LeBron James overtook Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the player with the most career regular-season points in National Basketball Association history.
The Los Angeles Lakers star made a fallaway jump shot from near the free throw line against the Oklahoma City Thunder on Tuesday evening to eclipse the record of 38,387 points.
Courtside baseline tickets for tonight’s game at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles were being offered for almost $80,000 each on resale site StubHub.
Standing at center court after the feat, James thanked current NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and his late predecessor David Stern.
“I thank you guys for allowing me to be a part of something I’ve always dreamed about and I would never, ever in a million years dreamed this even better than what it is tonight,” James said.
The countdown to the first change since 1984 atop the NBA’s career scoring leaderboard has been a bright spot in a league struggling with TV ratings this season. Despite teams averaging the most points per game in more than 50 years, overall viewers for the season to the end of January were down 7.9% year-on-year, according to Nielsen.
A Los Angeles Lakers-Boston Celtics game last month was the most watched non-Christmas Day match this season. It had the highest viewership on Walt Disney Co.’s NBA Saturday Primetime on ABC since 2019. Warner Bros Discovery Inc.’s TNT and Comcast Corp.’s NBC also broadcast League games.
As he breaks the record, James will have been paid about $10,941 for every career point he’s scored, according to Bloomberg calculations. He has made an total NBA salary of about $420 million through the halfway mark of his 20th season.
Tom Brady, the seven-time NFL Super Bowl-winning quarterback of the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers who retired this month, earned about $333 million from playing contracts over his 23-year career, according to Spotrac.
James, the first pick of the 2003 NBA draft, had topped the all-time record of combined points in the regular season and playoffs last year, which was also held by Abdul-Jabbar.
The Lakers, NBA’s third-most valuable franchise according to Sportico, are the same team that Abdul-Jabbar was playing for when he took the scoring record from Wilt Chamberlain. James has previously played for the Cleveland Cavaliers and Miami Heat.
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