Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the Skyhook

A shot nobody could block

The skyhook looked almost polite. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would turn his shoulder to the defender, rise on one leg and release the ball with a long, sweeping arm at the very top of his reach. At 7 feet 2 inches, with that arm fully extended, the ball left his hand at a height no defender could touch without goaltending or fouling.

He had honed the move as a kid in New York and sharpened it at UCLA, where he played as Lew Alcindor and won three straight national titles from 1967 to 1969. Before his junior season the college game banned the dunk, a rule many people saw as aimed at him. He answered by leaning even harder on a shot that did not need the rim to be dominated.

Chasing Wilt

Alcindor entered the pros with the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969, won a title there in 1971 and took the name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar that same year. A trade sent him to the Los Angeles Lakers in 1975, and the skyhook kept falling season after season.

On April 5, 1984, in a game against the Utah Jazz played in Las Vegas, he dropped in a skyhook that pushed him past Wilt Chamberlain's career total of 31,419 points. He kept playing until 1989, his 20th season, and finished with 38,387 regular season points.

The record that would not fall

For almost 39 years nobody came close. Michael Jordan retired twice and still finished well short. Karl Malone got within about 1,500 points. The mark began to feel like one of those numbers that simply belongs to history.

Then came LeBron James. On February 7, 2023, in Los Angeles against the Oklahoma City Thunder, LeBron hit a fadeaway jumper late in the third quarter to pass Kareem, with Kareem watching from the stands. The crowd stood, the game stopped, and a record set during the Reagan years finally changed hands.

Why the skyhook still matters

Kareem also collected six MVP awards, still the most in league history, and six championships. Yet the image people remember is the hook: smooth, repeatable and almost impossible to stop.

Coaches still ask why more big men do not use it. The honest answer is that it takes thousands of hours to master and looks old fashioned next to the dunk and the three. Kareem made it look easy, which is the best proof of how hard it really was.

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