LeBron James drops one-emoji reaction to never achieving career average statline

When it comes to LeBron James, there are very few things that he hasn’t achieved on a basketball court. The 20-time All-Star is in his 21st NBA season, with career averages of 27.1 points, 7.5 rebounds and 7.4 assists. He's also the leading scorer of all time and recently became the first to surpass 40,000 points in the regular season.

On Tuesday, ESPN shared an interesting bit of trivia on Instagram. The sports broadcasting giant claimed that LeBron James never had a game statline that matched his current career averages. ESPN termed the 27-7-7 statline as the “LeBron Statline.”

Here’s the Instagram post by ESPN:

LeBron James took notice of the post and replied with a shrug emoticon:

James' Instagram comment on the post.

The information surprised many, and fans took it upon themselves to investigate further.

One fan claimed that James had a 27-7-6 and 27-8-7 statline but never 27-7-7 in 1,476 regular-season games so far.

A fan's comment on the post

While it's surprising, it’s not very unfathomable, as the probability of landing on that exact statline has to be very low.

It could be a different story altogether if James takes it as a challenge to finish with a 27-7-7 statline sometime soon.

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How LeBron James scored his 40,000th point

A spin layup in the second quarter against the Denver Nuggets on Saturday helped James breach the 40,000-point mark in regular-season games. He also has 8,023 playoff points in 282 games.

While 50,000 points in just the regular season seems unlikely, the four-time champion should reach that mark in overall career points.

James spoke about the incredible feat of reaching 40,000 points:

“Records are always meant to be broken. You can never say never, of any record. ... For years, people said Kareem’s record would never be broken.”

While LeBron James might have been honest in his assessment of records being meant to be broken, the 40K mark seems unlikely to be broken in a long time.

For any player to even get close to it, they have to be almost injury-free for their entire career and have a career as long and consistent as the Chosen One’s.

Before 2019, analysts claimed that Kevin Durant had a chance to be the most decorated scorer in the history of the game.

An Achilles injury in the 2018-19 NBA Finals all but derailed any hopes of Durant making that record his own. KD missed the entire 2019-20 season, 47 games in 2020-21, 27 games in 2021-22 and 35 games in 2022-23.

Kevin Durant’s career trajectory after the Achilles injury shows why eclipsing James’ feat won’t come down to just talent but divine intervention as well.