LeBron James surpassed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar last season to become the NBA's all-time scoring leader, surpassing a record that stood for nearly 40 years. He now he has increased his total record in epic fashion.
James lost the 40,000th point of his career Saturday night against the Denver Nuggets. He is the only player in NBA history with 40,000 points in the regular season. By comparison, Kevin Durant, the next highest-scoring active player, has just 28,342 points, nearly 12,000 behind James' mark. Durant is also only four years younger than James, giving him a nearly impossible mountain to climb to make up for that deficit.
That got us thinking about other sports records that seem unattainable, whether because of the way the game has changed since they were set, the absurd talent of their holders compared to the rest of the league, or a combination of both. Here's a short list of records you'll probably never see broken, at least not in our lifetimes.
Emmitt Smith: 18,355 rushing yards
Active leader: Derrick Henry (9,502)
Dallas Cowboys great Emmitt Smith broke Chicago Bears legend Walter Payton's all-time rushing record of 16,726 yards in 2002. Of course, Smith wasn't finished yet; He played for two and a half more seasons, finishing with 18,355 rushing yards.
This is a milestone that is unlikely to ever be surpassed. On the one hand, we're talking about Emmitt Smith. The man ran for 1,000-yard seasons like clockwork, basically forever. But the NFL has also changed quite a bit since then. Offenses don't focus on running backs like they used to, and playing as much time as Smith did as a ball carrier is seemingly impossible.
Jerry Rice: 22,895 receiving yards
Active leader: Julio Jones (13,703)
Rice had an incredible 14 seasons with 1,000 or more receiving yards, including three with more than 1,500. A big part of this was his incredible durability; he only played less than 16 games in two of his 21 years. Rice was also fortunate to go from one Hall of Fame quarterback (Joe Montana) to another (Steve Young). But let's be real: Rice was more or less incubable for two decades straight on his account. He also explains why no one is going to match his receiving touchdown record: He has 197, and the next highest receiver, Randy Moss, has 41 fewer touchdowns.
Active leader: Sidney Crosby (972)
The old saying about “The Great One” is that if he had never scored a single goal in his career, he would still lead the NHL in total points in assists alone. To give you an idea of how difficult it would be for someone to do that, he would have to average 98 assists a year over a 20-year career just to come close to that total. In reality, no one has had 98 or more assists in a single season since…Wayne Gretzky, in 1990-91. In total, it has only been done three times by a player not named Wayne Gretzky (twice by Mario Lemieux and once by Bobby Orr).
Cy Young: 749 complete games
Active leader: Adam Wainwright (28)
Unless there is a dramatic change in the way teams approach pitching (something on the level of “all pitchers are now literally robots”), there's no way anyone will come close to Young's all-around game mark. All MLB pitchers combined had 36 complete games in 2022; Young had 36 or more complete games in just 11 different seasons. While we're at it, it seems extremely unlikely that anyone will come close to Young's 511 wins or 315 losses anytime soon.
Wilt Chamberlain: 50.4 points per game in a single season (1961-62)
Active leader: James Harden (36.1 points per game in 2018-19)
Kobe Bryant was what you might call a prolific scorer, right? He had 10 50+ point games in his 2006-07 campaign. In 1961-62, Wilt had 45 50+ point games, 15 60+ point games and three 70+ point games, and one in which he scored 100 points. Unless the NBA introduces the 4-point shot, this won't happen. And even then…
Active leader: Denver Nuggets (1)
Do you know how difficult it is to win a single title in the NBA? Shaquille O'Neal/Kobe Bryant The Los Angeles Lakers made it three games in a row. The Stephen Curry/Klay Thompson/Draymond Green Warriors almost did it four times in a row, except for LeBron James & Co. beating them in 2016. James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh made it back-to-back titles. These were some incredible teams…but in the modern NBA, almost every team is tough to beat come playoff time. The Celtics had the advantage of an all-time player in Bill Russell, an all-time coach in Red Auerbach, a seemingly endless variety of other players who were considered legends, and an NBA that had fewer than 10 teams.
Simone Biles: 23 world gold medals in gymnastics
Active leader: Simone Biles
To give you an idea of how far Biles is from her competition, the next most decorated gymnast in terms of world gold medals, Svetlana Khorkina, has nine. No other active gymnast has even two, probably because she had the great misfortune of competing at the same time as Biles.
Cal Ripken Jr.: 2,632 consecutive games played
Active leader: Matt Olson (457)
This is, again, one of those records that is more about how the game is played today than anything else. Ripken was unusually durable, to be sure. But today, he probably would have been encouraged to take a few days off from time to time just to make sure he was well rested.
UConn Huskies Women's Basketball: 111-game winning streak
Active leader: South Carolina Gamecocks (16)
The next highest streak on this list (90) is also held by the UConn Huskies, so if we are going to see it broken again, it will probably happen in Storrs, Connecticut. Realistically, though, Geno Auriemma's teams have been so dominant historically that it's hard to see even a new version of them going on such an absurd unbeaten streak again.
Active leader: Elvis Andrus (347)
Baseball writer Bill James once said that if you split Rickey Henderson in two, you would have two Hall of Famers. Well, if you split it four ways, you'd still have a guy with more stolen bases than the current active leader. People still campaign big against base stealing; José Reyes stole 78 in 2007. But Henderson's consistency and longevity make this record unattainable. To put it another way, someone who steals 78 bases a year would have to hold that mark for more than 18 seasons to break Henderson's record.
Michael Phelps: 28 Olympic medals
Active leader: Arianna Fontana (11)
Phelps not only has the most Olympic medals in history, but he also holds the records for gold medals (23) and individual gold medals in a single Olympics (eight, at the 2008 Beijing Games). Swimming has many events and therefore many opportunities to win, but Phelps' dominance remains incomparable to that of any other Olympic athlete.
