Basketball has never seen anything like LeBron James’ dominant tenure

It’s not often that athletes are still active, let alone still dominant, while receiving their flowers. Let us now praise the NBA’s newly minted scoring king

OVER TO YOU: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, left, hands the ball to Los Angeles Lakers forward LeBron James after he passed Abdul-Jabbar’s record.

There are numerous factors that make it difficult to appreciate that which is special in real time. For starters, valuing the finite nature of anything brings into sharper focus the fleetingness of our own existence, and for obvious reasons, that’s something we’d generally rather not dwell upon. Beyond that, life passes by at a frenetic pace, and most days are spent just trying to weather the storm. Most special, resonant, or important people or events, for that reason, are more easily appreciated in retrospect: the rose-coloured glass of the rearview mirror highlighting everything that was once muddled by the chaos of life.

But it’s a worthy exercise in mindfulness to take stock of that which is here now. Such an opportunity arises this week after LeBron James broke a record on Tuesday night that was long believed to be unbreakable: passing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the league’s all-time leading scorer.