One Final Game: The last great performance for NBA legends

One Final Game: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Date: June 11, 1989

Few players in NBA history can match the peak of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and none but LeBron James can match his longevity. Abdul-Jabbar played 20 seasons in the league after a four-year college career, playing past 41 years old. He averaged at least 20 points per game in 17 of those seasons, and double-digits in every single one.

By the end Abdul-Jabbar was slow and creaky, but he still knew enough to get his shot off and have occasional bursts of scoring. Those came less often than earlier in his career, when he could pump out 20-point games in his sleep, but it was remarkable how defenders two decades younger than him still couldn’t shut him down.

In his final season, at age 41, the Los Angeles Lakers made it to the 1989 NBA Finals looking for a third-straight title. They played the “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons in a rematch of the previous year, when the Lakers won in seven games, in part due to a hotly-debated foul call that sent Abdul-Jabbar to the free-throw line in the waning seconds.

This time around the Pistons had the Lakers’ number, winning the first two games at home before the series went to Los Angeles. The Lakers needed a win to stay alive (going down 3-0 is an NBA death sentence) but the Pistons’ defense smothered most of their usual offensive engines and they lost by four points. The loss was not on Kareem, however; he dropped 24 points and 13 rebounds, both season-high marks. He gave it all he had in the penultimate game of his career, one last great game from the NBA’s most prolific scorer.