Michael Jordan finished the 1997-98 regular season the way he had finished so many before it: at the top of the scoring list. It was his tenth such distinction, a total no player in league history had reached. The record belonged to him alone.
The final title came in his last season with the Chicago Bulls. There was symmetry in it. Jordan had claimed his first scoring crown early and defended it without interruption for years, then returned near the end to claim one more.
How the record was built
The pattern was relentless rather than sudden. Jordan won the scoring title in his third NBA season and was not dethroned in any of the following six seasons. Seven consecutive years at the summit set a standard the league had not seen. Showing the enduring greatness of Jordan's scoring, he also won the scoring title in his final season with the Bulls in 1997-98. That last title, secured as the regular season closed in April, carried the count to ten.
The peaks within the run were extreme. His most prolific season came in 1990, when Jordan averaged 33.6 points per game. Yet the record rests as much on consistency as on any single year. Season after season, against changing defences and defenders built to stop him, he remained the man the scoreboard answered to.
A mark set apart
The distance to the field measures the achievement. Wilt Chamberlain, second on the all-time list, won seven scoring titles; among active players Kevin Durant has four and James Harden three, neither yet halfway to Jordan's total. The verdict from those who track the game is plain. It is a record likely to stand for some time, if not forever.
The tenth title sits within a career already crowded with markers. It arrived in the same season that would end with the last shot in Salt Lake City, the Bulls' sixth championship and a second three-peat completed. Before that had come the Flu Game of 1997, the 72-10 season of 1995-96, the first three championships from 1991 to 1993, and, at the beginning, the Rookie of the Year award of 1985 that opened the whole story. The scoring titles ran beneath all of it, a quieter tally accumulating while the trophies drew the eye.
What the ten titles record is not a moment but a habit. For the better part of a decade and a half, Michael Jordan led the league in the simplest thing basketball asks of a player. He scored more than anyone, more often than anyone, for longer than anyone. The number stands where he left it.
Ten. Still first. Still his.
