It's fun to look back at the greatest of the greatest — the greatest NBA players' greatest games — on Basketball Reference.
The box score of Kobe Bryant's 81-point game never fails to amaze me, especially seeing as he did it largely by himself without any teammates recording high assist numbers.
There's also Jordan's flu game, LeBron's epic Game 7 of the 2016 Finals — though the three blocks in the stat line don't quite represent just how epic the last of those three was — and many others that live on in NBA history and can be told, in part, through the eye-popping statistics that are forever logged online.
But what about these players in their high school days? We've heard the stories, we know the hype surrounding them and we know just how difficult it must have been for similarly aged players to compete with the future legends of the NBA. But now, we can see just how great these three legends were — and hopefully more players in the future — as part of a project compiled by the aforementioned Basketball Reference.
Jordan's high school stats had been available on the popular stats website prior to this newest release, including his 45-point outburst at age 15, with Bryant's and James' becoming available as of Tuesday morning.
You can travel back to December 11, 1992, and see that Kobe dropped 18 points in his high school debut with Lower Merion. You can see that he lost nine of his first 10 high school games, surprisingly, with a scoring average of 16.0 ppg. By his junior year, that flipped to nine wins in his first ten games. His scoring average? Nearly double his debut efforts, at 30.3 ppg. As Alex Bonilla of Sports Reference notes, you can see important milestones as you travel along the game logs, including his 40-point game which he only needed three quarters of action to achieve.
The same goes for LeBron, as the Saint Vincent-Saint Mary standout posted his first career double-double at age 15 in March of 2000, one of his final games as a freshman leading the Fighting Irish through an undefeated campaign. You can see his first 50-point game, coming in January of his senior year, with his second 50-point effort coming around three weeks later.
Todd Spehr helped to compile many of the statistics. Check out the full game logs through the links above.
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