LOS ANGELES — After Tuesday night, they’re going to stop introducing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as “the leading scorer in NBA history.”
He wore the title well for almost 39 years, longer than its new owner LeBron James has been alive. But considering how many other descriptors Abdul-Jabbar has available to fit on a business card – if he needed one – I don’t think he’ll even miss this one much.
He’ll always be a Lakers legend, of course. And a six-time NBA champ, and six-time league MVP, 19-time All-Star. At UCLA, a three-time NCAA champion and twice the collegiate player of the year. And if you want to include the identifiers that really count, a thought leader, social justice champion, a best-selling author – and a prolific one, having written autobiographies and mystery novels and, fittingly, history books.
An intellectual giant – and not because he’s 7-foot-2.
He sat on the baseline on Tuesday night at Crypto.com Arena, folded into a front-row seat to see James eclipse his 38,387 career point total, finishing the game with 38 to tack on a few more to the all-time tally in a 133-130 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. When the record fell, late in the third quarter, Abdul-Jabbar rose and made his way onto the court, where he hugged James, posing with the kid from Akron who had just added the title of “leading scorer in NBA history” to his hefty collection of accomplishments and accolades.
Among those, James has the distinction of having a metric named for him: LEBRON (“Luck-adjusted player + Estimate using a + Box prior + Regularized + ON-off.”) That makes sense to the most analytically inclined, but for everyone else: It’s basically a statistical attempt at holistically evaluate a player’s impact.
I say we petition for another newfangled stat. Let’s call it CAP (Championships + books Authored + Points scored).
And I’d bet all of my meager fantasy sports winnings ever that equation would score Abdul-Jabbar so far ahead of…
Read the full article here
