The 30 best NBA seasons from players over 35 years old — 11. Karl Malone, 1999-00 (36)
While working our way down towards the absolute best seasons we continue to encounter Karl Malone, who makes it onto this list four times, younger and younger each time. In the 1999-00 season Malone, the defending league MVP, put up the fourth-most win shares ever by a player 35 or older with 15.3.
This season, the first full-length year after the bizarre sprint of the 50-game 1998-99 season, was one of Malone’s best despite the lack of MVP hardware standing at the end of it. He shot a career-best 79.7 percent from the free-throw line on a solid 9.0 attempts per game, chipping in 25.5 points and 9.5 rebounds per game.
The Utah Jazz won the Midwest Division of the Western Conference with a 55-27 record, taking down the Seattle SuperSonics in the first round before losing to Scottie Pippen and the Portland Trail Blazers in the second round. Malone was the leading scorer between both teams in four of that series’ five games, but an aging Jazz team didn’t have enough against a deep Portland team ready to challenge Shaquille O’Neal and the Los Angeles Lakers.
Malone was again an iron man, playing all 82 games. He finished second in the league in free throws made, fifth in defensive rebounding (9th in total rebounds), fifth in points per game and a close second to O’Neal in advanced metrics such as win shares (15.3) or BPM (7.5). At 36 Malone was still the best forward in the league and he proved it by scoring again and again and again, as unstoppable as always.