Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Trivia
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49 free Kareem Abdul-Jabbar trivia questions with answers — sports quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Kareem Abdul-Jabbar trivia quiz covers the 7-foot-2 center who was the NBA's all-time leading scorer for nearly forty years. The easy questions cover the shot nobody could block, the two franchises he played for, the record six MVP awards and the co-pilot role in Airplane! that introduced him to people who never watched basketball. From there the quiz moves through the career in order: the 71-game winning streak at Power Memorial, three straight national titles at UCLA and the dunk ban that followed, the coin toss that sent him to Milwaukee, the 1971 title with Oscar Robertson, the trade to Los Angeles and the Showtime years beside Magic Johnson. The hard end covers the details: the Sports Illustrated announcement of his new name, the 1968 Olympic boycott, the Game of the Century in the Astrodome, the goggles, the night in Utah he passed Wilt Chamberlain, the oldest Finals MVP ever, the Oklahoma Storm, the White Mountain Apache season, the Bruce Lee film, the Mycroft Holmes novels and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Every answer was checked against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Los Angeles Lakers, NBA and Magic Johnson quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Under what name did Kareem Abdul-Jabbar play high school and college basketball?
Lew Alcindor
Lew Alcindor. He won Rookie of the Year, his first NBA title and Finals MVP under that name, and only asked to be called Kareem Abdul-Jabbar weeks after the 1971 championship.
Q 02What was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's trademark shot?
The skyhook
The skyhook left his hand so high, with his body between the ball and the defender, that it was almost impossible to block. He still called one of the most effective weapons in sport 'unsexy'.
Q 03Whose record of five NBA MVP awards did Kareem Abdul-Jabbar tie in 1977?
Bill Russell
Bill Russell. One of Kareem's six was a rarity: in 1976 he was voted MVP even though his Lakers finished 40-42 and missed the playoffs.
Q 04In 1967 Kareem, still a UCLA student, joined Jim Brown at the Cleveland Summit to back which athlete's stand?
Muhammad Ali
Muhammad Ali, who had refused the Vietnam draft a month earlier. The athletes heard him out behind closed doors, then faced the press to back him, with 20-year-old Kareem in the front row.
Q 05Which former Celtics centre broke Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's record of 20 seasons?
Robert Parish
Robert Parish. The rival who outplayed Kareem in the opening game of the 1985 Finals kept going until he was 43, finishing with 21 seasons and 1,611 games.
Q 06In the 1980 comedy Airplane!, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played a co-pilot with what name?
Roger Murdock
Roger Murdock. A boy visiting the cockpit says his dad thinks Kareem doesn't try hard on defence, and the 'co-pilot' breaks character to defend himself.
Q 07Which New York City high school won 71 straight games with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?
Power Memorial
Power Memorial. The streak ended in January 1965, when DeMatha of Maryland beat them 46-43.
Q 08Under which college coach did Kareem Abdul-Jabbar win three straight NCAA championships?
John Wooden
John Wooden. Freshmen were barred from varsity play then, so Kareem won the national title in every season he was eligible, and UCLA lost only two games in those three years.
Q 09What did college basketball ban after Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's sophomore season, in a rule named for him?
The dunk
The dunk. The ban followed a sophomore season in which his UCLA team went 30-0, and it outlasted his college career by seven years: dunking only became legal again in 1976.
Q 10Which Baseball Hall of Famer wrote to the teenage Kareem Abdul-Jabbar urging him to choose UCLA?
Jackie Robinson
Jackie Robinson had been UCLA's first four-sport letterman before he broke baseball's colour line, and his letter backed up assistant coach Jerry Norman, who did the actual recruiting.
Q 11Which Houston forward scored 39 as UCLA's 47-game streak ended in the 1968 'Game of the Century'?
Elvin Hayes
Elvin Hayes also hit the winning free throws, before 52,693 at the Astrodome. In the NCAA semi-final rematch two months later, UCLA held him to ten points and won 101-69.
Q 12Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's first public UCLA game in 1965 was the inaugural game at which arena?
Pauley Pavilion
Pauley Pavilion opened with a shock: Kareem scored 31 as his freshman team beat UCLA's varsity, the two-time defending national champions, 75-60.
Q 13Which international event did Kareem Abdul-Jabbar boycott in 1968?
The Summer Olympics
Q 21Which centre started for the West in 1978, the one year Kareem wasn't an All-Star?
Walton
Bill Walton. Kareem had sat out 20 games that season after breaking his hand in an opening-night punch; he was picked in each of his other 19 seasons.
Q 22Against which team did Kareem Abdul-Jabbar break Wilt Chamberlain's scoring record in April 1984?
Utah Jazz
He scored the record basket on a skyhook over 7-foot-4 shot-blocker Mark Eaton.
Q 23Which team swept Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Lakers in his final games?
Detroit Pistons
Detroit Pistons. Both Lakers starting guards were hurt, and Kareem, 42, bowed out with 38,387 career points, a record that stood for nearly 39 years.
The Summer Olympics. He declined even to try out for the US team, in protest at the treatment of Black Americans, and was deluged with hate mail for saying so.
Q 14Which ABA team also chose Kareem Abdul-Jabbar first overall in 1969?
New York Nets
New York Nets. He let each league make one offer; when the Nets came back with $3.25 million, more than double Milwaukee's winning $1.4 million, he refused to reopen the bidding.
Q 15How did Milwaukee win the right to draft Kareem Abdul-Jabbar first?
A coin toss with the Phoenix Suns
A coin toss with the Phoenix Suns, the league's other first-year team. Phoenix had finished 16-66 and Milwaukee 27-55; with him as a rookie the winners jumped to 56-26.
Q 16Which All-Star guard did Milwaukee acquire before the 1970-71 season, helping Kareem win his first title?
Oscar Robertson
Oscar Robertson came from the Cincinnati Royals at 31, and with him Milwaukee won 66 games, 20 of them in a row, then swept Baltimore in the Finals.
Q 17To which branch of Islam did Kareem Abdul-Jabbar convert, having been raised a Catholic?
Sunni
Sunni. He later wrote that fans thought he had joined the Nation of Islam, which he chose not to do because he wanted to focus on the spiritual side rather than the political.
Q 18What is the rough translation of the name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?
Noble one, servant of the Almighty
Noble one, servant of the Almighty. He said he chose an Arabic name to reclaim part of his heritage, because many of the people brought to America as slaves had been Muslims.
Q 19Before his 1975 trade to the Lakers, which team was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's first choice?
Knicks
Knicks. He said Milwaukee didn't fit his cultural needs and asked to go home to New York, but it was the Lakers, also on his list, who made the deal.
Q 20Which of these players went to Milwaukee in the trade that sent Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Los Angeles?
Junior Bridgeman
Junior Bridgeman, a rookie drafted less than three weeks before the deal, became Milwaukee's long-serving sixth man, then built a fast-food franchise fortune and bought a stake in the Bucks in 2024.
Q 24Who broke Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's career scoring record on February 7, 2023?
LeBron James
LeBron James did it as a Laker, in Los Angeles. The game was stopped late in the third quarter for a ceremony in which Kareem himself handed him the ball.
Q 25Why did Kareem Abdul-Jabbar start wearing his trademark goggles in 1974?
He was poked in the eye during preseason
He was poked in the eye during preseason by Boston's Don Nelson, and was so angry that he punched the basket support and broke his hand. He returned weeks later in goggles.
Q 26Which player did the Lakers pick first overall in 1979, launching the Showtime era alongside Kareem?
Magic Johnson
Magic Johnson. The Lakers only held that pick because New Orleans had owed them compensation for signing the veteran Gail Goodrich three years earlier.
Q 27What injury kept Kareem Abdul-Jabbar out of the clinching Game 6 of the 1980 NBA Finals?
A sprained ankle
A sprained ankle. He hurt it in Game 5 yet came back to finish with 40 points; two nights later a rookie guard started at centre in his place and scored 42.
Q 28Which 76ers centre outrebounded Kareem 72-30 in the 1983 Finals sweep and took Finals MVP?
Moses Malone
Moses Malone had been brought in to counter him: a year earlier Kareem had outplayed Philadelphia's big men in the Finals, so the 76ers traded for the league's leading rebounder.
Q 29Under which Lakers coach was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar named Finals MVP at 38 in 1985?
Pat Riley
Pat Riley. After a 34-point loss in the opener, Kareem spent two days on game film and extra sprints, then averaged 30 points across the Lakers' four wins.
Q 30How was Boston's 148-114 win over the Lakers in Game 1 of the 1985 Finals nicknamed?
The Memorial Day Massacre
The Memorial Day Massacre fell on the holiday itself, 27 May 1985. Kareem, 38, managed 12 points and three rebounds in it, then recovered to be voted the series' most valuable player.