By Vincent Bonsignore

There might not be three more different basketball players than Blake Griffin, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Charles Barkley, but with a few more rebounds Griffin is about to create an interesting link among the trio.

Heading in Saturday’s game against the Atlanta Hawks at Staples Center, Griffin needed 19 more rebounds to join Abdul-Jabbar and Barkley as the only three players to reach six-thousand points, three-thousand rebounds and one-thousand assists by the end of their fourth season.

“Wow, that’s impressive,” said Clippers coach Doc Rivers, who played against Barkley and Abdul-Jabbar.

Most intriguing to Rivers is how distinctly different the trio play the game, with Abdul-Jabbar a 7-foot back-to-the-basket center, Barkley a 6-foot-5 undersized – length anyway – power forward and Griffin an explosive 6-9 power forward.

And yet, all three arrived at a similar place statistically at the same exact time.

“There aren’t three guys that can be more different than those three,” Rivers marveled “There’s not anything similar about any of them, which is amazing. And it’s another lesson that you can do things similar but in different ways.”

Through 63 games, Griffin is averaging a career-high 24.4 points to go along with 9.7 rebounds and 3.6 assist. He and Minnesota’s Kevin Love were the only players to average at least 30 points and 10 rebounds in the month of February.

“It just tells you how great Blake is, is what it does,” Rivers said. “He’s awful young to be reaching milestones.”