Inspired by Corey's latest post, I decided to graph the career scoring trajectory of the best scorers in N.B.A. history, some other notables, and LeBron. I wanted to see whether Corey was right when he wrote, "it's extremely likely He's going to be competing for the all-time scoring record."

I made a chart so large that I'm only going to link it, rather than post it here. But you really should look at it. (You can also take a look at the whole spreadsheet.) Read it like so: each player's career scoring total is presented as a line, with age on the horizontal axis. For players that have retired, their line just becomes horizontal. For active players, the line stops abruptly, since they'll continue to accumulate points in the coming years. And I apologize for the lines being of so many similar colors; I wanted to maximize the number of available comparisons.

With the chart, we can inspect how LeBron compares to the scoring pace set by, say, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It turns out that LeBron is outdoing everybody else, by a good margin too. He hasn't scored the most points per season—just check out the slope of Wilt Chamberlain's line between twenty two and twenty seven—but LeBron can thank His age for the head start. Had Abdul-Jabbar or Chamberlain been able to play in the N.B.A. directly after high school, LeBron wouldn't seem such a good bet to break records anymore. And speaking of age, Kobe Bryant is usually mentioned as someone who'll get to Abdul-Jabbar's record before LeBron, since he too has had the advantage of playing professionally at eighteen. I'm not convinced by this argument. LeBron has already completely outpaced Bryant, thanks to Bryant's pedestrian first two seasons.

The hidden assumption in all this is that not only will LeBron stay healthy for the next twenty or so seasons, but that He'll remain interested in playing professionally. Plenty of great players have retired relatively young, and not necessarily due to injuries: Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, Bob Pettit to name a few. If one of them had played until his forties, LeBron might have a tougher path in front of Him. Not that He's not up to it.