The 25 players who scored the most points in their NBA careers

The late Jerry West watched himself fall down the points leaderboard after retiring, and eventually he will fall out of the top 25. Steph Curry and, quietly, DeMar DeRozan loom. Still, unequivocally, West was a great player, and a Lakers legend. Famously, he is, to date, the only NBA player to win Finals MVP for a losing team.

Westbrook is the first of four active players in the top 25. He is more famous for doing the season-long triple-double thing multiple times, so much so that it stopped being remarkable. Obviously, he has scored plenty of points in the process, even if he has lost a step and also never been the strongest shooter.

Thanks to the proliferation of three-point shooting, Miller is going to eventually fall down the list of career three-pointers made. However, the Pacers icon walked so guys like Steph could run. Before teams shooting a ton of threes and having guys camp out in the corner was the norm, Miller was raining down from beyond the arc. He made 39.5 percent of his threes, but also 88.8 percent of his free throws.

English played for some go-go Nuggets teams in the 1980s, which helped him make eight All-Star Games in a row. He doesn’t get talked about as much, or with as much reverence, as many guys on this list, but clearly the guy knew how to score, given his 25,613 career points. English easily made it into the Hall of Fame. Which, just to be clear, every player on this list other than the active ones is in the Hall.

There were two phases of Carter’s career. First, he was the dynamic dunker who wowed fans. Then, he was the guy who kept on playing well after many guys had hung it up. Though Carter was no longer half-man, half-amazing by the end of his career, as he averaged single-digit points in each of his six last seasons. However, he also played until he was 43, which is incredible.

The polarizing Harden is in the top 20, and he is one of the best scorers of all time. Quibble and air your grievances, but he’s a 10-time all-star and three-time scoring champ. Harden once averaged a staggering 36.1 points per game over a season, which is truly a rarified level of success. Maybe you don’t like how he got there, but he got there, and he’s still going.

Drafted out of high school, Garnett was a force on both ends of the court. In addition to all the buckets that got him into the top 20 in career points, KG won Defensive Player of the Year and made an All-Defense team 12 times. He breathed life into the Timberwolves’ franchise, and then he won a ring with the Celtics.

Speaking of the Celtics! Havlicek is an old-school Celtics legend. How old school? For most of his career, stuff like steals, blocks, and turnovers were not official stats. They still had All-Star Games, though, and “Hondo” played in 13 of them. Oh, and playing for the Celtics in the 1960s and 1970s, he won a whopping eight NBA titles, and was a Finals MVP once.

We’re on a run of Celtics Hall of Famers. Pierce and Antoine Walker got to gun it for the Celtics of the early 2000s, but Pierce proved to be a better player. He averaged 21.8 points per game over his 15 seasons with Boston. Then he added some more points, enough to get ahead of Havlicek, with brief forays with the Nets, Clippers, and, oh yeah, Wizards. Remember when Pierce was a Wizard for a season? Hey, all the points count.

Duncan has one of the most impressive resumes you will find. He made 15 All-Star Games, 15 All-NBA teams, and 15 All-Defense teams. On top of that, he has five rings and won three Finals MVPs. The Spurs, admittedly, packed it in for a chance to draft him first overall. Clearly, that panned out well for both the franchise and the player.

Wilkins never won an MVP, or a ring, but playing in the Eastern Conference in the ‘80s and early ‘90s made things tricky on that front. He absolutely got buckets, though. Wilkins, a great dunker and dynamic athlete, averaged 29 points per game or more on four occasions, and he was the NBA scoring champ once. Clearly he knew how to get to the rim, and he did it with gusto.

Before Westbrook, Robertson was the guy who had averaged a triple-double over a season. It was his claim to fame. Now that Russ has changed the landscape, let’s focus on some other stuff “The Big O” did in his Hall of Fame career. You know, like leading the NBA in assists a whopping seven times. Also, averaging over 30 points per contest six times as well. Certainly, the best player in Cincinnati Royals history.

“The Dream” is one of the rare players to win MVP and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season. Twice Olajuwon led the NBA in rebounds and three times he topped the league in blocks. Of course, thanks to his “Dream Shake,” Olajuwon also scored plenty of points as well. Yes, playing 18 seasons helped him ensconce himself in the top 15 in career points, but he was consistently great for over a decade of his career.

Hayes is not the biggest name in the top 20, that is for sure. He retired in 1984, and he never played for one of the iconic NBA franchises, which has played a role. Know this, though. Hayes was the NBA scoring champ as a rookie, and he made the All-Star Game in each of his first 12 seasons. Four times in his career he averaged over 20 points and 15 rebounds per game. If you aren’t familiar with Hayes, get familiar.

Famously, Malone skipped college and went pro out of high school, unheard of at the time. To make that happen, though, he had to go to the ABA, and those points don’t count as NBA points. That was a brief foray, though. He joined the NBA for his age-21 season and played over 1,300 NBA games. Malone was a three-time MVP and one of the best rebounders of all time. There was plenty of scoring as well, as Malone averaged over 20 points per game across the length of his NBA career.

We enter the top 10 with Carmelo. He never won a title in the NBA, though he did in college, and he also never won an MVP. Mostly what Anthony did was score, but he scored more than 99.9 percent of the people to ever play in the NBA. During his prime, which is to say his years with the Nuggets and Knicks, he averaged just under 25 points per game. Never once in that time did he average under 20 points per contest, which is remarkable consistency.

Imagine if Shaq had the ability to shoot free throws. He could be…even higher in the top 10 in career points! Shaq didn’t need to know how to shoot. All you had to do was get him the ball near the net and he would outmuscle and outathlete anybody trying to stop him for a ferocious dunk. There’s a reason why Shaq often led the NBA in field-goal percentage, because dunks are easy buckets. O’Neal’s skill was how often he could get those dunks. His physical prowess was once-in-a-generation. What a force.

Everybody above Durant on this list has scored over 30,000 points, and Durant is likely to get there in time. If not for that Achilles injury, he’d be there already. Durant has jumped around more than you expect from an all-time great player, but then again Shaq did the same thing. Not everybody is Larry Bird or Magic Johnson. On four occasions Durant has won the scoring title, and he’s one of the few members of the 50-40-90 Club.

Chamberlain won Rookie of the Year and MVP as a rookie. That’ll happen when you average 37.6 points and 27.0 rebounds per game. By modern standards, Wilt’s numbers are absurd. Once he averaged over 50 points per game! That same season he averaged 48.5 minutes per game, which means he averaged more minutes than there is in a regular NBA game. Obviously, given the video game numbers he put up, Chamberlain would be even higher on this list had he played longer. However, he debuted at 23 and retired at 36 after sitting out the last season of his contract because he didn’t feel like playing any longer.

Hey, speaking of one-team guys. Nobody will ever be a more beloved Maverick than Nowitzki. Luka Doncic could lead them to five titles, and Dirk would still be number one in the hearts of Dallas fans. As a seven-footer with a good three-point shot, for a while there teams were desperate for their own Dirk. Turns out, players like Nowitzki are once in a generation. He scored over 31,000 points, each and every one of them in a Mavericks uniform.

Olajuwon was the first-overall pick the year Jordan was drafted third. The Rockets would happily take “The Dream” each and every time, though it is notable the only two titles the Rockets won during Olajuwon’s career was during Jordan’s retirement sabbatical. Hakeem is one of the 20 or 30 best NBA players ever. Jordan is, at worst, second. On 10 different occasions, MJ won the scoring title. Most of the guys on this list won it once or twice at most! Plus, let’s not forget that, like Olajuwon, he won MVP and Defensive Player of the Year in the same season.

Chamberlain had his legendary 100-point game, but basketball was different back then. For some, Kobe’s 81-point game is the most-impressive act of a single-game scoring in NBA history. Yes. Bryant could be a gunner. He was, at best, an average three-point shooter. You don’t get into the top five in career points unless you are one of the best gunners to ever do it. Kobe was a two-time scoring champ and as skilled at getting buckets as anybody.

There is a bit of a surge in total points from Kobe (33,643) to Malone (36,928), so arguably the top three are on a tier of their own. For 11 seasons in a row, Malone was first-team All-NBA, and he won two MVPs. Sure, he never brought a title to Utah, and when he tried to win a title with the Lakers in his final season he fell short, but Malone averaged 25.4 points per game over 18 seasons with the Jazz, often helped by the NBA’s assist leader John Stockton.

When Kareem passed Wilt, he was the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, and he held onto that for decades. It seemed like nobody would pass him. Yes, part of that is that he played 20 seasons in the NBA, and was still averaging double-digit points in his forties. In his prime, though, he was pretty empirically the best player in the NBA. Kareem won MVP six times in his first 11 seasons.

The NBA points leader. The first player to have over 40,000 career points. Oh, and he’s still playing. LeBron is, for our money, the best basketball player to ever do it. He’s won three MVPs and averaged 27.1 points per game over an NBA career that has lasted over two decades. Only Kareem can really claim to have been as good for as long as LeBron. If you think the fact he “only” has won four rings to Jordan’s six means Jordan is better, well, then the best individual resume in the world isn’t going to shake your opinion. LeBron is King James.