LeBron James’ streak didn’t end on a missed shot. It ended on a pass.
On December 4, 2025 in Toronto, with the game tied and the clock bleeding toward zero, 40-year-old LeBron drove left, drew two Raptors to the ball and fired the pass to the right corner. Rui Hachimura caught, rose and buried a three as time expired.
RUI HACHIMURA FROM THE CORNER FOR THE WIN OFF THE LEBRON JAMES DIME!
🚨 @TISSOT BUZZER-BEATER 🚨
Everyone Gets 24 pic.twitter.com/6J38hGVRYK— NBA (@NBA) December 5, 2025
The Lakers beat the Raptors 123–120. LeBron finished with just 8 points on 4-for-17 shooting, but added 6 rebounds and 11 assists, and in the process, his absurd, almost mythological run of 1,297 consecutive regular-season games with at least 10 points finally came to a close.
For the first time since January 5, 2007, LeBron James played an NBA regular-season game and did not reach double figures.
To understand how staggering 1,297 games really is, you have to go back to where the gap in the record lives: Milwaukee.
On January 5, 2007, in his fourth season, LeBron had one of those strangely human nights in an otherwise superhuman prime: 8 points on 3-for-13 in a Cleveland win over the Bucks. Nobody knew it then, but that would be the last time for nearly 19 years that LeBron James would fail to score at least 10 points in a regular-season game.
The very next night, January 6, 2007, at home against the New Jersey Nets, he reset the counter. Nineteen points in a Cavaliers win became the first entry in what would become the most unbreakable streak on his résumé.
From that night in Cleveland to this week in Toronto, every regular-season game LeBron played, through jersey changes, franchises, teammates, coaches, eras, rule tweaks and pace revolutions, ended with his point total in double digits. That’s 1,297 straight games, a span that works out to almost sixteen full 82-game seasons’ worth of appearances without a single off-night dropping him below 10.
It’s the longest such streak in league history by a mile. The previous record belonged to Michael Jordan at 866 games, followed by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (787), Karl Malone (575) and Kevin Durant (562). LeBron didn’t just clear that bar. He moved it to a different building.
The streak is really a thread that runs through LeBron’s entire mature career. It began with him as a 22-year-old superstar-in-waiting in Cleveland; it survived “The Decision,” two titles and two MVPs in Miami; a homecoming and a drought-ending championship in northeast Ohio; and the late-career reinvention in Los Angeles that brought banner No. 17 to the Lakers and turned him into the NBA’s all-time leading scorer.
He scored 10 or more in every regular-season game he played while winning four championships and four Finals MVPs, collecting four regular-season MVP awards, and surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the NBA’s career scoring leader and pushing that total beyond 42,000 points, all while stacking up a record 21 All-Star and All-NBA selections and more minutes than anyone who has ever played in the league.
You can tug on almost any major moment from the modern NBA and find the streak quietly sitting in the background, intact. That’s the part that’s easy to miss: this wasn’t a record about explosions, it was a record about never slipping. Every rolled ankle he played through long enough to get to the line. Every “maintenance night” he avoided in an era of load management. Every ugly shooting night where he still willed his way to 11 on drives, post-ups and free throws. Over time, it became less a stat than a heartbeat.
One way to appreciate the scale is to look at everything that has changed since the last time this didn’t happen.
When LeBron last scored fewer than 10 points in a regular-season game before Thursday, the date was January 5, 2007. At that point:
- The original iPhone hadn’t even been announced yet. Steve Jobs would unveil it four days later, and it wouldn’t hit stores until June 29, 2007.
- Luka Dončić was a 7-year-old kid in Ljubljana, not the MVP-caliber face of the Los Angeles Lakers and a future scoring champion.
- Kevin Durant hadn’t been drafted; he was still a freshman at Texas, months away from going No. 2 in the 2007 draft and beginning his own Hall of Fame career.
- Twitter (now X) had only been publicly launched in July 2006. In January 2007, it was still less than a year old and a curious toy rather than a cultural force.
- Bronny James was two years old.
- Cooper Flagg, now a No. 1 overall pick and NBA rookie, was 15 days old.
- George W. Bush was in the middle of his second term as President of the United States.
Last time LeBron scored under 10 points:
— Twitter was less than a year old
— Bronny was 2 years old
— Cooper Flagg was 15 days old
— George W Bush was president1,297 straight games — tonight, the streak ended. pic.twitter.com/jRFLBi2aw9
— StatMuse (@statmuse) December 5, 2025
All of that sits between two nights where LeBron James scored eight points in an NBA game. The streak outlived superteams, rule changes, hand-check debates, entire cycles of “Is this the best player in the league now?” discussion. It ran from the tail end of the post-Shaq Kobe era, through the rise and fall of the Warriors dynasty, to an NBA where Shai Gilgeous-Alexander leads the Thunder to titles and LeBron shares an NBA locker room with his own son.
Now that LeBron’s streak is finally over, Kevin Durant inherits the mantle of the league’s longest active run of double-digit scoring games at 267, with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander next at 170. Those are impressive numbers in their own right, and they say a lot about two of the most relentless scorers of their generation. But they’re also a reminder of how far away LeBron’s mark really is.
From where Gilgeous-Alexander sits today, he would need 1,127 more consecutive double-digit regular-season games to tie 1,297. At a full 82-game schedule, that’s roughly 14 more seasons without missing a night or slipping under 10. He’s 27 years old. To catch LeBron under these conditions, he’d have to be averaging at least 10 a night, every single game, into his early forties, circa the 2039–40 season, and stay healthy and motivated enough to never break that chain. It’s theoretically possible. So is a perfect game every time you step on a golf course.
It’s fitting, almost to the point of cliché, that the streak died not on a forced pull-up but on a pass for a game-winner.
On a night where the shots wouldn’t fall – 4-for-17 from the field, 0-for-5 from three – LeBron still controlled the game as a playmaker, setting up 11 baskets and initiating the action that decided the outcome. He had one last chance to salvage the record in those final seconds. Instead of hunting a step-back or barreling into traffic for the whistle, he read the coverage, trusted Hachimura and made the right basketball play.
That’s always been the tension with LeBron discourse: Is he a scorer or a passer, Magic or Michael, bully-ball finisher or point-forward genius? The streak is one of the quiet answers. For nearly two decades, no matter how he tilted the slider between scorer and facilitator, no matter which superstar he played next to, he could always get you 10. On his worst nights, the floor stayed higher than most stars’ average.
The rest of the résumé will always anchor his GOAT case: four titles across three franchises, four MVPs, more points than anyone who has ever played the sport, a 20-plus-year prime whose statistical footprint looks like a typo. But this streak might be the clearest numerical expression of what watching LeBron has felt like for twenty-plus years: the absolute certainty that he will show up and be great, again and again and again.
Records like this don’t expire gracefully. They hang over every box score, every in-game graphic, every “LeBron has…” tweet. They can become burdens as much as badges. By letting this one go on a hockey assist, by choosing the win over the line in the scoring column, LeBron closed the loop in a way that feels true to the player he has always insisted he is. The scorer who never called himself a scorer. The superstar who built an empire on the most basic promise a teammate can make: “I’ll be there.”
Nearly nineteen years of double-digit nights is now a finished story. It stretched from George W. Bush to presidents not yet elected, from a pre-iPhone world to a league that lives inside everyone’s pocket. Through all of it, if LeBron James checked in, you could write “10+ points” in pen before the ball went up.
The streak is over. The ode continues.
