LeBron James Works Hard
Shortly before the pandemic, I was in Los Angeles and decided I should see LeBron James play in person at least once before he retired. The Lakers were playing the Portland Trail Blazers and, honestly, James didn’t have such a great game. It happened to be the team’s first game after the death of Kobe Bryant, and the team was clearly emotional. LeBron took some bad shots and missed a few free throws, and LA lost by eight. But then I looked at the box score, and it turned out LeBron had put up 22 points with 10 assists and 8 rebounds — he nearly had a triple-double. It was nowhere near his best game and, if not for the off-court context, would have been just another forgettable, unimportant midseason game. But he still produced. He was compiling…
Sports fans often look down on “compilers,” or players who reach impressive career milestones simply by compiling numbers over a long career. That’s why the most cited statistics are rate statistics, like batting average or points per game or yards per carry, which measure how players would do given equal opportunities. But it’s the counting stats, the raw numbers that are compiled, that measure someone’s actual production, the amount of actual work a player does.
On Tuesday, LeBron James reached the mother of all raw numbers when he broke the NBA’s all-time record for points scored, passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, whose 38,387 once seemed unbreakable. (Kareem wrote a nice appreciation of LeBron and the record over at his own Substack.)
Unlike Kareem, who entered the NBA and immediately led the league in scoring for three straight seasons, LeBron has never been primarily a scorer. In fact, he has only led the league in points scored once in his entire career. On the other hand, Kobe Bryant did it four times. Wilt Chamberlain, who held the record before Kareem, did it seven times. And Michael Jordan, of course, led the league in scoring every full season before his second retirement — 11 times (!) in total. The only guy in the Top Five who led the league in scoring less than LeBron is Karl Malone, and that’s only because Malone’s career perfectly overlapped Jordan’s (Malone finished second to Jordan in scoring eight times in his career).
To be very clear, this is NOT meant as a criticism of James, whose game has alway been about versatility, as his best advocates (like Sean) will remind you.
This is not a criticism, but an attempt to put his record into context. Back in 2021, when Steph Curry set the all-time record for three-pointers, it felt fitting: Curry is the best three-point shooter in history, so of course he has the most three-pointers. But this feels different. I’m not sure anyone — even LeBron himself — would consider James the best scorer in the game’s history. Throughout his career, it’s hard to find a moment when James would have even been considered the best scorer in the league; Kobe would’ve been ahead of him early in his career, and Kevin Durant later. And yet LeBron has the record.
In other words, LeBron’s points were compiled. This record is an almost inevitable consequence of the all-around production James has put up throughout his career. He has, as the kids say, done work. Points are biggest thing, but you can see his mark in almost every statistical category:
LeBron is fourth all-time in assists, way ahead of every other non-point guard in NBA history. (The next highest assist total for someone who didn’t primarily play point guard is from Kobe Bryant, who is 33rd on the all-time list and four thousand assists behind James.)
LeBron is tenth all-time in steals.
LeBron is only 35th all-time in rebounds, but nearly everyone ahead of him was either a center or power forward. So LeBron not only passes better than any other non-point guard; he also rebounds better than any other non-post player.
LeBron doesn’t really block that many shots… and yet he’s 93rd all-time in blocks. And, of course, perhaps his most iconic play ever is a block.
He simply does everything you can do on a basketball court, and he’s been doing everything forever. James is in the middle of his 20th NBA season, which is itself noteworthy. According to Wikipedia, only nine other guys have ever played in that many NBA seasons. But even that undersells LeBron, who has been the best player on his team more or less that whole time. Every other player whose career has lasted this long approached his 20th season on a gentle slope down from his prime: In Kareem’s 20th year, he was really a part-time player, averaging 10.1 points in roughly 23 minutes per game. Robert Parish, in his 20th season, had a similar deal, becoming a bench player for a mediocre team. And in Kobe Bryant’s 20th season, he averaged fewer points than he ever had as a starter (even after that number was boosted by his 60-point final game).
Meanwhile, LeBron James is averaging over 30 points per game, which would be the fourth-highest total of his whole career (and one of the only seasons he was ahead of that was last year, in his 19th season). His rebounding and assist numbers are also in line with his career averages. Only ⅔ of the way through the year, he has already shattered the record for most points scored in the 20th season of a career, with 167 more than the previous record (held by Kobe, who himself was 234 ahead of the next highest guy). Perhaps most impressive of all, he is doing all this while averaging ~30% more minutes per game than anyone previously had in such a season. There is simply no precedent for anyone being nearly this good this late in his NBA career.
LeBron James also just turned 38, which makes him the third-oldest active player in the league. The two guys older than him — Andre Iguodala and Udonis Haslem — have combined to play 88 total minutes this year; LeBron has played more than that since Thursday. It is simply rare for guys to be consistently great basketball players at that age. Kobe Bryant had been out of the league for a year by that age; Wilt Chamberlain had been out for two; Michael Jordan was returning from three years away to fool around on the Wizards. The guys who have had good age-38 seasons — Kareem, Tim Duncan, Karl Malone, etc. — were typically big guys who could evolve into complementary players on the post. But LeBron James is not that kind of player. Even at 38, he is the focus of the Lakers offense. Indeed, his usage rate this season is over 33% — far higher than anyone at that age that I could find.
And, of course, James is doing this despite having more tread on his tires than practically anyone in history. At the moment, he is only tenth in games played and third in minutes played, behind both Malone and Kareem. But those numbers don’t include the playoffs, where LeBron is first in both categories. Indeed, if you combine regular and postseason minutes, James is well ahead of Malone and only 1,520 minutes behind Abdul-Jabbar, which would take less than a full season to make up.
When you add all this together, the sheer tonnage of elite basketball that LeBron James has produced is almost impossible to comprehend. When we talk about LeBron — or any elite athlete — we tend to talk about talent. And obviously he needed to be immensely talented to set this record. But the impressive thing to me about this record is that it represents WORK. It wasn’t enough to be talented; he had to actually do it. How many times did he have to put up 27 points in a meaningless game in February? How many put-backs did he have to fight for at the end of a possession? How many defenders did he have to back down to get to reach this record?
In my very first post for this newsletter, I wrote about how the charm of sports is that you are watching people do work: “Sports are the best showcase we have for the joys of labor… They isolate the simple pleasure of accomplishing something, of excelling at a task, of working with teammates and competing against others.” We knew LeBron had talent since he was in high school. But talent is just an ingredient. The path from there to here — all 38,390 points — required work, an unprecedented and almost unimaginable amount of work. And that is worth celebrating.