players to reach 30,000. And at 33 years and 24 days old, he shattered Bryant’s record for getting to the milestone fastest, as Bryant was 34 years and 104 days old when he hit the mark in 2012. Even accounting for James’s status as a prep-to-pro player, allowing him to join the league at an age three to four years younger than that of all the players on the list besides Bryant, James did it in the fourth-fewest games, trailing only Abdul-Jabbar, Jordan and Chamberlain.
Continue reading the main storySpeculation has been rampant over whether James is capable of finishing as the top-scoring player in N.B.A. history — Abdul-Jabbar, with 38,387 points, has been the career scoring leader since he passed Chamberlain on April 5, 1984 — but James has made a point of telling anyone who will listen that he still does not view himself as a scorer, regardless of his career average of 27.1 points a game.
“When you categorize who I am as a basketball player, it won’t say ‘scorer,’” he told reporters after scoring 16 points in a win over the Orlando Magic last week. “There’s too much more attributes to my game, and then you can talk about scoring as well.”
James, as he often is, was being too modest. He came into Tuesday’s game with 5,818 more points than Abdul-Jabbar had at the same age and he has not averaged fewer than 25.3 points a game in a season since his rookie year.
Making up the 8,300-plus points between him and Abdul-Jabbar will be a challenge. Excluding Nowitzki, who is still active, the five players ahead of James on the scoring list averaged 7,395 points from the season in which they were 34 years old — Basketball-Reference uses a player’s age on Feb. 1 as their official age for that season — until their retirement. Chamberlain, who retired at 36, scored the fewest points following that point, with 3,993, while Abdul-Jabbar scored the most with 12,117.
As Bryant proved, the end can come quickly for a player. He was still near the top of his game during his age-34 season, averaging 27.3 points a game in a whopping 3,013 minutes. A series of injuries would limit him to 107 combined games over his final three seasons, with his scoring average dropping to 18.9 points a game.
But barring a catastrophic injury, James, who has endured a postseason and international workload during his career that only Tim Duncan would understand, does not see the end as being near.
“Right now, I feel great. I don’t feel 33,” he told reporters earlier this month.
He also showed he has not lost his sense of humor, even amid a great deal of turmoil for the Cavaliers this season, pointing out that he has another reason to stick around.
“I’ve got too many sneakers to sell, still,” he said.
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