Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James became the NBA’s all-time leading scorer in February of 2023, when he passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with 38,387 total points. That record was previously seen as unbreakable due to Abdul-Jabbar’s longevity, but James has added over two years worth of points since then.
As of Dec. 22, 2025, LeBron sits at 42,406 points, 4,019 points ahead of the next-highest total. That difference alone is two full seasons of averaging 25 points per game. And that was what L.A. Clippers star James Harden focused on after his recent win over the Lakers.
Harden recently passed Carmelo Anthony to become the NBA’s 10th leading scorer all-time. But he wouldn’t even entertain the idea of catching up to or passing LeBron, via Tomer Azarly of Clutch Points:
“Don’t even say LeBron in this conversation,” Harden joked. “LeBron is… Nobody’s — when we talk about that record — nobody’s ever catching that. But just to be back out there, I’m not, I only missed one game, but just to be back out there and giving my teammates an opportunity to help them win the game was important for me. So it wasn’t pretty, but we got to win, so we just got to build momentum off this.”
Harden is currently 10th all-time with 28,359 points. He has been in the NBA for 17 years and was, at one time, one of the league’s most prolific scorers. He averaged over 30 points per game in three consecutive seasons and averaged over 29 points per game in five. Over the course of nine seasons from 2012-21, he averaged 29.3 points per game.
And yet, he is still over 14,000 points away from James. He’s in his 17th season at age 36, and would need to average his current 25.8 points per game — his most in a season since 2019-20 — for another 544 games to catch LeBron’s current total. That’s over 6.5 seasons if he played 82 games every year.
And that’s not even factoring in that James is going to score more points before calling it a career. If Harden, a player with one of the greatest scoring resumes in league history, sits that far away from LeBron, it’s going to be very hard for anyone to pass him up.
Even take James’ teammate in Luka Doncic. He has a 28.9 points per game career average in his eighth season, and has scored 13,594 points. He would need to maintain that average for 82 games per year for over 12 seasons to catch LeBron.
Catching James may simply never happen. But that’s what many thought about Abdul-Jabbar as well.
LeBron James discusses significance of playing Christmas Day
James is set to play his 20th game on Christmas Day in 23 seasons. So he knows more than anyone what it means to be chosen to play on one of the league’s biggest regular season days and he spoke about that as the Lakers prepare to play the Houston Rockets.
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