LeBron James’s Incredible, Unsuspenseful Chase for the Scoring Record

Watching him on the stage of Madison Square Garden again invited the inevitable question: is this the greatest player the game has ever seen?
Lebron James jumping in the air with a basketball in his hands while players from the New York Knicks attempt to block him.
LeBron James is one of the best drivers that basketball has ever seen. Once you’ve clocked him charging toward the basket, you can start adjusting the score in your head.Photograph by Elsa / Getty 

Before Tuesday night’s game between the New York Knicks and the Los Angeles Lakers, LeBron James stood a hundred and seventeen points away from passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s record for points scored in a career. James’s chase of Abdul-Jabbar down the halls of history has had an odd, preëmptively anticlimactic vibe. It’s an incredible feat whose impending reality we’ve had three or four years to digest. Barring a major injury—which, on the one hand, is always possible, especially for a player in his later thirties, but which, on the other hand, seems hard to imagine, given LeBron’s remarkable durability—nobody has doubted, for almost half a decade, that the record would eventually belong to him. Last year, when he passed Abdul-Jabbar’s record for points in the regular season and post-season combined, it barely registered in the news—largely, I think, because those of us who care about such things were anticipating, without much true suspense, this season’s weightier milestone.

Maybe that certainty has been unfair. The lead-up to LeBron’s big accomplishment hasn’t felt like the bazaar of praise that welcomed Steph Curry’s triumphal assumption of the record for three-pointers made. That might be because the Lakers have been so strangely mediocre for the past two seasons. Their other, younger star, Anthony Davis, was supposed to take over as the team’s best player, allowing LeBron, who recently turned thirty-eight, to rest a bit, but Davis is stuck in a purgatorial loop of injury, convalescence, return, and reinjury. Last season’s chief acquisition, Russell Westbrook, was an outright disaster as lead guard before settling into place as the team’s sixth man. Recently, James scored forty-six points in a loss to the Los Angeles Clippers. Toward the end of the game, the cameras fixated on his defeated posture as he sat on the bench. He looked like the lost parent of a wayward child, at the end of his rope.

More broadly, though, LeBron’s pending celebration feels fraught and uncathartic precisely because he’s been so good, and his meaning has been so hotly debated, for so long—each of his achievements carries with it a potential argument over just how we should remember him when he’s gone. Is he “better,” by the numbers, than Abdul-Jabbar and Michael Jordan? Are we watching the waning days of the game’s greatest star? And, if so, how do we enjoy them amid so many losses for his team? Even when Curry has been weighed down by his team’s woes, we can understand him as the ringleader of a circus whose crux isn’t the scoreboard or the standings.

LeBron only really gets to bask in a performer’s irresponsible spotlight when he shows up at Madison Square Garden, that honorary Broadway stage, which he has often called his favorite place to play. He loves to put on a big show in midtown: he always scores a lot, he usually wins, and he cheese-smiles at the post-game pressers. It’s great fun for him, clearly, but it isn’t so hot for people like me, who, record or no record, would prefer to see the Knicks get a win.

After tipoff on Tuesday, it looked like the home team might put up some resistance to LeBron—if not in his pursuit of Kareem, at least in his hopes of bringing the Lakers into playoff contention. The Lakers got out to an early lead, and LeBron, after a day’s rest—he’d sat out a game the night before, against the Brooklyn Nets—looked spry. Early on, during a fast break, he collected a pass from Russell Westbrook near the three-point line, and with a dribble and two loping steps charged the rim with surprising speed and force, but in midair seemed to change the tone of his attack: suddenly he was all gliding grace, floating into a double-pump layup. So many of those tens of thousands of points have come just like that—James is one of the best drivers that basketball has ever seen. Once you’ve clocked him charging toward the basket, you can start adjusting the score in your head. At one point in the first half of the game, I wrote down, “LeBron drive and fluid righty layup,” forgetting, in my haste, to mark the time. Soon the note was completely useless—it’s too common an occurrence, even in the course of just one game.

But the Knicks fought hard. They’re not perfect—in fact, they’re often maddening, especially on the defensive end of the floor—but their record is better than I’d dared hope at the beginning of the season, largely because of the leadership and relentless effort of the newly acquired point guard Jalen Brunson. The guy never quits, his lovely footwork leaves constellations on the court, and he’s just plain riveting to watch when the stakes get high. He can shoot from deep, but he does his best work close to the hoop—pivots and drop steps, hairpin spins—in a manner increasingly rare for a guard of his relatively small stature. Early on, he put his back to the Lakers guard Dennis Schröder, and, before Schröder could move to stop him, spun like a dancer around the defender and dropped in a lefty layup off the glass.

After a long bomb toward the beginning of the second quarter by Immanuel Quickley—a canny guard who is one of the Knicks’ best defenders—the score was tied, and the teams struggled toward the halftime buzzer, when Schröder exacted his revenge on Brunson by hitting a totally nonchalant halfcourt shot. He tossed the ball and turned around, seemingly uninterested in its fate. When he looked back, as an afterthought, it had banked its way home.

Schröder’s shot came after a pass from James, probably because of a quiet game of hot potato: most players, with an eye toward efficiency stats, don’t like to take those long, shot-percentage-undermining half- and quarter-ending shots. Still, it counted as an assist for James, highlighting an undersung climb upward in the record book: with just a few more assists, he was poised to pass the former Knick Mark Jackson and the two-time N.B.A. Most Valuable Player Steve Nash on the career-assists list, landing him at fourth all-time. The impending scoring title will always eclipse this mark, but the true content of James’s greatness—and, incidentally, his most valid case to be the best player ever—is his negotiation between these two strengths. Although he has never failed to lead his teams in points scored, his obvious joy in sharing the ball, in making plays that depend as much on his intellect and quicksilver foresight, verging on spatial prophecy, as on his unstoppable physicality, is the trait that defines him.

In the fourth quarter, with the game still close, he helped the Lakers pull a bit ahead with two more assists—the last ones he needed to pass Nash. The second was especially pretty, a nice drop-off in the paint to the big man Thomas Bryant after a pick-and-roll at the top of the key. On the next possession, he ambled into the post and executed a brown bear’s slow post move for a score. Sweet pass and easy score: that’s the wintry mix LeBron can drop in the Garden on a January evening.

With a bit less than two minutes left in the game, James hit a three to put the Lakers up 114–108, at which point I stopped being dutifully impressed and relapsed into an old, familiar feeling: Knicks-related irritation. Toward the end of the fourth, Brunson hit an elegant floater to tie the game. But midway through overtime the Lakers pulled ahead and never let go. Another nice game for James in Manhattan. He finished, as he has so often through the years, with a triple double: twenty-eight points, eleven assists, ten rebounds. At this pace, he’ll be the scoring leader before Valentine’s Day. The correct response is astonishment, but my feeling—poor Knicks—was, Good for him.  ♦