After passing Karl Malone for second on the NBA's all-time scoring list, which happened Saturday night, the question becomes when could Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James reach the top by surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?
Malone retired after the 2003-04 season having played until he was 40, finishing 1,459 points shy of Abdul-Jabbar's record total of 38,387. Abdul-Jabbar, who retired in 1989 after a 20-year career, has been safe atop the scoring leaderboard for more than three decades. Before James, nobody besides Malone got within 4,700 points of Abdul-Jabbar's mark.
Now, James becoming the NBA's all-time leading scorer seems inevitable if he stays healthy. James would pass Abdul-Jabbar in his 20th season if he manages to repeat this year's point total, which has come on his highest scoring average (29.7 PPG) since 2009-10.
Still playing at an All-NBA level, James has said he wants to continue playing beyond the end of his current contract after next season. He could become the first NBA player to score 40,000 points.
When can we expect James to potentially pass Abdul-Jabbar? And is there anyone on the horizon who might eventually threaten the NBA scoring record? Let's take a look at the future of the points leaderboard.
When might James pass Kareem?
There are two big variables here, one of them obvious and the other perhaps subtler.
The obvious one is health: James missed 27 games in both 2018-19, his first season with the Los Angeles Lakers, and last season. He's missed 18 so far this season. Even if we knew exactly how many points per game James will score going forward, pinpointing how long it might take him to score 1,479 points will depend on how many he plays.
As for determining how prolific James will remain as a scorer, that might depend on the health of another player who's dealt with injuries: teammate Anthony Davis. James' highest-scoring season as a Laker has largely been a function of picking up the load with Davis sidelined. In 21 games with Davis as a sidekick this season, James has averaged 25.6 PPG, in line with his rate the past two seasons (25.0 PPG and 25.3 PPG). With Davis sidelined, James has ramped his scoring all the way up to 32.8 PPG in identical playing time.
It's worth noting James didn't show the same pattern the last two seasons; he actually scored fewer PPG with Davis out of the lineup in 2020-21. That suggests part of the difference may reflect the Lakers moving away from playing two big men over the course of the season. In 17 games without Davis where the Lakers have started another big man, James has averaged 30.8 PPG. When James starts at center, that goes up again to 34.5 PPG.
If we assume James ends up settling in between his 2021-22 scoring average and the past two seasons, somewhere around 27 PPG, he'd need about 54 more games to catch Abdul-Jabbar's total. Conservatively, I'd guess that James will play about 70% of games going forward -- a little less than his 74% mark since joining the Lakers. Based on those assumptions, we're 73 team games away from the mark, which would put a reasonable over/under for James breaking the record around the start of next March.
Which current players could threaten James?
Maybe nobody.
James is the youngest player to reach every 1,000-point scoring milestone between 1,000 and 37,000 points, so projecting current players based on their pace at the same age as James is destined to come up short.
Instead, we can take all active NBA players and graph them out by their career points total and current age. From there we can narrow down to a sample for which the following statement is true: There is no other active player younger than them who has scored more points. That sample group includes James at the high end and Joshua Primo, the NBA's youngest player, at the low end.
In between that duo is a group of 20 other players who establish a "best-fit line" for career points by age.
As you can see, James has blown far past the "best fit." In fact, he's scored more than 5,000 additional points than you'd expect from the other active players on the scoring frontier. By contrast, Kevin Durant -- who's third in active points at age 33 -- is just 362 points ahead of the pace. What this shows is Durant would have to either significantly improve his scoring or play longer than James to have any chance of catching him.
The same is true of any established star. Of players who have scored at least 15,000 career points, Durant is the closest to James's pace. To find someone with a more realistic chance of catching him, we have to go younger.
Luka Doncic is one such candidate. Doncic came into the NBA at age 19 and his scoring average (26.2 PPG) is similar to James' through his first four seasons (26.7 PPG), albeit over fewer games (in part because of the NBA's COVID-related schedule adjustments).
Another realistic possibility is 2020 No. 1 overall pick Anthony Edwards. Unlike Doncic and James, Edwards hasn't ramped up his scoring quickly in his second season, averaging just 21.0 PPG. (Doncic was at 28.8 in Year Two and James 27.2.) However, he was even younger than Doncic as a rookie, turning 19 just before his rookie season -- close to as young as it's possible to enter the league under the current NBA age limit.
Of course, a lot can and surely will happen for Edwards and Doncic over the nearly two decades necessary to threaten James's points total. They have to remain healthy and consistent over an exceptionally long period of time. There's a reason that even some of the NBA's greatest scorers ever, including Michael Jordan and the late Kobe Bryant, have fallen short of the lofty totals accumulated by the league's three all-time leaders.
It's taken a long time for James to reach the point of catching Malone. It might take even longer for anyone to surpass him.