LeBron James Is the NBA All-Time Leading Scorer and a Top-Four Passer

LeBron James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the leading scorer in NBA history and went past 40,000 points, a number nobody else has reached. He also sits in the top four all-time for assists, which no other high-volume scorer can say.

James has won four championships with three different franchises and four Finals MVP awards. He reached ten NBA Finals, eight of them consecutively. For most of a decade, the road to a title in the Eastern Conference went through whichever roster he happened to be on, including teams that had no business being there.

The scoring and passing combination is the structural argument. Scoring leaders are usually specialists who have sacrificed everything else; James is the leading scorer in the sport's history while also ranking among its most productive passers, and he did it while guarding all five positions in various playoff series. That breadth is why he has more All-NBA selections than anyone.

The 2016 Finals is the performance that settles his case. Cleveland trailed a 73-win Golden State team 3-1, a deficit no team had ever recovered from in a Finals. James answered with consecutive 41-point games, then a triple double in Game 7 of 27 points, 11 rebounds and 11 assists, including the chase-down block on Andre Iguodala with under two minutes left. He led all players in that series in points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks, the first person ever to lead a Finals in all five.

Michael Jordan is the counterargument, and it is a good one. Jordan went 6-0 in Finals; James is 4-6. Losing six Finals is a real mark, and it means James has been on the wrong end of the biggest stage more often than anyone else in the debate. Jordan also has the higher scoring average and never needed a Game 7.

The reply is that James got to those ten Finals in the first place, frequently as the only star on his team, and that he was still an All-NBA player in his twenty-first season. The peak belongs to Jordan. The body of work does not.

The verdict: LeBron James for the career. Michael Jordan for the peak.