Riley hails Abdul-jabbar
Pat Riley remembers just about every detail surrounding the events of Dec. 29, 1961. It was a cold night in Schenectady. A little snowy, the roads a little icy. And when the bus carrying the opposing team from New York City arrived, all of Riley’s Linton High teammates peered out the window. They saw a giant.
Long before Riley and Kareem Abdul-jabbar were winning NBA championships together as coach and player with the Showtime-era Los Angeles Lakers in the 1980s, they were opponents. Riley and Linton beat Power Memorial and Lew Alcindor — Abdul-jabbar’s name before converting to Islam — 74-68 that night.
Abdul-jabbar, then a 6foot-10 freshman, was held to eight points because he spent virtually the entire game in foul trouble. He has told Riley several times over the years that Linton won because Riley’s father — a lifelong baseball man — had his umpiring friends refereeing the game.
“Which we did,” Riley acknowledges.
Riley knew it then and came to appreciate it even more years later — there were only a few ways to stop the player who would eventually spend nearly four decades as the most prolific scorer in NBA history.
Abdul-jabbar is on the verge of being passed by the Lakers’ Lebron James, the 38-year-old who was nearly nine months from being born when the unforgettable center made one of his signature sky hooks on April 5, 1984 to overtake Wilt Chamberlain and become the league’s scoring leader.
“Kareem was a guy that never had any potential. He just had greatness,” said Riley, now the president of the Miami Heat and one of the few who has worked with both Abduljabbar and James. “You could see that. When you can bypass potential and you move right to greatness as a high school player,
and then college and then the pros ... there are very few like him. There’s a handful. Two handfuls, at the most.”
James is one of them, going from high school straight to the NBA, and now in his 20th season, he is now just 89 points away from passing Abdul-jabbar's record. The Lakers play Thursday in Indiana, then Saturday at New Orleans.
The most realistic target for the record-breaker is Tuesday in Los Angeles against Oklahoma City or — perhaps symbolically — next Thursday in L.A. when the Lakers play Milwaukee, the team Abdul-jabbar started his NBA career with.