Every year in the NBA, amazing things happen. It’s right there in that old league slogan, “Where amazing happens.” Some of the amazing things that happen during a typical season involve amazing players doing amazing things for so long that they bypass somewhere between many and all of the other amazing players in the history of the NBA on all-time leaderboards. We call these particular amazing things milestones, and they’re awesome.
With the 2018-19 season set to begin on Tuesday night, we thought now was as good a time as any to identify some milestones that should get eclipsed this year, and just when those moments of history may occur.
LeBron James will pass Michael Jordan in career points scored on Saturday, Feb. 2, 2019 vs. Golden State.
LeBron averages just over 27 points per game for his career and enters the season 1,254 points behind Jordan on the career scoring list. If LeBron were to play in every single game and score exactly 27 points in every single game, it would take him 47 games to pass Michael. But LeBron’s probably not going to play every game again like he did a year ago, and he’s probably not going to score exactly 27 points in every game.
With this estimate, we’re going a bit conservative and estimating LeBron averages 26 points per game (0.1 per game less than he averaging during the past four seasons in Cleveland), while also sitting six of the first 53 games of the season — a rate that would put him on pace to play 73 games, three fewer than his career average but essentially in line with where he’s been since originally leaving Cleveland for Miami back in 2010. In this scenario, LeBron enters the Lakers’ Super Bowl Saturday showdown with the Warriors needing just six points to surpass MJ, which he’ll probably do sometime in the middle of the first quarter.
Steph Curry enters the top five in career three-pointers on Friday, Oct. 26, 2018 vs. New York, enters the top three on Dec. 29, 2018 vs. Portland, and finishes the season exactly 100 short of passing Reggie Miller for second all-time.
Steph needs only 24 made threes to move into the top five all time, which is patently absurd. He’ll do that pretty early in the season — we’re guessing in the sixth game of the year when the Warriors visit Madison Square Garden and Steph seems likely to absolutely go off, like he usually does on that big stage. He’s 153 made threes behind Jason Terry for third place all time, and it should take him 35 games or so to get there. Figuring he gets a few nights of rest early on in the season, that takes us to late December, with a three-game stretch where the Warriors play the Blazers twice and then the Suns looking particularly enticing.
A full season’s worth of threes for Steph usually means he’s going to hit somewhere north of 300 at this point. He may not get to 400 threes like he did in 2016, so we’ll say he gets to 331 and enters next season needing exactly 100 to surpass Reggie Miller and 513 to pass Ray Allen, which would have Steph becoming the all-time leader somewhere around the 2021 All-Star break.
Dirk Nowitzki becomes the fourth player ever to play 1,500 games on Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2019 vs. San Antonio and passes Tim Duncan in career Win Shares sometime before that.
Dirk is sadly nursing an ankle injury and will not be on the floor at the start of the season. The Mavericks say he’s expected to miss at least two weeks, but given that he did not practice at all during training camp or the preseason, we’re conservatively placing his return in mid-to-late November.
Dirk is 29 games away from 1,500 in his career, something that only Robert Parish, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and John Stockton have ever done. Dirk does not figure to play in every single game when he gets back, as the Mavs will want to assure that he remains healthy for the entirety of what could be his final season. So, assuming he misses a few games here and there, mid-January seems about right for his 29th game of the year. Fittingly, it could come against the Spurs, the franchise that was home to Duncan for so many years.
Nowitzki is only 0.3 Win Shares behind Duncan for seventh on the all-time list (and 1.6 behind Stockton for sixth), so he should get there pretty quickly once he does get back on the floor. Even playing reduced minutes at a diminished capacity the past two seasons, he’s averaged 0.1 Win Shares per 48 minutes. He’ll likely play 15-20 minutes a night this season, so that’s around three games to reach 0.1 Win Shares, meaning he’ll pass Duncan after 9-10 games and Stockton around the same time he plays game No. 1,500.
Chris Paul passes Gary Payton and Isiah Thomas on the all-time assist list while Rajon Rondo breaks into the top-20.
Let’s actually start with Rondo. He’s 211 assists behind Deron Williams for 20th all-time, and since he’s going to be starting at point guard to begin the season, he seems likely to rack up assists early in the year. If he averages 7.0 per game it would take just over 30 games, but assuming he misses a few, this could easily happen on Christmas Day vs. the Warriors. That would be both cool and funny, so let’s just say that’s when it’ll happen.
CP3, meanwhile, comes into the year 258 assists behind Payton and 353 behind Thomas. He averaged just south of eight assists per game during his first year in Houston, but the Rockets seem likely to drop his minute load this season and take the ball out of his hands a bit more in an effort to keep him healthy all year. Let’s say he’s at 7.5 per game, which would be a career-low, but also makes sense given the situation. Let’s also say he sits out a few games here and there so he can stay healthy and plays at a full-season pace of around 60-65 games. That would have Paul passing Payton around 48-50 games into his season (perhaps against the 76ers on March 8, 2019) and passing Thomas sometime in the last week of the regular season … like, against the Clippers on April 3, for example.
The Rockets pass the Bulls to become the 10th-winningest franchise in NBA history on Saturday, Dec. 15, 2018 vs. Memphis.
Houston is 11 wins behind Chicago for 10th place in NBA history. While 11 wins like sound like an easy thing for the Rockets to make up, you have to remember that it will take more than 11 wins for the Rockets to get there because the Bulls actually will win some games, too. Probably. We’re betting it happens 28 games into the season, when the Rockets move to 20-8 with a win over the Grizzlies, while the Bulls fall to 8-20 with a loss to the Spurs. Chicago figures to struggle sans Lauri Markkanen early in the season, and with both head-to-head matchups with the Rockets happening within the first 25 games of the year, Houston has a chance to pull pretty close relatively quickly.
