NBA all-time leading scorers: Whom will LeBron James join?

Somewhere along his path toward becoming the NBA's all-time scoring leader, LeBron James reached the ultimate state of being as an offensive force: unguardable.

"Early on, it was a lot of just speed and jumping and then figuring it out," James said in January, looking back at his career the day after he joined Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the only other player in league history to put up 38,000 career points. "And you get smarter and smarter, you say, 'Teams know they can key on these things, so how can I make sure that I am unguardable and can always put myself in position where I do what I want to do and not what the defense wants me to do?'"

Through regular-season losses and playoff-series exits when opposing defenses targeted the holes in James' game, the eventual four-time MVP and four-time champion was handed a cheat sheet to know what to work on.

Illustration by ESPN

"There were times where I didn't really have a low-post game -- I wasn't a low-post threat," James told ESPN. "There were times when I wasn't a threat from the midrange. There were times when I wasn't a threat from the outside. There were times when you literally could just try to bait me into doing things that I wasn't great at.