Stranger Stats #2: LeBron Never Recorded His Career-Average Game (27/7/7), But Who Has?
This might be one of the NBA’s most famous statistical trivia:
LeBron James has averaged 27 points, 7 rebounds, and 7 assists over his career — yet he has never once recorded a single game that matches those numbers exactly.
As of January 12, 2026, LeBron has played 1,581 regular-season games in 23 seasons, across three decades, 3 franchises, multiple positions/roles, and every possible game scenario, but the box score has never read:
27 points, 7 rebounds, 7 assists
Not even once.
This sounds quite impossible, right?
How Likely Is This, Really?
In fact, basketball fans have noticed this oddity for a long time now, and it turns out that it’s not as implausible as it sounds.
To quantify this phenomenon, I found a insightful statistical analysis in which he models LeBron James’ points, rebounds, and assists using a correlated multivariate normal distribution. He estimates that the probability of LeBron not recording exactly 27/7/7 in any given game is $0.999064$. At the time of his post in 2019, LeBron had played 1,143 games, implying a probability of $0.999064^{1143} \approx 0.3429$ that he had not recorded a 27/7/7 stat line. This makes the outcome far more plausible than it initially sounds.
Fast forward to today (January 11, 2026), with seven additional seasons of data, I repeated the same analysis and found that the probability of LeBron still never having recorded a 27/7/7 has dropped to 0.2435. The likelyhood is pretty low, but it’s definitely possible.
In other words: surprising, but far from impossible. It’s in fact very much within the realm of possibility.
Has Any Player Ever Matched Their Own Career Averages in a Game?
That brings us to a more interesting question.
Has any NBA player ever recorded a single game that exactly matched their own career averages?
To investivate this, I compared the career average stats for each NBA player (rounded to the nearest who numbers) against each game they every played, and try to see who has done it throughout the history.
Let’s first look at other all-time great players besides LeBron James. In 2022, ESPN ranked the top 76 Players to ever play in the NBA. Taking that list and running through the test, we find a surprisingly even split: 39 players have recorded a game exactly matching their career averages at least once, while 37 have never done so**. That’s almost a perfect 50–50 divide — a remarkable coincidence.
Some of the most iconic names in basketball history, Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kobe Bryant, and Bill Russell, never recorded a game that matched their career-average stat line. On the other hand, Hakeem Olajuwon accomplished this feat six times. Magic Johnson, Stephen Curry, and Kevin Durant each did it on two separate occasions.
kaggleNBADataset_01102026
Who Has Done it the Most Throughout the History?
If we look at all the players who played in the NBA, then Adonal Foyle is the champ based on this criterion. He recorded his rounded-off career average (4/5/0) 16 times during his 728-game NBA career:
We can refine the results by imposing an arbitrary constraint where the sum of pts, rebs and assists must exeed 15 and the player must have played a minimum of 50 games. This filters out players with limited careers or had extremely low-usage roles, and leave us with some more recognizable names. It turns under this restriction, it’s big Ben who wins! Ben Wallace record his career average 9 times in his 1082-game career.
Further Reading
Hope you enjoyed this blog. I did some google search and it turns out I’m not the first person to be curious about players recording exactly their career average stats. This reddit post from a few years ago also does a deep analysis and sparked some great discussions. Very intersting read!