“Kevin Durant will be the NBA’s all-time leading scorer when it’s all said and done,” Iguodala said emphatically to CSN Philly. “He loves the game and has a knack for putting the ball in the basket.”
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the all-time leading scorer with 38,387 points in 21 NBA seasons and played until he was 41. The most games he missed in a season was 20 and he only played less than 75 four times. Karl Malone is second all-time with 36,928 and Michael Jordan third with 32,292. Through three seasons, Durant has 5,967 points and will turn 22 in the next few weeks.
I tried to break down the possibilities over at my other landing page and here’s my conclusion: It’s definitely possible. Not necessarily probable, but I went with pretty conservative numbers and KD is right at Kareem’s number. Say Durant averaged what he did last year (30.1 ppg) for the next 14 seasons. That would have him passing Abdul-Jabbar at age 35. Is it really that hard to see Durant’s average over the next 14 seasons being around 30 ppg? I definitely think not.
Of course so much of this is about health. And on top of that, KD’s mentality. Durant won’t have his eyes focused on this type of individual achievement until he’s satisfied nearly every team goal there is. Once he has his trophies put in the case, he might start caring about this sort of thing. And that’s only a maybe.
[...] of the way he is. That’s what makes the great ones great. I think it’s reasonable that KD could challenge for the all-time tally in points, assuming of course he stays healthy. It’s possible. He’s got more than eight thousand [...]