Stephen Curry is the 30th Member of Pro Basketball's 25,000 Point Club
On Saturday March 8, Stephen Curry joined pro basketball's 25,000 point club while scoring a game-high 32 points as his Golden State Warriors won at home versus the much improved Detroit Pistons, 115-110. The NBA and its media partners count Curry as the 25,000 point club's 26th member because they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge ABA statistics, thereby wrongly excluding Julius Erving (who scored 30,026 career points), Dan Issel (27,482), George Gervin (26,595), and Rick Barry (25,279).
Curry joins Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki, Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Tim Duncan, John Havlicek, Reggie Miller, and Jerry West on the list of players who scored at least 25,000 points while playing for one franchise.
Curry ranks fifth among active players on the career scoring list, trailing only LeBron James (the NBA's career scoring leader who is also the sole member of the 40,000 point club), Kevin Durant, James Harden, and Russell Westbrook. DeMar DeRozan needs to score 123 points to be the next member of the 25,000 point club. Chris Paul is 2158 points short, but the soon to be 40 year old has not scored 1000 points in a season since 2020-21 so it seems unlikely that he will join the 25,000 point club.
Curry, West, and Russell Westbrook are the only 25,000 point club members who are shorter than 6-4, which is yet another reminder of how much size matters in pro basketball. As I discussed in my article about Westbrook joining the 25,000 point club, Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, West, and Havlicek were the "charter" members of the 25,000 point club, and then the club added six members in the 1980s: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julius Erving, Dan Issel, Elvin Hayes, George Gervin, Moses Malone and Rick Barry.
Even though the 25,000 point club is not as exclusive as it used to be, joining the club is still meaningful: a player who averages 25 ppg and plays in 80 games per season for 12 years would fall short, highlighting the combination of durability and high level productivity that it takes to surpass 25,000 points.
Labels: Dan Issel, George Gervin, Golden State Warriors, Jerry West, Julius Erving, Rick Barry, Russell Westbrook, Stephen Curry
posted by David Friedman @ 2:28 PM
2 Comments:
Hey David, long time reader here; thanks for continuing to include the ABA whenever these achievements happen; I’ve learned a lot more about the history of the game due to researching these players who are often left out of these lists.
I have also been meaning to ask if you’ve taken a look at the “Greatest NBA Peaks” series on YouTube by Ben Taylor/Thinking Basketball?
It only examines level of play and skill set at a players peak seasons, not taking team achievements into account, so it ends up being a surprising watch also in large part due to Ben Taylor going back and scouring lots of tape and trying to use both eye test/data.
Would be really interesting to hear your take on a couple of episodes (the Kareem, Walton and Jordan ones are very interesting) even though I can already imagine you fervently disagreeing with a lot of the conclusions lol (all in good fun). Of course I realize you’re extremely busy but just in case you want to burn a couple of minutes.
HP:
You're welcome!
I have not seen the "Greatest NBA Peaks" videos. The drawback of focusing on a narrow subset of games (because, sadly, that is all of the video that is available of early Kareem and early Walton) is that for the uninitiated it can be difficult to determine if a particular game is typical or if it is an outlier in some fashion. There are a lot of contextual factors that are lost on people who are not well-versed in basketball history (I have no idea how well-versed Ben Taylor is, but I am speaking in general terms).
I have seen (but not purchased, for reasons that should be obvious) Ben Simmons' book ranking the all-time greats; he made some valid points, but he also displayed his pro-Celtics' bias while buying into certain narratives instead of checking to see if those narratives are grounded in facts. He, Justin Termine, and others make a lot out of one playoff series in which the Bullets beat the 76ers, asserting that Bobby Dandridge showed himself to be on par with if not superior to Julius Erving--a notion that is, to put it mildly, absurd. I wrote an article addressing various false narratives, including that one: Narratives Versus Reality.
Keep in mind that I advocated for Dandridge to be inducted in the Basketball Hall of Fame, so for me this was not about denigrating Dandridge; it was about telling the truth. Unlike Simmons and Termine, I don't have an agenda or an ax to grind, so I showed that it is possible to justifiably praise Dandridge without making ludicrous assertions about Erving (Simmons and Termine are Celtics fans who want to elevate Larry Bird at Erving's expense, and Termine is also a Rick Barry fan who wants to elevate Barry at Erving's expense).
Post a Comment
<< Home