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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar entered the NBA in 1969 after a legendary UCLA career, spent six seasons with the Milwaukee Bucks, then moved to the Los Angeles Lakers in 1975, where he'd spend the rest of his 20-season career anchoring the "Showtime" era teams of the 1980s. His signature move, the skyhook — an ambidextrous, sweeping hook shot released from well over most defenders' reach — proved close to unblockable across two full decades of professional basketball, contributing to a career .559 field goal percentage. He used it to break Wilt Chamberlain's all-time scoring record on April 5, 1984, a record Abdul-Jabbar himself would go on to hold for nearly four decades until LeBron James passed him in 2023. Abdul-Jabbar won six NBA championships — one with Milwaukee in 1971, and five more with the Lakers — and six regular-season MVP awards, still the most of any player in NBA history. That MVP total alone is a good shorthand for how long he stayed at an elite level: his six MVPs were spread across 1971 to 1980, meaning he was still the league's best player nearly a decade after his rookie season. Abdul-Jabbar's longevity is arguably as impressive as his peak — 38,387 career points scored across two decades and two very different eras of NBA basketball, from the run-and-gun 1970s to the more physical, defense-oriented 1980s, without ever losing the shot that made him close to unguardable.
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LeBron James
LeBron James entered the NBA straight out of high school in 2003 as the first overall draft pick by his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers, and over more than two decades since has built the longest sustained run of elite, MVP-level play the league has ever seen — a career that's now spanned four different franchises: the Cavaliers (across two stints), the Miami Heat, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Philadelphia 76ers. On February 7, 2023, James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the NBA's all-time leading scorer, a record many assumed was effectively permanent given how long Abdul-Jabbar had held it. James has since pushed the record well past 40,000 career points, a total that reflects both his individual scoring ability and a remarkable, largely injury-free level of durability across 20-plus seasons. James has won four NBA championships with three different franchises — two with Miami (2012, 2013), one with Cleveland (2016), and one with the Lakers (2020) — along with four regular-season MVP awards. The 2016 title is often singled out specifically: Cleveland came back from a 3-1 Finals deficit against a 73-win Golden State team, delivering the city's first major sports championship in over five decades. Few athletes in any sport have managed to remain at an elite competitive level as long as James has, and the ongoing debate over whether he or Michael Jordan is the greatest player in basketball history has become one of the sport's defining, unresolved arguments.
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