Kobe Bryant: What Records Lie Ahead?

On Sunday, Kobe Bryant broke the record that will likely be the biggest individual achievement for the rest of his career. While he has an outside chance at catching Karl Malone for second in points, he won’t break a record bigger than that.

However, that doesn’t mean he isn’t going to continue to move up other leaderboards. We’ll take a look at what records Bryant could still break and where he’ll likely finish among many other notable leaderboards.

We’ll do our best to project, based on his averages, the totals for Bryant by careers end as well as where he’ll finish. However, for some situations, finding a finishing point will be difficult depending on how many active players are close to Bryant, as their numbers will change as well.

All these numbers will be totals following Mondays game against the Indiana Pacers.

Regular Season Games:

All-Time Leader – Robert Parish 1,611 games

As of now, Bryant sits with 1270 games, but this is the most finite number we can calculate. Bryant averaged 69 games a season prior to this year. The average is obviously skewed by last season, which if you exclude, the average jumps to 73 games. On top of that, we’re unsure if Bryant will play past next year, with his answer changing on a weekly basis.

For now, we’ll assume he doesn’t play past next year, and we’ll use the 73 game average for the final two years. In terms of where that’ll put him, there are a number of players with more games in the regular season than Bryant: Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen. The latter two have their days numbered, while Duncan seems to have another solid 10 years in him. Allen is just 30 games ahead of Bryant while Garnett has played 126 more, and that margin won’t get much smaller this year.

Projected Career-End Total – 1391 games, 8th all-time