Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played twenty NBA seasons, scored 38,387 points, won six championships, six regular-season Most Valuable Player awards, and two Finals MVPs, and spent thirty-nine years as the league’s career scoring leader before LeBron James passed him on February 7, 2023. He is also the only player in the history of American basketball with two distinct claims on the single most unguardable shot ever invented. The first claim is that he invented a version of the hook shot, the skyhook, that no defender in his career figured out how to block. The second is that when the NCAA banned dunking from 1967 to 1977, specifically to make the college game harder for him, he responded by averaging more points per game than he had before the rule change.
Harlem, Power Memorial, and the high school seventy-one-game streak
He was born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. on April 16, 1947, in Harlem Hospital. His father, Ferdinand Sr., worked as a New York Transit Authority police lieutenant and played jazz trombone at Juilliard-adjacent sessions on his off nights. By age nine Ferdinand Jr. was already 5’8”. By fourteen he was 6’8”. He enrolled at Power Memorial Academy, a Catholic high school in Manhattan, on the recommendation of his middle-school coach, because the Power coach, Jack Donohue, had a reputation for developing tall players.
Donohue’s Power Memorial teams, with Alcindor at center, went 71 games without a loss between January 1963 and March 1965, at the time the longest such streak in New York City high school basketball history. The team won three consecutive New York City Catholic championships. The streak ended when Alcindor was a senior, against DeMatha Catholic of Maryland, in a nationally-attended game at the University of Maryland’s Cole Field House on January 30, 1965. DeMatha coach Morgan Wootten had his players hold broom handles during practice to simulate Alcindor’s reach. DeMatha won 46–43.
The part of the Power years that Abdul-Jabbar has returned to most often, in his own writing since, is not the basketball. It is a halftime speech Donohue gave during his junior year, after Alcindor had played poorly in the first half, in which Donohue used a racial slur about him to the team. Alcindor walked home to Harlem on the subway after the game; he writes in his 1983 memoir Giant Steps that the speech ended his willingness to take a white coach’s praise or his criticism at face value, and that it was the first moment he understood his basketball career as a Black career.
UCLA, John Wooden, and three national championships
He chose UCLA over every eastern program. John Wooden had won the previous two national championships (1964, 1965) and coached, as Alcindor described it in Giant Steps, without shouting. Alcindor played on the freshman team in 1965–66, per NCAA rules of the period, and the freshman team beat Wooden’s returning NCAA championship varsity in a preseason scrimmage, a result Wooden later said persuaded him that the dynasty was about to enter a new phase.
In his three varsity seasons, 1966–67 through 1968–69, UCLA went 88–2 and won three consecutive NCAA championships. The two losses were both during his junior year: one to Houston on January 20, 1968, in the “Game of the Century” at the Astrodome (UCLA 69, Houston 71) in front of 52,693 fans, the first regular-season college basketball game broadcast nationally in prime time; and one in the final weekend of the regular season against USC. Alcindor played the Houston game with a scratched left cornea from a game three nights earlier, was 4-of-18 from the field, and UCLA still lost by only two. The rematch came at the NCAA semifinals. UCLA won 101–69. Alcindor had 19 points, 18 rebounds, and held Elvin Hayes, who had scored 39 at the Astrodome, to 10.
The NCAA banned dunking from the college game in April 1967, after Alcindor’s sophomore season. The rule was widely, openly, understood inside the sport as a response to him. It is still referred to in basketball historiography as the “Alcindor rule,” including in Alcindor’s own 1983 memoir. He responded by developing the skyhook against the best defensive centers available in the Pac-8, at a scrimmage volume John Wooden’s staff later estimated at roughly 500 attempts a day over three seasons. His scoring average went up after the rule change, from 29.0 points a game as a sophomore to 26.2 as a junior and 24.0 as a senior, a drop that tracks precisely with the rise in double-team attention, not a drop in his individual effectiveness.
He was a three-time consensus national player of the year. UCLA retired his jersey in the rafters of Pauley Pavilion.
The 1969 NBA Draft, and the ABA’s $3.25 million offer
Milwaukee, which had won a coin flip with Phoenix for the first pick, selected him in the 1969 NBA Draft. The American Basketball Association’s New York Nets, backed by Vince Lombardi’s brother and Nets owner Arthur Brown, made a competing offer of $3.25 million over five years, the most any American team-sport athlete had been offered to that point. Alcindor asked each league to submit a single sealed bid and committed in advance to signing with the higher one. Milwaukee’s bid of $1.4 million over five years was lower. He signed with the Bucks anyway, on the stated grounds that the ABA was a speculative league and he did not trust the franchise stability. The decision was the first of several he made that prioritized institutional reliability over maximal money, and it has been, in later interviews, one of the few career decisions he has said he would revisit.
Milwaukee, 1971, and the ring with Oscar
As a rookie in 1969–70, he averaged 28.8 points and 14.5 rebounds, and the Bucks, a second-year expansion team, improved from 27 wins to 56. He was Rookie of the Year. In the summer of 1970 Milwaukee traded for Oscar Robertson, then thirty-two and arguably the best perimeter passer in basketball history. Robertson’s arrival gave the Bucks the backcourt passer the offense had been missing.
The 1970–71 Bucks finished 66–16. Alcindor won his first league MVP. Milwaukee went 12–2 through the playoffs and swept the Baltimore Bullets in the Finals, 4–0. Alcindor was Finals MVP at age twenty-three, the youngest Finals MVP since the award’s creation in 1969. He won a second MVP in 1972. The 1973–74 season produced his third. In 1974 the Bucks lost the Finals to the Boston Celtics in seven games, a series in which Alcindor’s game-six, double-overtime, buzzer-beating skyhook from 15 feet in the Boston Garden is still one of the most-replayed shots in a Celtics opponent’s uniform.
The 1971 name change
In 1968, during his senior year at UCLA, he began practicing Sunni Islam under the guidance of Hamaas Abdul-Khaalis, a former Ahmadi leader. He adopted the Arabic name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar privately in 1968 and announced it publicly at a Milwaukee press conference in the fall of 1971, after the championship. Kareem means “generous” or “noble”; Abdul-Jabbar means “servant of the powerful.” He has said in nearly every subsequent interview that he considered the name an act of ownership of his own identity rather than a political statement, though the public reaction, especially in Milwaukee, treated it as the latter. He writes in Kareem (1990) that the hate mail he received in the weeks after the announcement was the most intense of his career.
The trade to Los Angeles
He requested a trade from Milwaukee after the 1974–75 season. The stated reason, per the press conference at the time, was that he did not feel rooted in Milwaukee and that he wanted to be in a city with a larger Black cultural community; the less-stated reason, per later interviews, was that Robertson had just retired and the roster was not built to contend for another decade. The Bucks moved him to the Los Angeles Lakers on June 16, 1975, in a four-for-two trade involving Brian Winters, Dave Meyers, Elmore Smith, and Junior Bridgeman.
He won his fourth league MVP in 1976 and his fifth in 1977. The Lakers of those years were a strong regular-season team carried by his individual scoring, but without a perimeter creator they lost in the first or second round three years running. In 1979 the Lakers drafted Magic Johnson with the first overall pick, a selection they owned via a 1976 trade with New Orleans.
Showtime, and five rings in nine years
The Johnson-Abdul-Jabbar Lakers won five championships in nine years: 1980, 1982, 1985, 1987, and 1988. The 1980 Finals, a six-game series against the Philadelphia 76ers, is best remembered for Game 6, in which a rookie Magic Johnson played center in Abdul-Jabbar’s place (Kareem had sprained his ankle in Game 5) and scored 42 points. The more representative Abdul-Jabbar game of the series was Game 5, which he played the second half of on the sprained ankle and finished with 40 points, 15 rebounds, and 6 assists. The Lakers went home up 3–2.
In 1985, against the Celtics, he was Finals MVP at age thirty-eight, the oldest Finals MVP in the history of the award. He averaged 25.7 points per game in the series on 60.4 percent shooting, and the series is usually held up, inside the game, as the most complete individual stretch of his late career. He won his sixth and final league MVP in 1980, a record that has not been matched since.
The career scoring record, April 5, 1984
On April 5, 1984, in a game at the Forum against the Utah Jazz, he scored over Mark Eaton with a skyhook from the left block with 8:53 remaining in the fourth quarter. The shot put him at 31,420 career points, one ahead of Wilt Chamberlain, and it ended a career scoring record that had stood since Chamberlain’s retirement in 1973. The game was stopped for a ceremony. Bob Cousy, the NBA’s president of players’ services at the time, presented him with the commemorative ball at halfcourt.
He held the record for 38 years, 10 months, and 2 days. LeBron James passed it on February 7, 2023, in a Lakers home game against the Oklahoma City Thunder. Abdul-Jabbar was courtside. The final Abdul-Jabbar total: 38,387 points over 1,560 regular-season games, 24.6 points per game, 55.9 percent from the field, 72.1 percent from the free-throw line. The combination of volume and efficiency is still unmatched among 20,000-point career scorers.
Retirement, 1989
He retired after the 1988–89 season at age forty-two, the oldest player to appear in an NBA Finals at the time, and the oldest to start one. The Lakers were swept by the Detroit Pistons in the 1989 Finals. He averaged 10.1 points a game in his final regular season, on a team that still made the conference finals. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1995, first ballot.
Writing, coaching, and the second career
Abdul-Jabbar has written fifteen books. Most are non-fiction. Giant Steps (1983), ghost-written with Peter Knobler, is the definitive autobiographical source for the UCLA and early Milwaukee years. Kareem (1990) covers the Lakers years. Black Profiles in Courage (1996) is a history of lesser-known Black Americans, co-authored with Alan Steinberg. On the Shoulders of Giants (2007) is a cultural history of the Harlem Renaissance. Coach Wooden and Me (2017) is a memoir of his fifty-year friendship with John Wooden. He has also published three Mycroft Holmes novels, co-written with Anna Waterhouse, which are commercial detective fiction set in the Sherlock Holmes universe.
He writes a weekly Substack newsletter. Before Substack, he was a monthly columnist for The Guardian, a political columnist for Time, and a contributor to the Los Angeles Times editorial page. His 2015 essay on American police violence, published in Time the week of the Freddie Gray protests, was widely reprinted. He was named a United States cultural ambassador by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012.
Coaching: he served as a special assistant coach with the Lakers from 2005 to 2011 and briefly with the New York Knicks in 2014. He did not seek a head-coaching job, and, in his 2015 Washington Post op-ed on the absence of Black head coaches in the NBA, he named himself as one of the players of his generation the league did not offer one to.
Legacy
The standard ranking places Abdul-Jabbar among the three or four greatest players in NBA history, with the specific ranking within that group a function of how the rubric weights longevity. He is the only player with six regular-season MVPs. He is the only player with twenty seasons at 20 points or more per game. He held the career scoring record for thirty-nine years. He won six championships with two separate cores in two different cities, something no player since has matched.
The skyhook itself, as a shot, did not survive him. Every coach who has tried to teach it to a younger center, including Abdul-Jabbar himself in his assistant-coaching stints, has reported that it requires a combination of back-to-the-basket comfort, left-hand footwork on a right-handed shot, and a willingness to accept the shot as the primary scoring option rather than a counter, which is a combination the modern NBA, with its spacing-and-threes offensive premise, has not produced again. That is an unusual fact about a shot that averaged more than twenty points a game for two decades. It is one of the reasons the scoring record stood as long as it did.
Gear
Shop official Kareem Abdul-Jabbar jerseys and fan gear on Fanatics, or read his 1990 memoir Kareem.
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Sources
- Basketball-Reference, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar career page (per-game splits, season-by-season record, April 5 1984 box score)
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Peter Knobler, Giant Steps (Bantam Books, 1983). UCLA and early Milwaukee years, Power Memorial halftime-speech account.
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with Mignon McCarthy, Kareem (Random House, 1990). Lakers-era memoir, 1971 name-change reception.
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Coach Wooden and Me: Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court (Grand Central, 2017)
- NCAA men’s basketball records, 1966–67 through 1968–69 (UCLA team record, “Alcindor rule”)
- Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar induction file (1995)
- Los Angeles Lakers and Utah Jazz box score, April 5, 1984 (scoring-record game)
- ESPN broadcast, February 7, 2023, Lakers vs Thunder (LeBron James passes 38,387)
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