On March 20, 2022, the NBA regular season continued to play. The Los Angeles Lakers played away to the Washington Wizards. Before this game, james's total score was only 19 points away from Carl Malone, coupled with the back-to-back game, many people speculated that James would choose to take a break and stay until later at the Cavaliers home to break Malone's record. But James still chose to go with the flow, and did not take a break. Unexpectedly, in the end, the Los Angeles Lakers lost to the Washington Wizards 119-127, and James's milestone once again became "mileage sad". James really might as well choose a break and then go back home to break the record.
In the first half of the game, James has scored 23 points, officially surpassing Karl Malone to be second on the scoring list. So after surpassing Malone, how long will it take For James to reach the top of the regular season scoring list? In today's game, James scored 38 points, and his career regular season total score also came to 36,947 points. Abdul-Jabbar, who topped the scoring list, had a career total of 38,387 points. James' gap with him is 1440 points.
After today's game with the Wizards, the Los Angeles Lakers have 10 games left in the regular season, and The elder Jan has averaged 29.7 points per game this season, and even if there are some game breaks, James can take another 250 points or so. This means that at the end of the season, the gap between James and Abdul-Jabbar is only about 1200 points. And 1200 points for James, basically do not take a season to achieve. So as long as James stays healthy, he can basically dominate the all-time scoring list next season.
James can still average 29.7 points per game at the age of 37, and rushing to the top of the all-time scoring list is not too challenging for him, and becoming the first player in NBA history to break the 40,000-point mark is enough to be the last goal of James' career. James is currently in his early 3,000s away from 40,000 points, and as long as James can stay healthy for the next two seasons, he can become the first player to break through 40,000 points in the 2023-2024 season at the earliest. In the past, I thought it would be difficult for even James to break through the 40,000-point mark, but seeing that James could still average 29.7 points per game at the age of 37, I felt that breaking 40,000 points seemed to be a matter of course for James.
Finally, congratulations to James for scoring ahead of Karl Malone!