Is James the best ever? Wait until he's done, if you can

LeBron closes in quickly on Abdul-Jabbar's scoring record.

He was 11 days short of his 37th birthday when he parked himself on the right side of the lane and attempted a hook shot over Utah’s Mark Eaton, one of the few NBA players who could look down on his bald spot.

He missed that one, and he and the Lakers came downcourt, where J.J. Anderson missed a baseline jumper.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar went to the same spot on the subsequent possession, and Magic Johnson passed up a fastbreak chance to wait for him. The noise built as Abdul-Jabbar got the ball again, sized up Eaton, ignored the buzzing double-team of Ricky Green, and unwound himself to launch the most celebrated and least duplicated shot in basketball. This time the skyhook was good. Abdul-Jabbar had become the NBA’s leading scorer, passing Wilt Chamberlain and scoring his 31,420th point.

He came out right then, as the Lakers mobbed him and his parents met him on the court. “They love their captain,” Chick Hearn said on the air. The Lakers would proceed to a 129-115 win.

The game was at the Thomas & Mack Center at UNLV, one of eight games Utah would play there. It happened on April 5, 1974, and for the season Abdul-Jabbar would average 24.6 points and 12.5 rebounds, and the Lakers would reach the Finals and lose in seven games to Boston.

It was widely assumed that Abdul-Jabbar was on track to irrelevance. Instead he would play through the 1988 season. After the record-breaker, he won his fourth, fifth and sixth championships, and he pushed his total to 38,387. He also retired with six Most Valuable Player awards.

Pat Riley said this week that Abdul-Jabbar remained the best player in basketball history, although he refrained from using the term GOAT, or Greatest of All Time, which became a cliche in record velocity.

Riley might be accused of bias because he coached Kareem, but then he also engineeered LeBron James’ flight to Miami. Since there are no current big men who deserve to even trespass into his shadow, Abdul-Jabbar is enjoying a minor renaissance among historians, like Harry Truman in the post-Watergate 70s. For years his late-career awards were written off as a byproduct of Magic, but Johnson did not win an NBA championship after Kareem left.

Now James stands 157 points behind Abdul-Jabbar, and he is gathering speed. Counting the 48 points he scored on his Dec. 30 birthday, he has averaged 34.8 points since he turned 38. He is likely to become the alltime scorer in Los Angeles on Feb. 7 against Oklahoma City, which is six games from now. Like Abdul-Jabbar with the Lakers 39 seasons ago, he is not only commemorated but necessary.

The oldest starter in the NBA is playing at a startling level, even for him. Against San Antonio Wednesday night he drove the length of the floor for a basket, then set up between the foul line and the midcourt line and found Dennis Schroder for a left corner 3-pointer, then got to the same spot and found Max Christie for a right corner three. He is still the fourth quarter point guard when the games are winnable, yet he is making 11.5 field goals per game, a career high, and his 8.5 rebounding average is 0.1 off his best ever. His scoring average of 29.9 is seventh in the NBA, ahead of Kevin Durant, Donovan Mitchell, Kyrie Irving and Trae Young.

James has made it clear that his primary goal, if he can’t win another title, is to play on the same team as LeBron Jr., who plays at Sierra Canyon, flies from coast to coast and has become his own cottage industry. But at this rate, Dad’s career will not only intersect with Bronny’s but outlast it.

Maybe it’s unsightly to have James play on three bad teams in his five Laker seasons. But just because the 2020 championship was a tree falling in a forest does not mean it didn’t happen, and most of the Lakers’ misfortune is not James’ fault. The Angels thought Albert Pujols might hit his 700th home run in their uniform, too.

Abdul-Jabbar did not arrive in the NBA until he was 22. James was a 19-year-old rookie in the fall of 2003. This season is James’ 20th, equalling Kareem, although it took Abdul-Jabbar only 15 to pass Chamberlain. Otherwise, it’s useless to compare. James plays all over the court, and Abdul-Jabbar lived in his own little cul-de-sac, a semicircle that was well within skyhook range.

Without question James is the top Old GOAT. Michael Jordan at 38 was an irrelevancy in Washington. Larry Bird, Jerry West and Oscar Robertson all retired at 35. Shaquille O’Neal was averaging 20 minutes and scoring 9.2 points at 38, and Kobe Bryant hung it up, not without pain, at 37.

Hakeem Olajuwon made it to 39 as a part-timer, playing 61 games in Toronto and averaging 7.1 points. John Stockton was a reasonable facsimile of himself at 40 and averaged 8.2 assists at 38, but he played only 29.2 minutes per game, seven fewer mintues a game than James this season. Karl Malone, who was the No. 2 scorer before James, played 38 minutes a game at 38 and averaged 20 points. He fought off the time monster as well as anyone prior to James.

But what separates James is the way he shifted into different shapes every time his game did.

The 2003-04 NBA was a far different land. Only two teams, Dallas and Sacramento, averaged 100 points. Only two others, Seattle and New Orleans, averaged 20 3-point attempts. Only Sacramento and Minnesota shot better than 46 percent. And only Denver, Dallas and Boston had more than 93 possessions per 48 minutes.

The game was Paintball. None but the strongest could survive in the post. Teams regularly walked upcourt. Detroit beat the Lakers in a five-game Finals, and the 100-point mark was breached only once, when the Pistons scored exactly 100 in Game 5.

James was Rookie of the Year. The next year he increased his scoring average seven points, to 27.2, and he played 42.4 minutes per game for Cleveland. Three years after that, he led a team to the NBA Finals that would have been lottery-bound without him. On the way, he scored 25 consecutive points and 29 of 30 to beat a stingy Detroit team in a playoff game, as he scored 48 in his 50 minutes and won it in the last two ticks of overtime. James tried only three 3-pointers that night and made two. Cleveland coach Mike Brown was the only witness who could put it into words: “Wow. Wow. Wow.”

Now the league is on speed-dial. It’s faster, flashier, more aerodynamic, and certainly no country for old men. Miami averages 108.4 points and is the lowest-scoring team in the league. Chicago averages 29.3 three-point tries. That’s also the lowest total in the league. Eleven squads average more than 100 possessions per 48, and Cleveland’s 95.6 are the fewest.

Still, James has used this new racetrack to his advantage, since he processes information so quickly. When he gets to maximum speed, people still let him go by. As long as they continue to do so, he’ll keep playing.

We try to judge players by how they fare against their peers, but James has played against six father-son combinations. There are no real peers, today or yesterday. Take the four championships and the 10 NBA Finals and his knack for blending in and improving everyone else, mix in the impending scoring record, and James has hunted down and blocked the claims of every other pretending GOAT.

Maybe it will take 39 years for someone else to catch him, maybe not. LeBron will let you know after he’s done. How long do you have?