Kevin Durant enters his next game (Suns vs. Grizzlies: 10 p.m. ET, TNT) with 29,974 career points, 26 shy of the 30,000-point mark.
Once he crosses that 30,000-point threshold, he’ll become the eighth member of this exclusive club.
In nearly eight decades of the NBA, only seven players have hit 30,000 career points: LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Dirk Nowitzki and Wilt Chamberlain. Save for James — who is still active — the rest are in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Since arriving in the NBA as the No. 2 pick in the 2007 Draft, Durant has been a scoring machine, racking up points from all over the court, and winning four scoring titles in the process. That ranks third behind Jordan (10) and Chamberlain (seven).
As the shot chart of Durant’s 10,331 career buckets entering Wednesday night shows, there’s a decided lack of white space.
A common phrase uttered by great scorers is one of “getting to my spots.” For Durant, the entire court is “his spot.”
His center-like height (Durant is 6-foot-11 with a 7-foot-5 wingspan ), guard-like skills and elite athleticism have separated him from other scorers in the NBA.
Even in the so-called unicorn era where bigs have expanded their range to the perimeter, they still can’t score at all three levels as Durant does so effortlessly. His Instagram handle, “@EasyMoneySniper,” accurately depicts his game as he’s a lethal scorer but does so with ease and smoothness to his game.
See how evenly spread out Durant’s 29,974 career points are. The only zone not well represented is the corner 3-pointer, which makes sense considering corner 3-pointers are highly used by 3-point specialists. Durant is the furthest thing from a specialist: he’s simply a scorer.
Among players that have appeared in at least 500 career games, Durant owns the fourth-highest scoring average of all-time at 27.2 points per game, trailing only Jordan (30.1), Chamberlain (30.1) and Elgin Baylor (27.4).
That consistent scoring has put Durant on the precipice of reaching 30,000 points faster in terms of games played than half of the existing club. If he can score the 26 points he needs on Wednesday, he will match Abdul-Jabbar as the third-fastest player to reach 30,000 points.
After he crosses the 30,000-point barrier, Durant will aim to surpass the all-time scorers ahead of him, starting with Chamberlain (31,419) in seventh pace, followed by Nowitzki (31,560) in sixth place.
While those will not happen this season, Durant has shown no signs of slowing down. His current scoring average of 26.9 ppg is just 0.3 ppg shy of his career average. At that rate, Durant would need 54 games to pass Chamberlain and 59 to pass Nowitzki, meaning both could happen in 2025-26.
