San Antonio Spurs’ Tim Duncan is a player who has been around for a long time in the NBA. Duncan has collected almost every award and achievement imaginable in basketball aside from an Olympic Gold medal. Through his very successful 14 year career, Duncan has managed to collect miles and miles on his body.
Brendan Bowers over at our premiere Bloguin NBA site, Crossover Chronicles wrote a piece regarding what it would take for veterans such as Duncan to catch the player with the most mileage in NBA history – Kareem Abdul-Jabbar who logged 66,297 minutes over the course of his career.
The currently active players who made the top-50 included Jason Kidd (9th with 52,386), Kobe (16th with 48,310), Kevin Garnett (18th with 47,998), Ray Allen (24th with 45,156), Tim Duncan (26th with 44,685), Dirk (37th with 41,363) and Paul Pierce (50th with 40,085). To add a bit more perspective, LeBron James has played 29,182 combined minutes over the course of his career, Dwayne Wade has played 21,329, and Kevin Durant has totaled 12,128 minutes.
Again, it would take Duncan 21,613 total minutes or an approximation of 721 more games for him to pass Kareem! Talk a about a testament to Jabbar’s longevity.
The only way this is possible would have to be for Duncan to play eight more full seasons and sweep every playoff series through each of those seasons. By that time Duncan would be 43 years old.
I’m pretty sure we have a better chance of finding artificial intelligence before the possibility of Duncan playing eight more seasons.
Duncan is nearing the closure of his career and what more does he have to prove? He’s got the hardware, the respect, the invitation to the Hall of Fame, and there’s one title that only legends in the game of basketball can achieve; the title of being the best ever at your position.
Tim Duncan will go arguably be remembered as the greatest power forward to ever play the game of basketball, so Kareem, you can keep the most minutes award.
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