It is often said that records are just meant to be broken, but there are a few for whom that doesn’t really apply. Bill Russell’s 11 NBA titles, Tom Brady’s 7 Super Bowl rings, Rafael Nadal’s 14 French Open titles are a few that are almost impossible to surpass and Brady along with Nadal can possibly add to their tally as well!
Another record that was held in the same breath as being impossible to break, for many years, was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s tally of 38,387 points. The NBA’s all-time leading scorer did have a few players reach within a couple of thousand points of him, only to ultimately fall short. He has now held the record for nearly 40 years, but that is about to change.
Magic Johnson Says Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Thought He Would Hold The All-Time Scoring Record Forever
Barring injuries, LeBron James is set to pass Kareem this season and Magic Johnson doesn’t think that Abdul-Jabbar would handle it well when LeBron passes him. Johnson was making an appearance on the Club Shay Shay podcast where he stated that and he also went on to say that Kareem probably thought no one would ever break his record.
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“I think he thought he was going to have it forever.”
He would have been right to think that, as it was almost unthinkable that someone else would get to 38,000 points. Kareem played into his 40s to eventually set that mark and his ability to remain a scoring threat even then because of his sky hook, was what made it possible for him to get to that mark. What is crazy is that LeBron is going to absolutely blow by this record, as he shows no signs of slowing down even in his 20th season in the league.
He is averaging 27.3 points per game this season and we don’t see any reason why he can’t keep playing at this level for a couple more years. We thought Kareem had set the mark so high that no one would ever reach it and we were wrong, but something tells us that no one is going to break LeBron’s final tally. It is just hard to see someone else come into the NBA at a young age and basically average over 20 points per game for more than 20 seasons. LeBron has had to average 27.1 points per game for his career to get close to Kareem’s tally, so someone is going to have to do even better than that to surpass LeBron, which just isn’t going to happen.
