LeBron James walked into the NBA able to hang 25 points on a good defense. I mean that literally: The first game he ever played as a pro, on Oct. 29, 2003, came against a Sacramento Kings team that had finished the previous season second in the league in defensive efficiency … and he scored 25 points.
It wasn’t the highest-scoring debut the NBA had ever seen; that record, like so many others, belongs to Wilt. But it was (and still is) the high-water mark for an 18-year-old — a “mesmerizing” performance, as The Associated Press put it, that featured “skills no teenager had ever displayed at this level” and more than lived up to the towering hype surrounding the No.