Okay, so I got curious the other day about how many NBA players are really killing it out there, scoring-wise. You know, those guys who consistently drop 20 or more points per game. I mean, it sounds simple, right? Just score a bunch of points. But when you really dig into it, it’s actually a pretty big deal. So, I decided to find out, just for my own curiosity, no professional reasons or anything.
First, I just started googling around like “NBA players average 20 points” and stuff like that. I found a bunch of articles and lists, some of them mentioning that not many players have actually hit that 30-point average mark throughout history. 36, to be exact, or something like that. That got me even more interested in the 20-point average thing.
I then started to look at team stats. There was this one article talking about how rare it is for a team to have three players all averaging 20 or more. It mentioned something about the Golden State Warriors’ big three a few years back, with Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, and Klay Thompson all doing it. That’s crazy! It got me thinking about how teams even manage to pull that off.
After that, I dove into individual player stats. I was checking out all these tables with points per game, and all that stuff. I even found this cool thing where you could sort of filter player stats in all these different ways. There were all sorts of filters, such as scoring, and tags like “Fga Scoring”, “NBA All-Time Scoring List”, and “NBA Player Scoring by Quarter”. It was really letting me dive deep into the stats.
I stumbled upon some random player, John Abramovic, who I’d never heard of before. Turns out he scored like 533 points in his whole career. That made me realize just how impressive it is to average 20+ points per game over a whole season, let alone a career.
Then, I found this table that was all about points per game, season by season. It showed the average age and height of all the players, you know like, for the 2024-25 season, it listed the average age as 26.5, and for 2023-24 it was 26.4, and so on. Pretty neat to see how things change over time, although those numbers didn’t really tell me much about the 20-point average guys.
I also saw that someone named Pascal Siakam just scored 25 points in a game. That got me thinking again about how many players have ever scored 20 or more in a single game. There were tags like “NBA Stats” and “NBA PPG” that I could check, but that was a whole other rabbit hole that I decided to explore.
I learned about some crazy records, like the highest average for a rookie in a season, and the most seasons with 2,000 or more points. There was even a record for the most consecutive games with 20 or more points. That’s just insane consistency!
There was also a bit about some new hotshot, Wemby, who apparently scored 2,273 points in his first 100 games. That’s a lot, but it still made me wonder how it stacks up against the all-time greats.
Finally, I found this list of all-time scoring leaders for both the NBA and the ABA. It had all the big names and their total points. Active players were in bold, and Hall of Famers had a little star next to their names. It was a cool way to see where everyone stands, you know?
So yeah, after all that digging, I still don’t have a definitive answer to my original question. It seems to vary a lot from season to season. But it’s definitely not as common as you might think. It takes a special kind of player to consistently score that much. I have a newfound respect for those guys who manage to do it year after year. It was a fun little journey into the world of NBA stats, and maybe I’ll try to get a more concrete answer sometime down the line. But for now, I’m just amazed by how much data is out there and how much work it takes to be a top scorer in the league.
