
National Basketball Association all-time assists leaders 1946-2022
Basketball legends
In basketball, an assist is awarded to the player who passes the ball to a teammate to score. John Stockton, who spent his entire career from 1984 to 2003 as a point guard for the Utah Jazz, is the runaway leader for assists in the NBA. One of the few still active players on the list is LeBron James, who currently stands in seventh place with his 9,923 assists. The basketball legend, who currently plays for the Los Angeles Lakers having moved from the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2014, also sits third on the list of NBA all-time scoring leaders.
King of the Playoffs
LeBron is the undisputed king of the playoffs, having scored a total of 7,631 in playoff games during his career. In his stints at the Cleveland Cavaliers and Miami Heat, James made the playoffs for 14 straight seasons from 2004/05 to 2017/18. He made a high profile move to the Los Angeles Lakers at the start of the 2018/19 season, but everything did not go quite to plan initially – James missed the playoffs for the first time since 2005 and failed to reach the NBA Finals for the first time since 2010. However, the Lakers then went on to claim their record-equaling 17th NBA championship title in 2020, defeating Miami Heat 4-2 in the finals. LeBron’s move has also undoubtedly been a commercial success for the Lakers – the regular season home attendance went up in the 2018/19 season and the franchise value reached a record 4.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2021.