SAN FRANCISCO — No one in NBA history has scored more points when it mattered than LeBron James.
With a three-pointer in the third quarter Saturday night, James scored his 44,152nd points — the most ever when combining NBA regular-season and playoff games.
He tied Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s 44,159 mark with a three-pointer right before halftime in a 117-115 loss to the Golden State Warriors.
“It’s incredible,” Lakers coach Frank Vogel said of the milestone before the game. “Everything the guy has done throughout his career is just remarkable. It’s why I believe he’s the greatest ever to play.”
The challenge, though, for the Lakers is to make the most of that greatness while it’s still here, and their inaction at the NBA’s trade deadline fueled critics who believe the team is squandering it.
Vogel said the team came through the trade deadline with a refreshed energy and a renewed spirit — and that was largely on display Saturday against one of the NBA’s top teams.
Russell Westbrook and Talen Horton-Tucker, two of the names mentioned most frequently in the build to the deadline, played well in their first game on the other side of it.
Westbrook had 19 points on only 13 shots, and Horton-Tucker scored 17 off the bench.
And James kept alive his streak of games with at least 25 points — the 22nd game in a row. But after he was fouled on a potential game-tying three-pointer in the final seconds, James missed the first free throw. After making the second, he missed the third intentionally. The Lakers were unable to corral the rebound, spoiling what should have been a memorable night.
The way Warriors coach Steve Kerr talked about James before the game, the key buckets were almost destined to come on a jump shot.
Informed that James needed 19 points to become the NBA’s all-time leading scorer in combined points between the regular season and playoffs, Kerr remembered being a broadcaster studying James during the 2013 NBA Finals.
After an entire series of the San Antonio Spurs daring James to shoot, he led the Miami Heat to a title from the perimeter, a moment burned into Kerr’s memory as the change that set the stage for Saturday.
“It seemed like he had, maybe, more of a mental breakthrough than anything. But the last two games of that series, they couldn’t go under (screens) anymore. He was knocking down that shot,” Kerr said. “From that point on, I think his shot has gotten better and better. And that opened up the world for him.
“… Everything changed after that, as far as what you had to deal with. That’s pretty remarkable. Most players don’t make that transition from being a poor shooter to a really good shooter midway through their career. And he found a way to do that.”
James still trails Karl Malone and Abdul-Jabbar on the NBA’s all-time regular-season scoring list, the generally used method for determining the league’s scoring king. James is already the NBA’s all-time leading scorer in the playoffs with 7,631 points.
“I feel like I witnessed a lot of those postseason points,” Kerr said before the game. “That’s a spectacular statistic, maybe not one that is going to be celebrated as if it were the regular-season record, but that’s incredible when you think about all the players who have played in this league, the talent — people like Michael Jordan, who played in a million playoff games. It speaks to LeBron’s brilliance but also his longevity.”
And while the Lakers were good Saturday, they and James just weren’t brilliant enough.
