page_title: Minute (basketball)
section_title: Leaders
hierarchical_section_title: Minute (basketball) / Leaders
caption_attribution_description: English: Los Angeles Lakers Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with Boston Celtics Robert Parish and Kevin McHale late 1980s
context_page_description: A minute is a unit of time in a basketball game. There are forty-eight minutes in each NBA basketball game, excluding overtime. As five people from one team will be on the court at any given time, a total of 240 minutes can be distributed in regulation among a team in an NBA basketball game.
  For players, the total number of minutes played in a season—and the average number of minutes played per game—are both tracked as statistics.
context_section_description: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the all-time leader in minutes played with 57,446. Karl Malone (54,852), Dirk Nowitzki (51,368), Jason Kidd (50,111), Kevin Garnett (50,052), and Elvin Hayes (50,000) are the only other players with 50,000 or more minutes played in a career. Most of Abdul-Jabbar and Hayes's minutes can largely be attributed to the amount of playing time that star players had in the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s. Abdul-Jabbar played 40 or more minutes per game from the 1969–70 season to the 1975–76 season, while Hayes played 40 or more minutes per game from the 1968–69 season to the 1974–75 season and from the 1976–77 season to the 1977–78 season. 
  Wilt Chamberlain holds the record for most minutes played in the NBA in one season with 3,882, set in the 1961–62 season.
caption: Abdul-Jabbar played a total of 57,446 minutes, more than any other player in the NBA.
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "Los Angeles Lakers Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with Boston Celtics Robert Parish and Kevin McHale  late 1980s", "Image Make": "Nikon", "Image Model": "Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 5000 ED", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:06:03 23:12:21", "Image Artist": "Steve Lipofsky Lipofsky.com", "Image Copyright": "(C) Steve Lipofsky Lipofsky.com", "Image ExifOffset": "408", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "520", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "20935", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220"}