On February 7th, 2023, LeBron James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the leading scorer in NBA history, and to celebrate this phenomenal achievement, I thought it would be fun to set the stage and put all of this in perspective and offer my thoughts on James. Now I know I cover the WWE over here on BSO but I also fancy myself a massive basketball fan, so allow me to indulge.
To start, I want to be honest, I used to HATE LeBron James. I began watching basketball in the early 2000s when Kobe and Shaq were conquering the game. I was a huge fan of Kobe Bryant, his electrifying play style, his afro, and his tenacious ability and mentality, something we would all know and love as “The Mamba Mentality”. I loved Shaq because of not only his larger than life persona, but also because he was in my favorite movie at the time, The Good Burger. Growing up a Kobe fan it was almost required to hate LeBron, because he posed a threat to Kobe as the best player in the NBA. And when LeBron decided to infamously take his talents to south beach, my God was I a huge hater. That season my friend and I decided to craft a diss track on YouTube in 2011 where I took the beat of “It’s Going Down” by Yung Joc and put my friend Daniel, a fellow Laker fan’s lyrics over the beat. The profanity ladened diss-track ended up getting over 10,000 views in 2011 YouTube where it was the wild west and people were uploading everything without any fear of copyright infringement. When LeBron and his Heat lost to the Mavericks in the 2011 Finals, my God was I insufferable on social media. Sharing all the LeBron memes such as “If you asked LeBron to give you change for a dollar he would give you three quarters” or “I set my phone to LeBron mode, no ring”. I was a menace. I was playa hater of the year every year with LeBron.
But as the years went on and Kobe began to wrap up his legendary career, LeBron would return home to Cleveland and I would grow older. See me being the Wrestling writer here allow me to use some wrestling terms here: Watching LeBron go from the biggest heel in the game to the biggest babyface in the league as he returned to Cleveland was amazing. I began to sit back and fully appreciate the totality of his game. He is so versatile, a man capable of winning a scoring title and a defensive player of the year any time he wanted, yet wanted to get his teammates involved more than anything while being robbed of several DPOY awards, I began to really appreciate the King. Then in 2016 LeBron did something that I consider one of the greatest feats in professional sports history when he led his Cavaliers in an epic comeback against the regular season record breaking Golden State Warriors. That comeback is something we will all remember, along with Mike Breen’s legendary “BLOCKED BY JAMES” call, that NBA Finals run was special, and career-making for LeBron. After that season, LeBron became the big babyface of the league while Kevin Durant would replace him as the big heel after joining the Warriors following LeBron’s victory over them.
Following this, LeBron would end up joining the team that got me into basketball in the first place: The Los Angeles Lakers. At this point I had no choice but to stan the King. After mortgaging the future and trading for Anthony Davis, LeBron would win what might be the most anti-climatic championship in NBA history in the NBA Bubble in 2020, and in the following years the Lakers would make horrible move after horrible move to where we find ourselves today where LeBron became the highest scorer ever…. In a loss. Watching the 2023 Lakers is a pain. The team outside LeBron is just lethargic, nonsensical, and just dreadful, most in part to Russell Westbrook and a cast of barely NBA quality role players. But this isn’t about the current season, this is about the legacy of what might be the greatest player in NBA history, if not 1, then he’s 1b.
What makes LeBron so special, and this record so incredible, is when we think of the best scorers ever we think of names like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Kareem, etc. Rarely if ever is LeBron James mentioned as an all time great scorer, and yet no NBA player has scored as many points as LeBron James, and won’t for a very very long time, possibly ever. When we compare LeBron to the greats, 9 times out of 10 we say “He’s more Magic than he is Jordan” due to his amazing passing ability and his psychic-like ability to read the court and opposing defenses, showing near superhuman instincts on where defenses are going to be and when. If anything he’s like Peyton Manning. A ruthless professor of the game, someone that knows everything that’s going to happen in a game before it happens. And yet, despite spending two decades calling him more of a passer than a scorer, here he is alone at the Mount Olympus of the NBA. LeBron’s greatest attribute is his longevity. Almost never injured, LeBron James is the most dependable player in NBA history, as for 20 years now he’s dominated the game, and to really put all this in perspective, let’s talk about the expectations he experienced just as a kid.
We first heard of LeBron James at the ripe old age of 15. I want you to take a second and think about what you were doing at 15 years old. For me I was cursing people out on Call Of Duty. LeBron James? Well he was leading his St Vincent St Mary team to a 25-0 record AS A FRESHMAN. He didn’t win player of the year in Ohio that year because freshmen were ineligible to win the award. You know, because freshmen are rarely even on their varsity teams in high school, but not this one. At this point LeBron was already preparing how to be a professional basketball player, studying Michael Jordan and how he rarely got rattled by questions, and always wore a suit and tie to games, he was preparing for the big time at FIFTEEN. At that age I was more focused on being hyped over the future Marvel movies as Iron Man came out the year before and teased “The Avengers Initiative”. However when LeBron was 15 and 16, he was preparing for the NBA. Danny Ainge, former Suns coach at the time and was just a couple years away from being the GM of the Boston Celtics, would even say if LeBron had entered the draft at that age he would still be the first pick in the NBA draft. As LeBron progressed through high school his games became must watch tv with tickets being sold for hundreds of dollars just to get a glimpse at this phenom. At 17 years old, Grant Wahl of Sports Illustrated would write the cover story of a kid from Akron. The headline? THE CHOSEN ONE. At 17 years old we proclaimed this kid as the future face of basketball, LeBron would go on to be the most hyped teenage prospect in American Pro Sports history. Following his senior season, his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers would win the first pick in the draft and LeBron would rock that famous all white suit, and would change basketball forever.
The insanity of this is the fact that at such a young age we donned this kid as the next Jordan. Something we love to do as sports fans, hype someone up as the next big thing. More often than not these young athletes crumble of the insane and unrealistic pressure the media sets upon young athletes, but not LeBron. LeBron, despite all of this, somehow exceeded the Godly expectations we had of him when he was just a kid. His career has been nothing short of one of the great sporting careers in professional athletic history. Despite all of the ridiculous hate from hot take artists that have nothing better to do but get on a pathetic soapbox and scream MICHAEL BETTER just for the sake of attention (Water pistol Pete), LeBron has gone on and on and on, and still looks to have 3-5 years of high-level play in him. You can yell “RINGZ” you can make fun of his cringy social media persona, all of that, but the more you do that, the more you fail to see greatness on a level we might not ever see again. It isn’t often we see players have this kind of career, and on top of all of that, also be an incredible person.
LeBron’s off court efforts might be just as amazing as his on court efforts. His “I Promise” school in Akron provides free education for low income children. His social campaigns have influenced other athletes around the globe to take action leading to the infamous “Shut up and dribble” from fun white fox news reporters, the same that would call players like Allen Iverson “Thugs” which we all know is what white people like to call black people when they don’t want to say the n word. I say this from personal experience growing up with my father that saw me watching a Lil Wayne music video, where he would call him a thug, then the n word with a hard r. I know it when I see it. Yet despite the racism from that side of the field, despite the constant, CONSTANT hate from embarrassing hot take artists, LeBron has handled it all with class, a far cry from guys like his old teammate Kyrie Irving, or Kevin Durant who needs to rush to the nearest burner to defend himself against people that have no effect on his actual career, just because he feels the need to argue and be triggered. LeBron never punched a teammate, never had off-court issues like my idol, and has been a phenomenal family man and father, where we are on the verge of seeing not one, but two of his sons enter the NBA with Bronny coming up soon and Bryce James right behind.
I’ve never been happier to be more wrong about an athlete than I was about LeBron James. A man who has been famous since he was 15. A man that hasn’t been able to go grocery shopping without being hounded by fans for well over half his life by now.
Despite whatever feelings you have of LeBron, I highly encourage and plead you to take a step back and recognize we are in the presence of an all time great American athlete. We are all witnesses. Congratulations, LeBron James.
Flip the page for LeBron breaking the all-time scoring record.