Tiktuknu: clip summarizing today's events in sports, 8.2 (Sport1)
The NBA league, and in a sense the entire United States, stopped everything tonight (between Tuesday and Wednesday) to celebrate with LeBron James breaking the record for points in the regular season.
Americans, as we know, are fans of statistics and can celebrate even completely esoteric numbers, but the NBA scoring record is one of the most important individual statistics in American sports, perhaps even the most important and valued of all.
The celebration is also big because it is very rare.
Until yesterday, in the last 56 years only two players held the NBA's points record: Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, two of the giants of the game (literally).
Kareem broke Willett's record in April 1984, eight months before LeBron was born, and went on to play five years later to set the record for points at 38,387.
Until the phenomenon called King James arrived in the league and refused to stop even after two decades, it was hard to imagine this record being broken.
Why exactly the record of points in the regular season?
That's a good question.
If you count the amount of points in the regular season and the playoffs together, then LeBron has already surpassed Kareem by almost 2,000 points.
In many ways this is a more impressive number, one that indicates greatness that is also manifested in the postseason, in the moments when the real season begins.
So why did we barely notice that record and celebrate this record as one of the greatest moments in LeBron's career?
Coincidence is always one of the answers to such questions.
At some point the decision was made to separate the regular season and playoff numbers and since then it's been that way, just as well it could have been decided to count everything together.
It could also be that the high standards set by Willett and Karim made this record so impressive and considered that if every three years someone broke the record (as in the years before Willett) it would be much less interesting.
But I believe that the main answer to the question of why the points record in the regular season is that it is a much purer record than any other.
Points in the playoffs do not depend only on the player himself but also on the fact that he plays on a team good enough to go far in the playoffs consistently.
Points in the playoffs are also related to the ability to excel in key moments, a very important trait but not the one that the points record is interested in.
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The record for points in the regular season indicates persistence in greatness.
It is the ability to be very good, in the first line of players in the league, all the time, from the beginning of the career to the end.
No need for acclimatization time, no long injuries, no mental breakdowns, no retirements to play baseball, no decline until a very advanced age.
When we look into the future of LeBron James' career I think this is the point we will start from: he has been so good for so many years, two decades and counting, the perfect storm of greatness persistence.
One random fact works in his favor: he belongs to the relatively short period when it was possible to reach the NBA straight out of high school.
Many of the major players in the league in the era before the second half of the nineties played several years in college before going to the pros, most players who came to the league after him had to wait a year after high school to register for the draft.
LeBron came to the league at the age of 18, started scoring points at an age when the vast majority of players in history were still not allowed to play in the NBA.
But all the other elements of the perfect storm are related to King James' characteristics as one of the greatest athletes of our era.
He is one of the rare players who started to star from their first moment in the NBA, that everything seemed easy for them already in the rookie season.
In that respect, it's only more impressive that LeBron's rookie season began at age 18. Almost all high school players who entered the league needed at least a year or two to acclimate, including historic players like Kobe Bryant and Kevin Garnett.
Not LeBron, he scored 20.9 points per game as a rookie.
And this is another unusual season for the worse.
From the second season to the current one, which is the 20th, LeBron scored between 25.3-30.3 points per game in each season without falling below 47 percent from the field in any season.
He also added at least six rebounds and six assists, usually more, in each of the seasons.
Apart from the points record, he also accumulated more than ten thousand rebounds and assists throughout his career, it is almost needless to say that he is the only one who is on these two lists (in assists there are only seven with over ten thousand, LeBron ranks fourth).
This is what perseverance in greatness looks like, unmatched in basketball and certainly not in any other sport either.
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Amazing dominance from the first moment.
LeBron in the rookie season (Photo: GettyImages, David Sandford/NBAE)
This persistence needs a body immune to injury.
LeBron is a real Iron Man.
Throughout his first 15 years, he did not suffer any significant injury and very rarely missed games, even though he played the most minutes, constantly came to the paint and everything went through him.
Even in the last five years, in which he occasionally misses several weeks and in rare cases even several months, he has not had an injury that requires a very long rehabilitation and has always easily returned to his pre-injury ability.
The durable body and the disposable talent are gifts that LeBron received, but over the years he also made sure to maintain and perfect them.
He invests millions of dollars in his body, from various types of fitness training to the most subtle nuances of sleep and nutrition that help him maximize his gift.
Professionally, he knew how to develop and change along with the game that developed and changed in his time and according to the explosive power that began to fade.
He developed a post game, improved his outside shooting and over the years his shot profile changed to include more 3-pointers and less shots in the paint and free throws.
Apart from body and talent, to play so well for 20 years also requires extraordinary mental strength.
LeBron's career is an emotional roller coaster that never stops.
It has included, until today, a host of successes and disappointments, transitions between teams, collapses in the playoffs, the costs in the playoffs, changes in the way it is perceived and evaluated.
He is one of the most famous people in the world in the age of social networks, millions of people publicly express their opinion about him every day.
At certain moments it also reached him, he is not immune to the negative effects of stress.
Compared to players to whom it comes naturally, like the one from that comparison, he worked very hard to become a player who knows how to excel at the right moments.
But none of this affected his persistence to Baron.
Season after season, team after team, in certain periods even division after division, they didn't change anything about how he gets to the next season.
Again numbers that range around 27,7,7, again dominance from the first moment to the last of every season, every month, every game.
When you think of mental toughness you usually think of dealing with pressure in the big time, in the big moments, but in many ways persistence at this level requires much more significant mental toughness.
It requires a solid foundation that does not change in any situation, unbreakable.
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Unlike the one from the eternal comparison, LeBron worked very hard to become a money time player.
With the championship ring (Photo: GettyImages)
Breaking LeBron James' NBA points record (photo: official website, photo processing: Jonathan Samuel)
In the last few years, there were moments when it seemed that LeBron was starting to wear out, to fake going down to the defense, he probably also gave up on last season at some point.
But even when that happened he continued to provide his numbers, his eternal 27,7,7.
Even when he has the attitude of another day at the office, he comes to initiate, score, deliver.
And even when the flame seems to be extinguished, he always finds a way to rekindle it, arriving at each season with renewed passion and renewed faith in his team.
A few weeks ago, LeBron prostrated himself on the floor, in a combination of rage, astonishment and excessive theatrics, after not receiving a whistle during the last period of the game in Boston.
This reaction, in the 1,362nd regular season game of his career, testifies to the passion that refuses to fade, to the mental energies that refuse to be eroded.
It is not possible to be so good even in the 20th season without this passion.
Only such a perfect storm could have led to Karim's record breaking.
How rare this collection of traits is can be understood from the difficulty of finding possible candidates to challenge LeBron's record.
Among the NBA players today, the only one who can be imagined reaching such areas is Luka Doncic, who, like LeBron, dominated things from his first moment in the league.
But Luka has already managed to miss a double-digit amount of games in most of his seasons and it is not at all certain that he will know how to invest in himself in a way that will allow him to play until the age of 40, or that his body is even suitable for such perseverance.
What's more, LeBron isn't done yet.
He probably won't stop until he hits 40,000 points, and who knows how long he'll keep going after that.
He seems very far from finishing the horse, it mainly depends on his desire, if he really wants to he can get close to 45,000 as well.
It is very possible that, as in the case of Kareem, in the case of LeBron, no one has yet been born to break his record.
It may also turn out to be an unbreakable record.
It is always possible that by the time Luca's generation reaches the age of 40, medicine will allow players to play until the age of 45 without a problem, but according to the existing knowledge of human beings, this is a record that stretches the limit of ability.
The debates about the position of LeBron James in the historical ranking will continue, probably, as long as humanity continues to exist.
But breaking the points record there seals that there is one area in which LeBron is the greatest of all, quite unequivocally.
No one has been as good for as long a stretch as LeBron James, no one has sustained greatness in such a manner.
This is one of the cornerstones of his legacy, without which it would be impossible to understand the meaning of one of the most important and interesting figures of the 20th century.
Not only in sports, in everything.
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LeBron James
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