Our discouraging reintroduction to the Los Angeles Lakers, who missed the play-in tournament last season and looked no better in Tuesday’s opener, may well mean the highlight of their 2022-23 campaign is LeBron James‘ pursuit of the career scoring record Kareem Abdul-Jabbar set in 1984 and lifted to 38,387 points.
James currently trails Abdul-Jabbar’s NBA record by 1,294 points. The 37-year-old eclipsed that number last season on March 3, so Lakers fans must hope their favorite team gives them better reasons to watch in the meantime. At the very least, James could reach several other milestones before catching Abdul-Jabbar.
In fact, James already hit one in the season opener. His three 3-pointers on Tuesday tied him with Paul Pierce’s 2,143 for 10th place in league history, just one behind Portland Trail Blazers star Damian Lillard.
James trails another Lakers great, Magic Johnson, by just 88 assists for sixth place on the career assists list. That could fall a dozen games from now. The 18-time All-Star’s output over the last two seasons, when he missed one-third of his games, would also move him past Mark Jackson and Steve Nash on that ledger, too, launching him into fourth place in NBA history, behind only Chris Paul, Jason Kidd and John Stockton.
James already established the club for 35,000 points, 10,000 rebounds and 10,000 assists last season. In a pre-LeBron basketball world, we could never have imagined a player who would finish his career with more points than Abdul-Jabbar, more assists than Nash and more rebounds than David Robinson, much less one who would do so while still performing at an All-NBA level — and yet James could achieve that this season.
It helps that James has remained healthy enough to play 1,367 career regular-season games. Twenty-five more will match Tim Duncan for 10th place on the all-time list. He can climb as high as eighth with another 58-game season, and even then he will have played 136 fewer regular-season games than Abdul-Jabbar.
James may be the headliner of this season’s assault on the NBA record books, but he is hardly the only player climbing the statistical leaderboards. Here are the milestones that could be met before the playoffs.
Points
Brooklyn Nets star Kevin Durant, whose 25,526 career points rank 21st in league history,…