One of the iconic moments of this century in sports is when LeBron James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for the all-time points lead. Since then, he’s scored another 4,000 points, and it should be a 5,000-point cushion by the end of the season. James is making this record close to unbreakable, but making it into the top 20 scorers of all time is still very attainable for many players.
Within the past few weeks, Steph Curry and DeMar DeRozan passed Celtics legends Paul Pierce and John Havlicek for 19th and 20th on the all-time scoring list. They were the latest active players who made the all-time scorers’ list. Who are the next players making the list?
Damien Lillard
Projected Final Ranking: 20th all-time
Of all the active players on the list, Damien Lillard is closest to the top 20 without being actively on it. Lillard has more than 22,000 points scored in his career. He’s added zero points this season, as the three-point scoring contest doesn’t count. Still, he’s sitting 37th on the all-time list. He is about 4,000 points away from the top 20.
This one has to be long-term projection. Lillard is coming off a major injury, and he’s signed to the Portland Trail Blazers. It’s a strange situation, but we expect him to come back and be somewhat effective for the rest of his career. Lillard feels like the type of player who will hold on to his career until he’s 40 years old. That gives him four years until he retires.
To get to the top 20 and stay there, Lillard probably needs around 5,000 points. That puts him ahead of Moses Malone, but with 10 people adding themselves to the list in various areas, Lillard needs to get into the top 10, which would be almost exactly 6,000 points. We think it’s definitely possible if he stays even remotely healthy for the rest of his career.
Devin Booker
Projected Final Ranking: 19th all-time
Devin Booker is the forgotten superstar in the NBA today. When you ask someone if Booker is a superstar and a top-10 player in the league, most would say yes, but if you ask people to name the top-10 superstars off the top of their heads, Booker is usually left off. Things in Phoenix needed a reset after the Kevin Durant failure and new owner mistakes, but they seem to be back on the right path. Booker is leading them forward, and he’s doing that by scoring 25 points per game. That’s actually a few points off his peak.
Booker is going to turn 30 years old at the start of the next season. He might have already seen his peak, which is somewhat upsetting for those looking to talk about Booker in the “all-time” conversation. He does already have 17,000 points to his name, so he realistically only needs 10,000 more in the second half of his career to make this list.
The reason we have him so low on the list is we do think he will be missing a considerable amount of time in the second half of his career. He had some injuries pop up, and we believe he will take advantage of the rules around rest. Those rules might get fixed in the next Collective Bargaining Agreement, but for now, we’re acting as if Booker will play around 60 games per season.
Tyrese Maxey
Projected Final Ranking: 18th all-time
This one might come as a surprise, but Tyrese Maxey is one of the best scorers in the NBA this season, and he’s only 25 years old. He continues to score at a high level, putting up 29 points per game this season. Maxey became a 25+ PPG scorer in his early 20s, which is a huge indicator for long-term scoring success.
Interestingly enough, Maxey’s ability to play every game is going to keep him growing while other players rest for up to 30 games per season. That is going to give a leg up to Maxey. He wants to be out there night in and night out, while almost every other star around the league finds reasons to take nights off. Maxey is on pace to play the most minutes in the league this season.
The worry here is the 76ers. They are married to this Joel Embiid contract. That’s just fine this year, with Embiid playing as well as he has, but it’s hard to tell if that will continue. Will Maxey have to take on more offensive responsibility, and will this help him move up the list? We won't know that for now, but we do believe Maxey has a pretty clear chance to dominate on the offensive end.
Anthony Edwards
Projected Final Ranking: 17th all-time
Anthony Edwards has scored more than 10,000 career points in his career and he’s just 24 years old. If he continues on this pace, where he’s scoring close to 2,000 points in his prime, he will make it far up this list. We do think there are some issues facing the Minnesota Timberwolves. Who will be his sidekick long term? It will likely be a different cast of characters throughout his career.
On top of that, there’s some uncertainty in who will be his teammates long term will impact his long-term ability to score ridiculous amounts of points. Don’t get us wrong; we think Edwards will have a long and fruitful career, but there are so many unknowns that we wanted to be conservative with our prediction.
And this is still one of the top 20 scorers in the history of the game. This gets him into the pantheon, and more likely than not, this would be enough to get him into the Hall of Fame. Obviously, there are other factors like playoff performance, awards, and championships that come into play, but based on pure statistics, while this might seem a little low based on everyone else on the list, this would be an incredible career to hit something like 27,000 points.
Jayson Tatum
Projected Final Ranking: 15th all-time
Jayson Tatum is a dominant player who is directly in his prime and has a lot of basketball left in his body. He’s just 27 years old and already has more than 13,000 points. If you just doubled his points, he should make it somewhere on this list, because that would get to right under 27,500 points.
The wild card here is we have no idea if Jayson Tatum will be the same guy after his Achilles injury. He’s rushing to get back on the Boston Celtics this season for the stretch run, but that has ended up further injuring players. The Achilles injury is so devastating, and many thought Tatum would miss the entire season after getting hurt in the 2025 playoffs.
Still, there’s plenty of time to even have a slow scoring start in 2026-27, and he’ll have plenty of time to make up points. He should be back to his explosiveness and scoring ability before he turns 30. He should then recoup another three-to-five years of his prime and be a good-to-great player for the rest of his career after that. If he sticks with Jalen Brown for his entire career, they should be able to help each other hit their ceilings and be competitors night in and night out.
Luka Dončić
Projected Final Ranking: 14th all-time
From the moment he stepped into the league with the Dallas Mavericks, Luka Dončić felt inevitable. The trade the Atlanta Hawks made, sending Dončić to the Mavs for Trae Young and a first-round pick, felt like a fireable mistake. Dončić shouldn’t have fallen to third in the draft, and now he was being traded for a future first? Fast forward a few years, and we’re talking about a player who, in his early 20s, was averaging around 30 a night in a league that is built to stop those players in their tracks. Very quickly, the Mavericks made Dončić the focal point of the offense (but we won’t talk about his defense).
Then, he was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers. Now, he had a different focal point. He was teaming up with LeBron James in one of the most shocking deals of all time. There are a few reasons this is impactful for this list. For one, the James connection has helped, as Dončić is averaging around 32 points per game this season and should be near the top of the league throughout their partnership. Even when James leaves or retires, the Lakers won’t sit on their hands. They want to remain one of the top franchises in sports in perpetuity.
Once again, we’re trying to predict availability, and Dončić is one who is hard to rely on. He’s played more than 70 games in the regular season once. He played 50 games last year and just 46 at the time of this writing in 25-26. He’s just 26 years old, so there’s a ceiling as high as Heaven, but can he stay on the court to reach his full potential?
Nikola Jokić
Projected Final Ranking: 10th all-time
If we gave you a time machine and allowed you to only see what Nikola Jokić would be like in the future, would anything shock you? If he retired tomorrow to join an international gambling operation or was planning to run for president of Serbia, would anything shock the world? Honestly, the most shocking thing might be if he just sticks with basketball until his early 40s.
Jokić is the best player in the sport and the only real threat to the juggernaut that is the Oklahoma City Thunder. He is already in the top 100 scorers of all time, and he should climb up the list every week. If he scores 100 points next week, he’ll move up three or four spots, passing Jason Kidd and Earl Monroe.
There really is no limit to Jokić’s scoring. He shouldn’t deteriorate with age, and he could legitimately break LeBron James’s record one day. He’s the only one on this list who has a shot to do it. He banked enough points and is young enough to make it realistic. However, we just don’t think basketball is all he wants to do in the prime of his life, so there’s a little projection here based on very little evidence. If he plays a full career with little injury, he should be much higher than 10th when he calls it quits.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
Projected Final Ranking: 7th all-time
There are two players who we have in the top three that amount to extreme projection. The first is the reigning and likely future MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. The Oklahoma City star has been incredible for years, and he fell into his own when the pieces around him grew into their primes. SGA is currently averaging just under 32 points per game. We don’t see that number dropping anytime soon. While he currently sits at 242nd all-time on the scoring list, he should be putting crazy numbers up for the next 10 seasons. If he averages 1,700 over those 10 seasons, he will pass where James Harden sits now for ninth all-time.
Assuming he drops a little at the end of his career, he could easily make it passed Dirk Nowitzki at 31,560 points. This also gives a little leeway that allows for an injury-riddled season and some unexpected drop-off. SGA seems like he’s far away from these statistics, but the team around him, the expected dynasty, and the extended prime should push him into the top-10 scorers in the history of the sport.
There are some questions about SGA’s ability to maintain this scoring value, since he wasn’t always this player, but there’s no evidence that he’s going in any direction other than up. He’s been one of the game’s dominant figures, and that won’t change.
Giannis Antetokounmpo
Projected Final Ranking: 5th all-time
Giannis Antetokounmpo is another player with a lot of questions surrounding his future. He came very close to getting traded at the NBA Trade Deadline this season, with the Milwaukee Bucks likely to miss the playoffs despite having a star in his prime. With that said, we can’t see Giannis wearing the Bucks uniform for much longer. What direction does that go? Will he try to join a superteam like the Knicks or Lakers, or will another team try to build around him like the Bucks did in a smaller market?
That will determine will the Greek Freak ends up on the all-time scoring list. He’s currently 42nd on the NBA’s all-time list, and he should get past Gary Payton and Larry Bird to break into the top 40. Were you surprised to hear that Bird was so far down the list? That’s why the second half of a career can go in many different ways, and this list is truly prestigious.
This is going to be a huge move for the NBA, and it could determine future champions. It also determines future points for Giannis. Will he join a team that allows him to stay around 30 points per game through his late 30s, or will he take a small step back to enter a situation with stars around him? To get to fifth all-time, he would need around 11,000 points to pass Michael Jordan. That seems extremely attainable for the current Bucks star.
Victor Wembanyama
Projected Final Ranking: 4th all-time
There is nothing stopping Victor Wembanyama in the NBA, and we can’t see that changing. Wemby was made in a lab to dominate the NBA. He’s already in his prime at 22 years old, scoring 23.7 points per game this year. We expect that to eventually grow to 30 points per game as the San Antonio Spurs keep getting better.
To get to fourth all-time, Wembanyama would need to score 1,663 points per season until he’s 40 years old. This is a physical freak who should be able to dominate the game like LeBron James has done well into his twilight years. If he plays just 60 games per season, he would need to average 27.8 points per game to pass Kobe Bryant on the all-time list.
Could Wemby pass LeBron one day? It seems unlikely. He would need another 10,000 points in his career (and counting). There’s a reason why LeBron is at the top of the list. His longevity just doesn’t exist in modern basketball. He’s a medical marvel. One major injury, which might happen with Wembanyama’s size, would throw him off from hitting those levels. Still, putting him in the top-five all-time shows were seeing the early years of one of the greatest of all time, if he’s able to hit these lofty projections.