Ranking the 75 best players in NBA history for 75th anniversary

6 of 78

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Los Angeles Lakers (Photo by: Mike Powell/Getty Images) /

Ranking the 75 best players in NBA history: No. 4 – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

On NBA 50 at 50 List

Career: 1969 – 1989

Achievements: Six-time champion; six-time MVP; All-NBA (15x); All-Star (19x); All-Defense (11x); Finals MVP (2x); career leader in points; fourth in career rebounds; third in career blocks

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar entered the league in 1969 after a dominant career at UCLA, and it was like nothing changed. He averaged 28.8 points per game as a rookie, then in his second season won MVP and the first championship in Milwaukee Bucks history. He then went on to play a total of 20 seasons, averaging as many as 34.8 points per game and at least 21.5 every season until he was 39 years old; he put up 10.1 points per game in 1988-89 as a 41-year-old.

No one could stop Kareem’s patented skyhook, and his touch around the basket was legendary. He scored 38,387 points all without the help of the 3-point line; he hit one in his entire career. He won a title and nearly a second in Milwaukee and then toiled alone in Los Angeles until Magic Johnson came along and the pair won five titles in the 1980s together.

It’s impossible to communicate how inevitable Kareem was. NBA coaches spent hours and days and weeks and years trying to figure out how to slow him down, and it was basically impossible. In a decade when the star power waned as the ABA took some of the cultural zeitgeist, Abdul-Jabbar was the league’s one constant, its biggest star for an entire decade or more, before Magic and Larry arrived to take the torch.