Carmelo Anthony passes Paul Pierce for No. 15 on NBA’s all-time scoring list

Carmelo Anthony has moved up on the NBA’s all-time scoring list.

Carmelo Anthony is officially a top-15 scorer in NBA history.

With a made free-throw during the first half of the Portland Trail Blazers‘ Sunday game against the Philadelphia 76ers, Melo passed former Boston Celtics star Paul Pierce for 15th on the NBA’s all-time scoring list, reaching 26,398 points for his career.

Anthony had also passed John Havlicek for 16th on the league’s all-time scoring list earlier in the game.

Though Anthony has often been criticized throughout his career for never leading a team to an NBA championship during his prime, he has always been unfairly compared to LeBron James, a fellow star from the 2003 NBA Draft, and criticized for his flaws more than he’s been appreciated for his elite talents as a scorer.

True enough, Melo sacrificed his chance for greater basketball success by agreeing to a massive contract extension with the New York Knicks back in 2014, and his recent tenures with the Oklahoma City Thunder and Houston Rockets were failures due to his inability to accept a lesser, more appropriate role. But there’s no question about his standing as one of the purest scorers the league has ever seen, even if team success hasn’t always followed.

Thanks to his prime years with the Denver Nuggets and New York Knicks, as well as his longevity in the association, Melo is now officially one of the 15 highest-scoring players in NBA history. He’s less than 100 points away from surpassing Tim Duncan on the list for No. 14, though that would probably have to wait until next season since the Blazers only have two more seeding games after Sunday’s contest against the Sixers.

If Rip City winds up bringing Melo back for another season, he’ll quickly pass Duncan and should have Dominique Wilkins, Oscar Robertson, Hakeem Olajuwon and maybe even Elvin Hayes in his sights. He’s less than 1,000 points from a spot among the NBA’s top-10 scorers of all time — for reference, in just 55 games with the Blazers so far this season, he tallied 840 points.

For now, a spot in the top 15 will do, but the higher up the list he climbs, the more he’ll finally earn a bit more respect for what he’s been able to accomplish in his Hall of Fame-worthy career.