Nobody Ever Blocked Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and His Skyhook Held the Scoring Record for 39 Years

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar scored 38,387 points, a record that stood for 39 years until LeBron James passed it in 2023. He won six MVP awards, the most in NBA history, along with six championships and nineteen All-Star selections.

Abdul-Jabbar was the first player to complete twenty NBA seasons. He won a title with Milwaukee in 1971 and another with the Lakers in 1988, and took the Finals MVP award in 1971 and again in 1985, fourteen years apart. A career that long usually means a great peak followed by a long decline. His looked more like a plateau that lasted two decades.

The skyhook is the whole reason. He released the ball at the apex of a fully extended arm, above seven feet in the air, with his body turned between the defender and the shot. There was no legal way to contest it without goaltending. Every other dominant scorer in history has a counter available to a defense: crowd him, force him left, make him a jump shooter. Against that shot there was no coverage, so he never had to adapt.

That is what produced the numbers. Not a hot decade, but a repeatable, unstoppable action he could go to on any possession for twenty years, against every generation of center the league produced. The scoring record he set was so far ahead that it took the most durable superstar of the following era, playing longer than he did, to pass it.

The counterarguments are as strong as any in this project. Bill Russell won eleven championships in thirteen seasons, which is a rate of winning nobody in team sport approaches. Wilt Chamberlain averaged 50.4 points for a season and once scored 100 in a game, numbers that read like misprints. Shaquille O Neal at his peak was the most physically unstoppable player the sport has seen, and Hakeem Olajuwon beat three MVP centers in consecutive playoff runs.

Russell has the rings and Chamberlain has the raw production. Abdul-Jabbar has the best combination of the two, plus the longevity none of them had and the single most reliable shot in basketball history.

The verdict: Kareem for the career. Russell for the rings. Wilt for the raw numbers.